Money Can Buy You Everything, Except Maybe a Birkin Bag

Earlier this year, two California residents filed a class-action lawsuit against the French luxury design company Hermès. Their grievance was that although they could afford a coveted Birkin bag made by the company, they could not buy one. The bags are genuinely rare, because they are still handmade by specially trained artisans. Wait lists are long. And the company, according to the lawsuit, gives wide discretion to salespeople at individual boutiques to determine who gets one next. This practice creates scarcity and pumps up the resale market, where some Birkins go for the price of a Ferrari. But the result, for some rich people, is the bitter taste of rejection.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, staff writer Amanda Mull talks about the lawsuit and the current state of the luxury market. If these customers win this lawsuit, will they eliminate the preciousness of the item they so covet? What do we actually want from luxury these days? Is there even such a thing anymore as a rare luxury good? And what handbag is Amanda carrying?

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: What’s the most expensive handbag you personally own?

Amanda Mull: I purchased, in 2012, I want to say—on my credit card, at the time, which was very stupid—a Proenza Schouler PS1 Bag that was pre-fall 2012, 2013?

Rosin: I’m looking it up now just to see how much it costs.

Mull: Yeah, it was a blanket-print bag, and it was in the large size. And I think that full-price it was $2,400? And I wrote for a handbag-industry publication at the time, and I waited it out until it went down to $1,900? And then I bought it, which I had no business doing, but I still have it. I love that bag. I think it’s an absolutely beautiful piece of design, and I have held on to it. I always will.

Rosin: I’m looking at it. It’s actually pretty cool. Looks practical and—

Mull: Yeah, it fits a laptop.

Rosin: It fits a laptop, exactly.

Mull: Yeah.

Rosin: This proud owner of a Proenza Schouler is Amanda Mull. Also an Atlantic staff writer.

Mull: The bag that I carry to work today costs $50.

Rosin: Right, right.

Mull: It’s canvas, it is very practical. I don’t buy expensive handbags anymore, but it can take a while to deprogram yourself.

Rosin: Mull recently wrote about a different bag: a Birkin bag. If bags were restaurants, the canvas tote would be a fast-casual chain. And the Birkin would be a three-star Michelin spot with a mysterious, almost mythical reservation system.

Mull: The Birkin bag dates to the 1980s. It’s not quite as old as the company itself. There’s a very perhaps apocryphal backstory to how it came about. The then-Hermès CEO was seated next to Jane Birkin on an Air France flight. Jane Birkin was, at the time, famous for carrying her possessions in a basket. And they got to talking about handbags, and they got to talking about handbags and what she needed and what she wanted from a handbag. And the Hermès CEO took that information back to the company and they created the Birkin bag.

Rosin: What I love about that story, and I have no idea if it’s true or not, is that the way they tell that story now is like, It’s über-practical. She was a mom. She needed places to put her mom things inside her bag, you know?

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: Now, nearly 50 years later, the Birkin bag is at the center of a class-action lawsuit filed in February by people who can afford the bag but cannot get one—a lawsuit that reveals, inadvertently, this very strange moment we are in with the luxury market.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And today, a dispatch from up in thin air. To those of us who can not afford a Birkin bag, it all looks the same up there. But to someone like Amanda Mull, who’s a close observer of Americans and their buying habits, the lawsuit is a rare window into divisions within the rich. Because the history of luxury handbags is a pretty good stand-in for the history of Western social wealth.

Rosin: I’m going to now Google—do you have your computer with you? I want to see how much Birkin bags cost. (Laughs) This is insane—the first one that pops up costs half a million dollars. That can’t be true. Wow.

Mull: Yeah, the How much does a Birkin cost? is a $64,000 question, which is perhaps the answer to it in some situations. But Hermès keeps things very close to the vest as far as their pricing, and especially for their most sought-after products, of which the Birkin is the absolute most sought-after. And then you look on the resale market, and almost all of these bags—the smallest, most basic leather Birkin is going to cost around $11,000 and go up from there. You can hit six figures. You can get versions that have solid-gold hardware that are pave-diamond-encrusted hardware.

Rosin: I saw the diamond-encrusted one.

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: I was like, Okay, that must be the top, top, top.

Mull: Yes, those get very expensive. And all of them are going to sell at above retail prices on the resale market, so How much does a Birkin cost? is sort of a fabulously complicated question.

Rosin: Yeah. I think I’m going to land it somewhere between a used Honda Accord and a condo in Washington, D.C. That’s about the range.

