How Jane Birkin Became the Namesake for the Birkin Bag

The man seated next to her eyed the scenario and suggested she should consider owning a bag with pockets. She sighed and told him that the day Hermès made one with pockets, that would be lovely, and she would buy it. He responded that he was Hermès, so he could do just the thing.

The man in question was Jean-Louis Dumas, then the chief executive of Hermès, and the sixth generation of family leadership in the most vaunted of French luxury houses. Birkin asked her seatmate why the company didn’t yet make a handbag that was bigger than the Kelly, but smaller and lighter than the Hermès’s Haut à Courroies, which her ex Serge Gainsbourg had carried for years. Dumas was intrigued as Hermès was dealing with a generational crisis of how to evolve the company without losing its core customers. Nice, petit bourgeois adults sought out the Kelly and their other bags. And Queen Elizabeth II of England and other, lesser matrons were avid supporters of the brand’s printed silk scarves. But Hermès wasn’t exactly cool in the eyes of Baby Boomers, who were starting to age into real spending power. With its orange boxes and quirky prints, Hermès could be seen as whimsical, but it was usually associated with uptight parents and grandparents.

Dumas asked Jane Birkin what her idea might look like. She got out the only paper she could find, which was an airsick bag in the seat back in front of her, and got to sketching a trapezoidal bag. It looked more casual than the Kelly, with two handles like a tote, and in a way, resembled a shrunken-down version of the Haut à Courroies Gainsbourg owned. Dumas said he would make one for her, though Jane really didn’t think much of it.

A month later, Birkin was asked to come in and see a maquette, which is a prototype of the bag that a designer had constructed out of paper—akin to how a fashion designer might make a muslin version of a dress for fittings. She fiddled with it and went through leather samples and offered her opinion on which ones would be nice with the design.

The process of making an Hermès bag is notoriously laborious, to the point where the company claims a craftsperson should be able to see a bag on the street and recognize on sight whether they had personally made it. A Kelly bag could take around 20 hours, but the bag Birkin helped design was more complicated and took about 40 hours to complete.

In 1984, Jane Birkin got another call from Hermes that her special ordered bag was ready. Hermès has always prided itself on being a place where loyal customers with enough money can still place highly specific special orders with the lofty name Hermès Horizons: bespoke upholstery for a yacht, a knife holder for a chef, a crayon case for someone’s kid, a baseball mitt. Birkin’s bag was black box, a kind of calf leather, with gilded brass hardware, fashioned in a rectangular shape with saddle stitching and a burnished flap embossed with the initials JB. The bag had a shoulder strap and, like the Kelly, had a lock and key. And, importantly, it did indeed hold everything Birkin needed—a useful, if luxurious, utility.

Dumas liked the bag Birkin had created enough that he wanted to make it part of their permanent collection, and they wanted to name the style after her, like the Kelly, but this style would be the Birkin. “With pleasure,” she responded. Hermès was not the only company to name bags after famous clients: Gucci made a Jackie bag after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Dior later named one after Princess Diana. The lauded French house of Hermès naming a bag after Birkin was claiming her for the French speaking world the way they had claimed Grace Kelly after she moved to Monaco. It was a way of adopting her into the fold. Not that she gave up all of her old British style traits–she still carried her basket bags, sometimes together with a Birkin if she had enough belongings to fill them both.

In naming the bag after her, Hermès was not asking her to model or endorse it. As a practice, Hermès did not–and still to this day does not–do celebrity ad campaigns. Without that kind of splashy announcement, it often takes time for a product to take off, and the Birkin was no exception. The Birkin was also subtle for the mid-1980s: a bag without overt logos or loud branding. It was also an investment, costing $2,000 ($6,000 adjusted for today’s inflation). The Birkin intrigued the core Hermès customers, who lived in the tony 16th arrondissement where Birkin herself lived, or on the equally tony Upper East Side in New York City. It was large enough to put a planner in (and, later, a laptop computer) and a big wallet and go to work but it wasn’t some anonymous leather tote; it was expensive and not easily purchased. That combination gave the bag enduring appeal.

The Birkin bag spread from denizens of wealthy neighborhoods to the world of celebrities, becoming more than just a much-desired accessory, but a cultural touchpoint for the scarcity market around it. As a private company Hermès didn’t have to release sales figures, which gave the bag an additional layer of mystery: How many people were buying them? How many were even being made? Within about a decade of coming out the Birkin was embraced by celebrities, usually photographed with one held prominently on the forearm to prove that they could get their hands on one: from Maria Shriver and Melania Trump to Heidi Klum and Catherine Zeta-Jones to Lil’ Kim and Beyoncé. The bag hit the larger zeitgeist when it became a plot point on Gilmore Girls and on Sex and the City, where in a 2001 episode, the public relations executive character Samantha Jones used the name of her client, the real-life actress Lucy Liu, to procure a Birkin for herself. When her ruse is discovered, she utters the memorable dialogue: “It’s not a bag, it’s a Birkin!” A true statement if there ever was one.

Jane Birkin was never out to make money off of her name being on the bag; she treated the whole thing like a funny accident. But having your name be usurped by a bag is a strangely dehumanizing experience. Once the bag became a household name, Birkin was asked about the bag in seemingly every interview she sat for. She usually gave a wry and self-deprecating answer or just said that having a famous bag was a delight. If she resented the association, she never spoke about it publicly or to friends. Birkin was focused in the mid-1980s and ‘90s on growing into her own creatively, the Birkin bag was the result of a funny encounter for a woman whose life was built on a series of funny encounters. She didn’t put much significance into the bag. That was something for everyone else; for those who were not named after the bag and who were not lucky enough to float through life in the way that Birkin appeared to. She used the bag at times ironically and not as a status symbol, but that’s not entirely true. The carefree way she used her Birkin was its own status symbol and class assertion–an inherent contradiction she never really rectified. Her behavior shows a carelessness about money, the kind of real money that could send a person to college. Birkin got her bags for free but she still carried them. That is how brands keep up the myth of luxury; that by owning a Birkin, you the wearer will belong and be understood to have somehow earned the privilege of owning it. Nor was there any moment when she lobbied hard to make real money off of it. She was ultimately content to be its muse. The world desired the bag for the status associated with it; it had less and less to do with Jane’s imprint on it. Jane Birkin became more and more distantly associated with it until she became merely a fun fact about its inception.