Jane Birkin's battered Birkin just sold for $10 million: Here's the real story behind fashion's ultimate trophy

Time of India

10-07-2025

How a Basket and a Sick Bag Birthed an Icon
Let's start on an
Air France
flight in 1981.
Jane Birkin
, London-born muse, singer and actress, is wrestling a wicker basket that keeps spilling everywhere. Sitting next to her is Jean-Louis Dumas,
Hermès
boss. He watches her struggle, then says, essentially, You need a better bag.
Birkin later told CNN how it went down: 'He said, 'Well, draw it for me,' and so I drew it on one of those sick bags — the vomit bags — in the airplane.' Dumas took her sketch and, four years later, handed her the very first
Birkin bag
.
It wasn't dainty. It was practical, roomy, tough enough to take stickers and keys and even a nail clipper hanging off its zipper. She used it daily from 1985 to 1994 — a real handbag, not just a status symbol.
The most expensive bag in the world, stickers and all
Fast forward to July 2025 in Paris. That same battered Birkin prototype just went for €7 million ($8.2 million) under the hammer at Sotheby's. With fees, the anonymous Japanese bidder paid €8.58 million ($10 million).
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Nine collectors fought for it in a tense 10-minute bidding war. According to Forbes, gasps filled the room when the opening bid hit €1 million. It obliterated the old record — a white-diamond Himalaya Birkin that fetched about $450,000 in 2022.
Morgane Halimi, Sotheby's Global Head of Handbags and Fashion, called it 'an important milestone' for
fashion history
. She added, 'It is incredible to think that a bag initially designed by Hermès as a practical accessory for Jane Birkin, has become the most desirable bag in history and will most likely continue to be so for many years to come.'
The details that make it one of a kind
Here's the thing — this bag isn't just expensive because it's old. The O.G. Birkin is different from every other Birkin made after. It's got a shoulder strap (most Birkins don't). It's a hybrid of the Birkin 35's width and height but the Birkin 40's depth. The brass hardware was swapped for gold-plate in later versions. A pair of small silver nail clippers dangles from the inside zipper. Birkin liked her nails neat.
She also sticker-bombed it with logos for Médecins du Monde and UNICEF. The wear and tear? That's not damage — that's Birkin's life stamped on black leather.
From basket to holy grail
Jane Birkin once joked to CNN's Christiane Amanpour, 'Bless me, when I'm dead… (people) will possibly only talk about the bag.' She wasn't wrong. Birkin died in 2023, but this humble, battered bag is now fashion legend.
Author Marisa Meltzer nailed it: 'This is the bag. Mother of all 'it' bags, really.' The Birkin sits in that rare space where an accessory becomes myth — a stand-in for wealth, taste, even secrecy. As Meltzer put it, 'The problem with everyone who wasn't Jane Birkin is that if you wanted a Birkin, you couldn't necessarily get one — to this day. So it became this kind of myth. The Birkin bag meant that you had made it.'
And you still can't just waltz into Hermès and buy one. You build a relationship. You spend. You wait. And maybe you'll get offered a Birkin, maybe not.
A piece of fashion, a piece of history
Catherine Benier, who owned it for 25 years before selling, said the auction 'made me relive my own bidding battle… and how raw and indescribable the feeling of winning over this wonderful bag was.' Before her, Birkin herself sold it in 1994 to support
AIDS research
.
It's been shown at MoMA in New York and the V&A in London. It's a museum piece you could sling on your shoulder — though you probably wouldn't dare now.
So why does this battered piece of black leather matter? Because it's not just a bag. It's a story. A spilled basket. A sick bag sketch. A single mother on a plane who needed something practical — and ended up with the mother of all status symbols.
Wear and tear be damned. This bag, scuffed and scratched, is proof that real life makes things valuable. And sometimes, that's worth ten million dollars.