Mull: Yes, that’s where you’re looking at.

Rosin: Why are they so coveted?

Mull: There are a thousand answers to that question. Part of it, I think, genuinely is because Hèrmes does make exceptionally nice products. Hèrmes is one of the few leather-goods companies out there. And in my experience, it is the only one of the major leather-goods companies that makes things by hand en masse. All of their handbags are made by hand. They’re stitched by hand. They use really fine materials. They employ their own leather workers. They train their own leather workers. They run a whole academy in France to create the workforce that they need to create these types of bags at scale. And they stand behind them for a lifetime. You can send your handbag back to the Hèrmes spa, which is what their loyal clientele refer to as sending their bag back to get refreshed or fixed or something. It goes to the spa. And one of their leather workers will tighten the stitches, will polish the hardware, will remove the scuffs, things like that, for the life of the bag.

Rosin: A facelift, the bag equivalent of a facelift.

Mull: Yes. But another reason is that the fact that they’re exceptionally well made puts a very real cap on how many can be made per year. There are very few places within the consumer-goods economy, even within luxury goods, that there is real scarcity—not fake scarcity, not limited edition, not, like, Oh, we did this collab with this celebrity or with this other brand. Hermès, it can only produce so many of them. And when there’s a hard limit on something, rich people really want to get into it. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay, what you just described makes Hermès—and honestly, I have always thought of them this way—as the hero of a certain kind of story. Like, luxury has gone through conglomeration, and there’s a glut of luxury, and who even knows what luxury is anymore? And then you’ve got this one used-to-be equestrian French company that’s holding the guard. They pay their craftsmen living wages, and they live up to their promises, and all the things that luxury companies really don’t do anymore.

Mull: Absolutely. It is very, very hard to even straightforwardly and dispassionately describe what it is that Hermès does and how it makes its products without sounding like you’re on the Hermès payroll.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Exactly. Exactly. And you’re like, Oh my God, they hand—I mean, you sort of forget about the fact that all of this labor that goes into a bag makes it only available to the very, very, very rich, and then not even, you know? Okay, of what story are they the villain? I’ll ask the question that way. What happened?

Mull: Well, the fact that Hermès does everything that it does in an old-fashioned handcraft way means that its products are (a) extraordinarily expensive and (b) genuinely a lot of them are pretty scarce, and nothing they make is more scarce than the Birkin. It’s become a pop-culture icon. There are storylines about it in Sex and the City; it is, like, a brass ring of personal style and wealth; and it is something that people want to buy and want to own in order to demonstrate that, not only are they personally successful, financially successful, and people of taste, but that they do that at the highest echelon possible. They aren’t just regular rich, they are carry-a-Birkin, have-Birkins rich, which puts you at a particular echelon, even within rich people.

Rosin: And not, like, tacky, not following fads. Like, classic, but interesting,

Mull: And the Birkin has gotten so popular that I think that on some level its own success threatens that idea that it is classic, it is not tacky, it is not nouveau riche, it is not new money, it is not arriviste. Arriviste? No French-pronunciation capability here.

Rosin: Arriviste, yeah. You mean it threatens that, or what did you mean by that?

Mull: I think that it has become an icon of arriving in such a way that it is so broadly desired that it threatens to be a mark of striving in that way.

Rosin: Oh my God, that’s so confusing.

Mull: Yes, it is.

Rosin: Like, it’s such a mark of having arrived that it’s become a mark of trying too hard to arrive.

Mull: Exactly.

Rosin: That is very confusing.

Mull: It is so confusing. Luxury brands walk a very narrow line between whipping up this level of aspiration and this level of desire for their products and ensuring that their products don’t become too readily identifiable as a mark of aspiration. And it is very, very difficult to stay on the straight and narrow when trying to sell as many of these products as possible. But the Birkin, because of its genuine scarcity, it has been this thing that even when you can get everything else, even when you can walk into a Louis Vuitton boutique and buy whatever you want, when you can walk into Chanel and buy whatever you want, you can’t necessarily do that with Hermès. because there are only so many bags and there are so many more people who want them and who can plausibly afford them than there are people who can have them, because there just aren’t that many bags.

Rosin: So if I have all the money in the world and I walk into an Hermès store and I want a Birkin, I can’t necessarily get one.

Mull: Probably not. Not that day.

Rosin: Probably not?

Mull: Probably not.

Rosin: After the break, how to get a Birkin. Which may or may not involve getting a lawyer.

