Latest news with #BirkinBag
Wall Street Journal
2 days ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
The Original Birkin Bag Was a Picnic Basket
The Hermès Birkin bag was born out of a simple idea and a legendary coincidence: Jane Birkin needed a bag that could fit a lot of stuff, and she happened to be seated next to Hermès executive Jean-Louis Dumas on a flight from Paris to London in 1983. The duo reviewed a few sketches, which Birkin said they had scribbled on an airline vomit bag, and in 1984, the Birkin bag arrived But the original handbag she popularized was no luxury item.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Lifestyle
- The Guardian
‘Publishing is a dream, but this has also been one of the hardest years of my life ': Palestinian author Yasmin Zaher
Buying a Birkin bag is not easy. You can't just waltz into an Hermès store and pluck one off the shelf, even if you're prepared to drop the many thousands required to pay for it. 'The great majority of people are refused a Birkin, they get told that there aren't any available in the store, which is a lie, they just don't want to give it to them,' explains the protagonist of Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher's debut novel The Coin, which this month won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize for authors aged 39 or under. Zaher's unnamed narrator, a Palestinian woman living in New York, has to get to grips with Hermès's exclusive and elusive sales policies – which seem to privilege loyal customers – after being drawn into a Birkin reselling operation. The Birkin scheme is just a side quest, though; her day job is teaching in a school for underprivileged boys. But the protagonist's true occupation, in this quirky, unconventional novel, described by Elif Batuman as 'bonkers' and Slavoj Žižek as a 'masterpiece', is cleaning: the meticulous, fanatical cleaning of her body and its surroundings. She develops a routine – which she calls a 'CVS Retreat', named after the US pharmacy chain – involving scrubbing and shaving every inch of her body with products and tools bought at the chemist in a process taking three to four hours, 'about the average time it takes a New York lunatic to complete the marathon'. One spot she's unable to clean with her Turkish hammam loofah is the square in the centre of her back. After one of her CVS Retreats, she begins to feel something 'blazing and spinning' in that area, and believes it is a coin, a silver shekel, that she swallowed during a car ride as a child. Naturally, the coin becomes a fixation. 'Obsession is a very good way to create a character's downfall,' says Zaher. The writer herself has an 'inherited obsession' with cleanliness, passed down from her mother and the other women in her family. Early in the novel, the narrator says that when you enter a woman's house, 'you never think of all the madness entailed' in making it 'sparkling clean'. Working on The Coin, Zaher became more intensely fixated on hygiene, and on fashion, with which she has a 'love/hate' relationship. While Zaher feels 'seduced' by fashion, 'it's also a tool for discrimination, for classism, for elitism, and I despise all of those things'. Zaher, 33, was born in Jerusalem, before leaving for Yale University at 17 to study biomedical engineering. 'I come from a traditional culture. Writing wasn't something that I thought was possible. So I went into the 'minority path': I studied science and I wanted to be a doctor, because that's what people like me did. And at some point in my mid-20s, I had the courage to do what I actually wanted to do.' She went on to study creative writing at the New School, where she was advised by the novelist Katie Kitamura. She started writing The Coin after moving to New York, drawing on Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to GH, about a woman who undergoes an existential crisis after crushing a cockroach in her apartment. Lispector 'really inspired me to write wildly, to not think too much about what I was saying, about it making sense', or about 'morality', says Zaher. She wrote the first draft 'very quickly' – it was 'so messy and so illogical and so strange' – and then spent six years editing it. Meanwhile, she worked as a journalist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Agence France-Presse, covering mostly culture, and 'obviously politics, because we have a lot of that'. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion For most of the book, Palestine is mentioned only in glimpses; debris left in the bath after a CVS Retreat is 'beautiful like summer in Palestine, uneven and seared'. The character's 'initial standpoint', says Zaher, 'is that she's going to America and she's going to reinvent herself as this glamorous woman who has no past, no roots, no constraints on her', but 'her past and Palestine keep bubbling up to the surface'. The same happened to Zaher when she was writing the book: 'I set out to write a novel that was fun, sexy, full of pleasures, and against my will, in a way, the past was coming up for me, and the painful present was coming up for me, and at some point I had to submit to that.' Although the character in New York is 'totally fictional', almost all of her childhood memories are Zaher's real memories, including the swallowed coin. By the end of the novel, we learn that during the Nakba – the forced displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – the protagonist's great-grandfather's land was seized by Israelis. The Dylan Thomas prize's ceremony happened to fall on Nakba Day, 15 May. Publication of The Coin marked a 'lifelong dream' coming true, but it has also coincided with 'one of the hardest years of my life', she says. Being Palestinian 'is a very dominant identity. You live with it all the time. You're all the time being reminded of it, externally, internally. And even more so now,' says Zaher. 'My fear is that the book gets attention because I'm Palestinian.' Yet the central character is not 'this perfect victim that people expect to see in a novel written by a Palestinian writer'. Zaher instead sees her character as 'almost a perpetrator'. She is often judgmental and rude, and her relationships with students are inappropriate (one boy, Jay, regularly helps clean her classroom; she begins leaving him money, and at one point kisses him on the forehead). 'I don't like novels where there are good people and bad people,' says Zaher. 'I find that boring. I'm always attracted to novels that bring me closer to my bad, secret fantasies, my repressed bad qualities. I think it's because reading is engaging in fantasy, and writing is also engaging in fantasy, so it's an exploration of parts of us that we cannot live in real life.' Aside from Lispector, key literary inspirations have been Kurt Vonnegut – 'he made me understand that there's this thing called contemporary literature' and that you 'don't have to imitate the classics' – and Michel Houellebecq. 'I really connect with the loneliness of his characters, and I think he's a very courageous writer.' Zaher now lives in Paris, with her husband, whom she met while living in New York. She's working on her next book, a 'newsroom mystery' set in Jaffa and inspired by her time at Haaretz. Asked what impact the £20,000 prize, the UK's most prestigious for young writers, might have on her work, she says she is generally a private person, and tries 'to not think about these things'. But 'it would be nice if the book would reach more people who really connect with it'. Is she still obsessive? 'After seven years of being inside this novel, I think I'm a lot less clean than I used to be, and I also care about fashion a lot less. In a way it sort of healed me of my own obsessions.' The Coin by Yazmin Zaher is published by Footnote. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
All $2.7 Million Worth of Luxury Goods Jon Hamm Steals on ‘Your Friends & Neighbors'
In 'Your Friends & Neighbors,' Jon Hamm plays a rich guy who remedies a bruising fall in status by robbing the other rich people in his neighborhood. His haul includes cash, a Birkin bag, a Roy Lichtenstein painting and watches that cost as much as luxury cars. As a showcase for specific trappings of wealth, the show gets to have it both ways: It satirizes the quest for evermore, ever-nicer stuff in the privileged class. It also gives viewers some extremely fancy goods to ogle and even covet for themselves.
