Can the Birkin Be Overexposed?

Now let’s get into today’s big story…

Earlier this year, I interviewed a group of Birkin and Kelly bag owners about how they obtained their bags. The Birkin and Kelly are “quota” bags, meaning Hermès will sell customers no more than two per year (with reportedly rare exceptions). The bags are notoriously difficult to obtain — you can’t just walk into a store and buy one, usually — and lore has emerged about how to do it. You can become a paid subscriber to read both pieces and learn about people’s experiences as Hermès customers and resale buyers and separate lore from fact.

One Hermès fan I interviewed was Perfect editor-in-chief and OG influencer Bryan Yambao, who said something that’s been nagging at me since we talked in February:

Yambao (who still loves Birkins, to be clear) has been covering luxury fashion online since the early aughts, so he’s seen the business go through many phases. And he’s not the only public figure who feels this way. Former Real Housewife and entrepreneur Bethenny Frankel also told me this year that Birkins had become overexposed. “I was watching a clip on social media about [Real Housewives of] Orange County, and the bags are a character. The bags could be Housewives themselves,” she said. “I find it to be so incredibly cringe that this is the flex, but we've all been part of it. I sold 50 handbags just as a result of being nauseated by myself.” Anecdotally, I’ve heard from several people recently who have Birkins, but simply aren’t interested in carrying super-expensive bags these days.

Birkins are inescapable in the reality television shows that exploit the loud luxury set. Selling the City, Netflix’s New York version of L.A.-based real estate show Selling Sunset, even titled its premiere episode “Workin’ for Birkin.” (This referred to the younger realtors telling their boss, who flies around in helicopters and whose rich-girl glow-up is a running storyline, that they were “workin’ for Birkin” when she asked what they were doing talking to each other in the office.)

But it’s not just reality television. Birkins are just everywhere. There could be a closet stuffed with them in the White House — or wherever Melania Trump lives — as evidenced by numerous Instagram compilations of her collection. They’ve been turned into LL Bean-inspired totes called “Boatkins.” They’re certainly not leaving the news in the near term since bag namesake Jane Birkin’s original bag is set to be auctioned on July 10 by Sotheby’s (which hasn’t provided any estimates for what it will fetch, though one of Birkin’s Birkins sold for around $160,000 at auction in 2021). And! We are yet to escape the ongoing obsession with those Satanic little Labubu charms, which are themselves being knocked off as “Lafufus.”

Interest in the bags seems to be increasing amongst the public, if Google searches for “birkin” over the last decade are any indication.

The far right spike in this chart coincides with the Walmart Birkin going viral. The big spike before that coincides with Jane Birkin’s death in July 2023.

The bag has become a symbol of status and striving both on and off reality television, shorthand for generally living large. It’s somewhat antithetical to the image Hermès cultivates of a brand intended for horsey old money types with an appreciation for select quirky things like a $700 “poisson” purse charm.

Hermès makes the bags desirable by purposefully not selling them to people who want to buy them. Generally, you have to persist for months or longer and shop at Hermès regularly to get a bag. But I wonder if now it seems like everyone just HAS one, and if that makes them less appealing in general.

I asked Marisa Meltzer, who wrote a biography of Jane Birkin called It Girl that’s coming out later this year, if the bags are now overexposed. She argues that nothing is going to ruin the public’s appetite for Birkins, which now start at nearly $13,000 in the U.S. following a tariff-related price increase. (In 2016, The Economist interviewed luxury analyst Luca Solca who estimated the production cost of a basic Birkin to be around $800.) “If [overexposure] is going to ruin someone's taste for a Birkin, someone else is going to be more than happy to take their place to get one,” she said.

Though her name has become indelibly tied to the excesses of capitalism, Birkin herself was an activist who long advocated for LGBTQ people and Amnesty International. She supported a campaign against torture; marched at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 to demand Myanmar let foreign aid workers into the country to help cyclone victims; and cut off her hair in a show of solidarity with Iranian protesters in 2022. In 2015, she asked Hermès remove her name from crocodile Birkins after she saw video footage of “cruel practices” on a crocodile farm where skins were harvested for the bags. (Hermès later said those practices were an “isolated irregularity” and patched things up with Birkin.)

“She had very progressive politics, but she was a limousine liberal,” said Meltzer. “I don't think she would've felt some sort of big sense of shame or conflict or anything around it. I think she would've been strangely more pro and kind of amused by the whole sort of Birkinifying-your-bags trend, and even the purse Labubu.”

Meltzer has a point about the Birkin’s popularity. Hermès stock has consistently outperformed rival luxury conglomerates Kering and LVMH since late 2021.

However, I predict that even Hermès won’t be able to avoid downturn the luxury industry is entering — its first in 15 years, according to a recent study. At which point pundits will try to explain where Hermès went wrong and why no one is “workin’ for Birkin” anymore.

I’d love to turn this topic over to the comment section: Do you think Birkins are overexposed? Are people going to move on from these bags within the next few years — or is their position in pop culture fixed? Please chime in below.