[Break]

Rosin: For a chance at a Birkin bag, Amanda Mull says you have to play something called the “Hermès Game.” Hermès didn’t respond to a request for a comment from The Atlantic. But aspiring customers have pieced together some clues, which basically add up to: Salespeople at each boutique seem to have broad discretion over who gets a bag and who gets off the waitlist.

Mull: Like, somebody will show up on Reddit or on a forum and say, I went to this boutique on this day, I talked to this person, or This is what I saw somebody else offered or saw somebody walk out of a store with, or This is what I was able to glean. And in most of these situations, what people say that you’re likely to hear is that these bags that are referred to as quota bags, which means that—

Rosin: (Laughs.) It’s just, like, this language imported into this context. It’s so funny.

Mull: Yes. So what people online say that you will generally hear when you walk into an Hermès boutique off the street and ask for a Birkin is that Birkins are prioritized to people who have a purchase history with the brand or who support the brand or who are brand-loyal who have relationships with a sales associate, things like that. Which basically means that if a truck pulls up and the store gets four Birkins, then what the sales associates at that store will probably do is look at their client rosters and go, This person expressed to me a year ago that they wanted to know if we got in a blue Birkin, and there’s a blue Birkin in this set, and they haven’t been offered a bag before. So I’m going to call this person up and see if they want this bag instead of just giving it to a person who shows up and says, “I’d like a Birkin. You got any?”

Rosin: Okay. So the way you just described that was pretty value-neutral. Good job. There’s two ways to imagine or—if you were to do a movie about that scene—there’s two ways that you could pitch that scene: One could be a scene of high snobbery, like a sales person looking down upon the person who just walks off the street and has no brand loyalty or history with that store and just squires the bag off to the back. And another way, totally straightforward, like: There’s a waitlist, you know, and on the waitlist is Mrs. So and So, and she’s been waiting for a year and a half, so get in line.

Mull: Right. There really are two legitimate ways to see this. And part of it is that there’s a lot of people who want these bags and a lot of people who asked before you.

Rosin: Right, which seems like there’s waitlists for a lot of things, you know?

Mull: Right. And something that Hermès has to deal with is that the fact that these bags all sell for above retail on the secondhand market means that they deal with something that a lot of other areas of the consumer market that where there’s scarcity also deals with, right? Like Ticketmaster—

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Mull: They do sell something that there is a genuine supply-and-demand mismatch for—Taylor Swift tickets or Bruce Springsteen tickets or whatever. And at a certain point, it is just hard to figure out how you allocate fairly a scarce product to a very large potential group of buyers. And one way that you can do that is to sell to people with purchase histories. So, in one sense, Hermès is trying to prioritize actual customers, and the best way to do that is to look at people who have been actual customers in the past. The other way to look at that is that in order to be offered the opportunity to buy this extraordinarily expensive thing, you have to pledge fealty to this brand by buying all of this other extraordinarily expensive stuff first before you will be given an opportunity to buy the thing you actually want.

Rosin: Right, right, right. Like, you have to buy a scarf, and you have to buy some menswear, and you have to buy a belt, and then you will have proven that you’re a loyal customer. Wow. I don’t even know if that’s legal? Is that legal?

Mull: Well, that is the subject of a lawsuit that was filed in February in California. These two plaintiffs are seeking class-action status over essentially not being offered the opportunity to buy a Birkin. One of the people who filed this lawsuit, it appears, actually did buy a Birkin from Hermès in the past and seems to be upset that she wasn’t offered immediately a second one. And then the other person in the lawsuit appears to have bought a bunch of Hermès stuff and never been offered a Birkin and is mad about that. And I think that being mad about that is reasonable, but also, there’s a lot of people who want a Birkin.

Rosin: But it’s so funny because the people suing them, don’t they understand that winning that right would kind of destroy the rarity of the object they desire and make it not rare?

Mull: I don’t think that they understand that. I think the flip side of that phenomenon is that rich people have been flattered, especially by luxury brands, into a belief that they will always be in the in-group. And suddenly finding out that scarcity sometimes is going to exclude you, that there are people who are a higher priority than you are is—when you have enough money that you want to buy multiple 14,000 handbags—

Rosin: It’s crushing and shocking and intolerable.

Mull: Yes. It is, like, the worst thing that has happened to you in recent memory, finding out that there are things your money can’t buy you immediately.

Rosin: I think what this has led me to think about, this lawsuit, is: What do we want and do we understand what we want? How did we get to a point now where we’re glutted with luxury and luxury becomes a lot more meaningless, and so you have to manufacture scarcity?