Vogue
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Bag Charms Continue to Rule at Australian Fashion Week
Bag pendants continue their charm offensive Down Under. At Australian Fashion Week the hottest accessory is a tote dangling with charms galore. If accessorizing with souvenir keychains was popular last year, these days the most-wanted bag charm is a Labubu toy. In fact, these dolls might be the one thing that's hotter than a Birkin bag in 2024. Scroll through for the best bag charms in street style below. Sydney, resort 2026 Photographed by Liz Sunshine
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
China Exposes Insane Markups of U.S. Luxury Goods and Black Internet Loses It
Things in the U.S. vs China tariff war have just reached a new height and this time—popular luxury goods are at the center of it. And when we tell you why, you'll understand why folks on the internet are absolutely living for it! As previously reported by The Root, President Donald Trump announced he's increasing tariffs on Chinese-manufactured goods, setting the rate at a whopping 145 percent in about 90 days. As a result China decided to retaliate and hit the U.S. with an increase too and raised their tariffs on our goods to 125 percent. In the days that followed, many Americans were understandably shook and confused as to how these tariffs would affect their pockets and the price of things they buy seeing that a lot of our clothes and shoes come from overseas. But thankfully, manufacturers in China decided to blow the lid on Trump's plans and took to TikTok to show how U.S. consumers can buy directly from them to potentially avoid all the tariff turmoil. Specifically, when it comes to luxury goods such as purses, shoes, makeup and more—Chinese manufacturers are spilling the tea on social media on how those high-ticket items from brands like Hermes, Prada, Chanel and more are made in their country. They claim that they're just being shipped to Europe where the labels are put on them and the prices get jacked up. tiktok-7492848702860676358 In one video provided by News Nexus Official, one Chinese manufacturer broke down the exact cost of each part of the coveted Birkin Bag and explained how individually, the parts are cheap. From the hardware to the leather to the thread, the bag only costs a little over $1,000 to make—even though Hermes sells them for anywhere between $10,000 to $2 million. But now, thanks to these tariffs, if folks are trying to get out of shelling out high prices for the bag—they can get them directly from China where they claim to use the exact same products and will sell the bags (without the Hermes logo) for a fraction of the price. tiktok-7492221088936512810 In a similar video exposing how Chanel cosmetics are made, another Chinese user on TikTok broke down the fact that it only costs manufacturers in her country $5 to make them and that the luxury logo is just added onto the products in France. They also explained that it's simply a matter of 'brand brainwashing' because most consumers would think that the luxury brand would feel cheaper if it said 'made in China' on it. 'Who makes Chanel cosmetics? 42 percent are crafted by Chinese artisans. We don't do 'cheap goods,' we do understated luxury,' the woman said. tiktok-7492816218819251486 Naturally, once this info hit TikTok, folks were quick to get to talking! As noted by TikTok user The Kempire, he expressed his pleasure in how China is dropping receipts on the U.S. and how the luxury goods are made, likening the moment to 'The Real Housewives of Potomac' season 'Honestly this fight between China and the U.S. is giving Monique Samuels versus Gizelle [Bryant] from season five of 'The Real Housewives of Potomac,'' he said. 'And if you're a housewives fan, you understand completely what I mean. Because China has their binder out and they're exposing everything. And the reads are LANDING! The reads are EPIC!' In the comments section of his video, other users expressed similar sentiments. 'The US went Low, China is sitting next to the Devil. Love it,' wrote one user. 'I love that none of these countries are bowing down to that orange wig and his cabinet of combs,' said another user referencing President Trump. Added another user, 'China said play with yo momma, not me! Here for it!' In a separate video from user Coach Chitown who also reacted to China exposing the secrets, one user commented: 'I now see why billionaires don't wear designer.' Said one other user: 'If it's cheaper, I'll take it.' For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
