In 1983 Jane Birkin boarded an AirFrance flight from Paris to London that would indelibly alter the trajectory of fashion history forever, though she nor any of the other passengers had any idea of it. “I remember it perfectly well! I’d been upgraded by Air France on a flight to London,” Birkin recalled when talking to Vogue in 2012. “And I found myself sitting next to a man [then creative director of Hermès, Jean-Louis Dumas].
I’m not quite sure what type of bag I had with me – my husband Jacques Doillon had reversed his car over my basket [bag], crushed it on purpose not two days before. [Dumas] thought I deserved more. “Little did he know that on this airplane journey, when everything fell out of whatever bag I had, the man next to me said, ‘You should have one with pockets.
’ I said: ‘The day Hermès makes one with pockets I will have that.’ And he said: ‘But I am Hermès, and I will put pockets in for you.’” Over the course of the flight, the pair got to talking about the what the ideal handbag would look like.
They sketched it out together on an airplane sick bag (très chic!), and decided on a simple rectangular holdall with a securable flap. Not rocket science, but little did the duo realise that their creation would come to be as incendiary and expensive as actual rocket fuel. Nowadays, standard Birkin bags can sell anywhere from £8,000 to £150,000, with the majority available for resale on sites like Farfetch costing around £15,000.
