The man seated next to her eyed the scenario and suggested she should consider owning a bag with pockets. She sighed and told him that the day Hermès made one with pockets, that would be lovely, and she would buy it. He responded that he was Hermès, so he could do just the thing.
The man in question was Jean-Louis Dumas, then the chief executive of Hermès, and the sixth generation of family leadership in the most vaunted of French luxury houses. Birkin asked her seatmate why the company didn’t yet make a handbag that was bigger than the Kelly, but smaller and lighter than the Hermès’s Haut à Courroies, which her ex Serge Gainsbourg had carried for years. Dumas was intrigued as Hermès was dealing with a generational crisis of how to evolve the company without losing its core customers. Nice, petit bourgeois adults sought out the Kelly and their other bags. And Queen Elizabeth II of England and other, lesser matrons were avid supporters of the brand’s printed silk scarves. But Hermès wasn’t exactly cool in the eyes of Baby Boomers, who were starting to age into real spending power. With its orange boxes and quirky prints, Hermès could be seen as whimsical, but it was usually associated with uptight parents and grandparents.
‘It Girl’ by Marisa Meltzer
Dumas asked Jane Birkin what her idea might look like. She got out the only paper she could find, which was an airsick bag in the seat back in front of her, and got to sketching a trapezoidal bag. It looked more casual than the Kelly, with two handles like a tote, and in a way, resembled a shrunken-down version of the Haut à Courroies Gainsbourg owned. Dumas said he would make one for her, though Jane really didn’t think much of it.
A month later, Birkin was asked to come in and see a maquette, which is a prototype of the bag that a designer had constructed out of paper—akin to how a fashion designer might make a muslin version of a dress for fittings. She fiddled with it and went through leather samples and offered her opinion on which ones would be nice with the design.
The process of making an Hermès bag is notoriously laborious, to the point where the company claims a craftsperson should be able to see a bag on the street and recognize on sight whether they had personally made it. A Kelly bag could take around 20 hours, but the bag Birkin helped design was more complicated and took about 40 hours to complete.
