Jane’s Birkin Bag: An Origin Story for the world’s most exclusive bag

For more than a decade, singer and actress Jane Birkin has been wearing a wicker Portuguese basket as a handbag, one that she had found on a market in London. The basket went everywhere Jane; From the supermarket to the red carpet in Cannes, the basket of Birkin was a whole thing.

Although she lived in Paris most of her adult life, Birkin was British by birth. She started her career as an actress and model during the peak of the swinging sixties, with films in the lead role as Explosion (1966, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni) and Wonderwall (1968, directed by Joe Massot), and it was while filming Pierre Grimblat’s Slogan(1969), that Birkin met and fell in love with Serge Gainsbourg. She moved to Paris to be with him, and this is true and when her musical career was launched. Singing would be part of the rest of Birkin’s life. Gainsbourg would not do that.

Serge was, in all respects, sometimes impossible to live with and sometimes violent, and Jane took their daughter (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and left him in 1980, the same year that she met Jacques Doillon, with whom Birkin remained until about 1996.

According to Fashion History Lore, Doillon decided to see the basket in 1983, decided that it was a gimmick that Jane did not need and the wallet with his car.

The timing could not have been worse for his tantrum, Birkin had to fly from Paris to London that same day. She grabbed another bag, which she later described on the press as: “A kind of a camel stomach or something horrible.”

After boarding her flight, doing all the little things you do to settle, the replacement bag spilled; Her diary and the agenda case, remarks, photos of Birkin’s daughters, all waste from the handbag of a lady. Her sitting companion, a rather tidy gentleman, noted that it was a shame that the bag she wore had no bags to organize and contain her things. Presumably Birkin replied:

“Well, what can I do if Hermès doesn’t make bags?”

To which her sitting companion apparently answered:

“I am Hermes.”

The Lord was Jean-Louis Dumas, then the chairman and creative director of the luxury brand, and great-grandson of company founder Thierry Hermès. He told the singer that if she were so kind to borrow him her business, he would make one for her and make it to meet her exact needs.

Birkin asked Dumas if he could make a version of the Kelly bag, only four times as large, who drew what she wanted on a napkin for him. About a month later, Birkin received a phone call, a cardboard mockup from her bag was ready, waiting for Hermès when it was handy that she came by.

When she came to see the progress, Birkin heard that the Petit Mains, the “small hands” that do work for couture accessories, which had made the bag of her drawing, were close to obsessed with the design. Would Jane imagine if Hermès produced the bag and would be named after her?

At the moment, the only mentioned bag in Hermès de Kelly BagNamed after Princess Grace Kelly, who was once an A-list movie star and Hitchcock Heroine. It is not surprising that Jane was rather flattered to be in such a company. Birkin selected the teacher, the buckles and closures she preferred, and gave Hermès permission to name the wallet after her.

A year later, in 1984, Hermès officially launched the Birkin bag.

When Jane Birkin died in July 2023, her namesake handbag was world famous and had spent decades as one of the most expensive and exclusive wallets in the world. Jane was regularly asked about the Birkin bag for the rest of her life.

“The last question from every reporter is always over the bag. But it is no effort, what it can be like? Because of the bag, even nowadays, while I honestly make no effort, I am still in fashion, and I think I can thank the bag for that.”

The Birkin is the most famous bag in the world. But if the Jacques Doillon had not been appropriate to a observed gimmick, it might never have existed.

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