The Birkin Bag: Background information when reading The Coin

The Birkin Bag

This article relates to The Coin

In Yasmin Zaher's novel The Coin, the unnamed protagonist, who has inherited a coveted Birkin bag from her mother, enters into a pyramid scheme with a relative stranger that involves buying more of these elusive items and reselling them. In many ways, the Birkin, a luxury handbag made by the French designer Hermès, is the ultimate symbol of upscale contemporary consumer culture, and it is used in Zaher's novel to illustrate the absurdities and artificialities inherent in elite fashion.

While it is now one of the most desired objects on the planet, the Birkin bag's beginnings were somewhat arbitrary and undramatic. It grew out of a 1983 encounter between British-born actor and singer Jane Birkin, who gained fame in France and elsewhere, and Hermès CEO Jean-Louis Dumas. On a flight from Paris to London, Birkin complained to Dumas about how difficult it was to find a suitable handbag. As a young mother, she wanted something stylish that was roomy enough to accommodate her needs. In response, Dumas began the initial sketches for the Birkin bag, a minimalist affair featuring a lock for secure transport, and it was released the following year. Initial reception was lukewarm, and it wasn't until the 1990s that the product really began to gain popularity. Its reputation was helped by its appearance on an episode of the show Sex and the City, in which Samantha, working as a publicist and desperate to skip the waitlist for a Birkin, name-drops her famous client, Lucy Liu, and becomes rude and demanding towards the Hermès salesperson. The bag is sent to Liu, who subsequently fires Samantha and walks off with the Birkin.

In The Coin, the protagonist understands that buying a Birkin is a carefully constructed game and that she can't appear too desperate. She explains the scarcity model Hermès operates on: "Every year, regardless of poverty, war, or famine, the price of the Birkin bag increases. Its value is more solid than gold or the S&P 500, and the luxury house of Hermès has achieved this by only selling to a very small and particular group of people…The whole model was based on rejection, people want to belong to a club that doesn't accept them." In order to begin to acquire bags, she and the man she is working with have to build a purchasing history, and her existing Birkin is used as a prop to show the salespeople that she is the right kind of customer.

Birkin bags retail at a starting price of around $12,000, and have been known to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. In a 2005 episode of Gilmore Girls, Rory receives a Birkin from Logan that, according to IMDb, cost around $38,900. In 2011, Jane Birkin sold the original bag given to her by Hermès at auction for over $162,000 to support earthquake relief efforts in Japan.

The Birkin comes in a variety of sizes and colors, and while opinions on the aesthetics of the item are mixed, its power as a status symbol is what seems to make it a uniquely lusted-after object. On an episode of the NPR podcast Planet Money, guest Wednesday Martin describes how she began to want a Birkin after a woman who was carrying one nearly ran her off the sidewalk in a "dominance display." In The Coin, the narrator describes a similar phenomenon, but as an observer of her own dominance when she first carried her Birkin in New York: "Women of all ages looked at me, even little girls and some gay guys looked at me, especially when I was uptown, turning the corner of Madison into a ray of sunlight."

Planet Money host Stacey Vanek Smith, having examined the bag Martin eventually bought, admits, "Here's the truth - that bag is so underwhelming. It is, like, aggressively underwhelming. It's ugly and boxy and the leather doesn't even look that nice. But…People wait for years to get this purse. If I can't see why it's special, I have the problem. Even though I could see right through Birkin's marketing strategy, it still worked on me."

Stone sculpture of Birkin bag, courtesy of Barbara Segal (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Filed under Cultural Curiosities

This article relates to The Coin. It first ran in the July 17, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.