From a cheap straw basket to a $10.1m handbag: The story of Jane Birkin’s Birkin bag

Dubai: For more than a decade before there was any such thing as a Birkin bag, Jane Birkin carried a straw basket.

Not a designer interpretation of one. An actual basket, essentially a fisherman's, picked up cheaply while travelling. She took it to the grocer's, filled it with bread, collected her newspaper in it, and then took the same basket to Cannes and to a pro-choice rally in Paris in 1972.

Photographs from the period show it doing all of this, usually overflowing.

"I was well known for carrying a basket," she said in a 2018 interview. "So I obviously knew girls liked to have masses of things in their handbag."

Everything that followed came from trying to replace it.

She was on an Air France flight, a young mother travelling with her daughter Charlotte, when the basket went into the overhead locker and its contents came back out into the lap of the man beside her.

That man ran Hermès. Jean-Louis Dumas.

She told him, at volume, that nobody made a bag big enough for an actual life. She wanted something roughly half the size of her suitcase. He asked her to sketch it, and the only paper to hand was the air sickness bag in the seat pocket.

Hermès says the design included a dedicated compartment for her baby's bottles, which tells you exactly what was being asked for. Not a status object. A better basket.

The finished prototype arrived a few years later, one of a kind, her initials stamped below the lock.

She carried it almost every day from 1985 to 1994. She stuffed it. She hung nail clippers off it because they were useful. She covered it in stickers for Médecins du Monde and UNICEF, added beads and worry beads collected from Greece, Israel and Palestine, and let the leather get scuffed, scratched and stained.

Her own explanation is the best thing anyone has said about luxury goods.

"There's no fun in a bag if it's not kicked around so that it looks as if the cat's been sitting on it, and it usually has," she said. "The cat may even be in it."

Elsewhere she offered this, which Hermès has presumably never used in a campaign: "A Birkin bag is a very good rain hat. Just put everything else in a plastic bag."

Eventually the habit defeated her. By 2017 she told the BBC she rarely used one at all, because if you fill it with junk and half the furniture from your house, it becomes very heavy indeed. "Now I fill my pockets like a man, because then you don't actually have to carry anything."

In 1994, nine years in, she donated the original to raise money for an AIDS charity.

She did this repeatedly. She has said the bags proved useful mainly because she could sell them and give the proceeds to causes she supported, Amnesty International among them.

She also took on Hermès directly. In 2015 she asked the house to remove her name from the crocodile version after learning about practices in its production, and the company reviewed them.

At Sotheby's in Paris on 10 July 2025, the prototype sold for €8.6 million, around $10.1 million with fees.

Bidding opened at €1 million and ran ten minutes across nine collectors before the hammer fell at €7 million. The previous record for a handbag was $513,040, paid in 2021 for a diamond-set crocodile Kelly. Only the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz have sold for more as a piece of fashion at auction. The buyer was a private collector in Japan.

Retail Birkins now start around $10,000 and Sotheby's resells them up to $220,000. A 2016 study found the bag had outperformed both the S&P 500 and gold. Most now live in dust bags in climate-controlled cupboards, carried rarely if at all.

There is a second sale that got less attention here than it should have.

In December, another of her personal bags, Le Birkin Voyageur, the one she carried daily between 2003 and 2007, sold in Abu Dhabi for $2.9 million.

Jane Birkin died in July 2023, at 76, faintly amused that a career spanning half a century had been reduced to a handbag.

The object now sitting behind glass as an investment asset was commissioned by a woman who wanted somewhere to put the shopping, and who spent nine years kicking it around, decorating it with charity stickers and, on at least one occasion, holding it over her head in the rain.