Mull: So the beginning of luxury goods as we know them arguably started, like, at Versailles.

Rosin: The most grippingly luxurious palace ever, yeah.

Mull: Yes. This is during that era of France. Clothing and really, really high-end clothing were really important to the social stratification of royalty, the aristocracy. And that is where you get the origins of the French luxury business. And then you see further into the 19th century, as travel became more possible, aristocracies started to travel more. And they needed all kinds of stuff to travel with. You get brands that start emerging to supply those travel items—that’s where Louis Vuitton comes from. It was a trunk maker for the wealthy in the 19th century. Hermès also comes about in this era where it made equestrian supplies.

Rosin: Oh, okay. Okay.

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: I did not put those together. I was wondering why they’re all either equestrian or trunk makers. Interesting.

Mull: Yes, yes. The history of luxury goods is a social history of wealth because all of these companies were founded to, especially in this era, to solve particular problems of modernity. Things are bespoke, they are couture, they are customized to your wishes.

Rosin: So truly rare. Truly rare.

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: Okay.

Mull: Truly rare. And you start to see the luxury industry start changing a little bit, because production capabilities have ramped up and the luxury industry starts to arrange itself—not necessarily arrange itself; people are arranging it—into conglomerates for the first time. In the 1980s, you get Bernard Arnault taking control of Louis Vuitton. And Bernard Arnault and LVMH, the conglomerate that he still runs, is enormously influential in creating the luxury industry that we have today. What Arnault was—and is—really, really good at is understanding how to market luxury brands and vastly increase their production capabilities using modern methods.

Rosin: Is this the beginning of the end? Is this when everything changes?

Mull: Yes. Once Bernard Arnault gets in there, his vision is really to make the luxury business a global, corporatized, huge, profitable behemoth, and he does it.

Rosin: So in the old vision of luxury, scarcity was implied. I’m not sure it was explicit, but it was implied that it wasn’t available to a lot of people. In the new post-Arnault vision of luxury, luxury is a story about luxury.

Mull: Yes, I think that luxury is a story about exceptionalism. Something that Arnault and LVMH know better than anybody is that there are other ways to project scarcity besides not having enough stuff to sell. And this is where you get a lot of limited-edition releases, collaborations with celebrities or with other brands, so that keeps the brand in people’s minds. If you are somebody who maybe wants to buy your first Louis Vuitton bag, then you are probably paying attention to larger fashion and style and pop-culture media, and you were gonna brush up against news about all of these releases that are like, It’s sold out, it’s very limited edition, it’s not available, etc., etc. And those particular very small releases might indeed be genuinely scarce, but there are Louis Vuitton boutiques in every major city in the world that are full of the regular stuff, and all of that regular stuff has the halo of those scarce releases around it.

Rosin: Given everything you’ve described about fake scarcity and the complicated democratization of luxury, do you yourself have more respect for the Hermès way, where you genuinely keep these ways of handcrafting and genuine scarcity, or the other way, in which more people have access to it, but it’s less perfect?

Mull: Yeah. I am not a person who I would say respects a lot of companies.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Mull: But I feel like I do have to have this grudging respect for Hermès because they make products that are what they say they are.

Rosin: Yeah.

Mull: If it takes a guy in a French warehouse 40 hours of work to put together my bag, and he has a good salary and a pension and job security and safe working conditions, then yeah, that bag is just going to be a lot more expensive and there’s just not going to be very many of them. I think that Hermès could charge more for most of its products based on what the market will bear, which is wild because those handbags are so expensive.

Rosin: Yeah. I’m so with you, and I really don’t want to be. The only natural conclusion of the conversation we’ve just had is that the hero of the guilds and the working people of France is a company that sells handbags for $16,000. But that is the way it is.

Mull: Right. And I think that that is indicative of how off-kilter our consumer market is, because it was not that long ago that a lot more of the stuff that we bought was produced in that way. And the production end of the stuff that we buy has gone so far off the rails that it is now truly rare to buy something that was made by somebody with a pension.

Rosin: Right. And so the ability to buy with integrity is also a luxury of being rich. That’s nice. All right, well, Amanda, thank you so much for going through the logic of luxury with me. I really appreciate it. I still can’t afford and won’t buy a Birkin bag, but maybe someday. You never know.

Mull: You never know. If I won the lottery, I’d probably buy one, because they are really nice bags and you’ve got to carry something. But for now, I will stick to my $55 canvas tote.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Yvonne Rolzhausen, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.