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A unique Le Birkin handbag, the only one of its kind made for the British-born singer and actor Jane Birkin, is to go on sale in Paris.
The prototype model of the iconic Hermès bag, which Birkin used for nine years, is expected to fetch a six-figure sum at auction next month.
Well-used and still bearing traces of the stickers Birkin irreverently stuck on the smooth black leather, the bag comes complete with the nail clippers she attached inside.
The head of handbags and fashion at Sotheby’s, Aurélie Vassy, said it was unique.
“It was the first bag given to Jane Birkin and it’s obvious that she made remarks and suggestions about the prototype. It’s not Le Birkin we all know and love, which was a kind of collaboration between her and Hermès,” she said. “The prototype is a one-off. There is no other bag like it in the world.”
The creation of Le Birkin is a fashion legend that came about after Birkin’s chance encounter with the head of the French luxury goods company, Jean-Louis Dumas, on a commercial flight from Paris to London in 1984.
In a 2018 interview with CBS, Birkin, who died in July 2023, said: “I found myself next door to a very polite gentleman and I had my agenda as usual banged full of bits of paper and everything and the whole thing fell to the ground.
“So I picked it up and he said: ‘You should have pockets in that agenda’. And I said: ‘What can you do? Hermès don’t make it with pockets’, and he said: ‘I am Hermès’.
“I said: ‘Why don’t you make a handbag that’s a bit bigger than the Kelly and not as big as my suitcase, which weighs a ton … there was the sort of vomit bag and I did a wee sketch and he took it with him, and a month later I got a call from Hermès saying would I come and have a look at this bag.”
Birkin auctioned the prototype handbag in 1994 for the benefit of a French Aids charity. It was auctioned again in 2000 and bought by the current owner, a collector of luxury goods, who has declined to say how much she paid for it.
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Birkin’s subsequent relationship with the exclusive bag that now sells for thousands new and hundreds of thousands secondhand, was mixed. Hermès gave her four more, but in a 2012 interview she described it as the “bloody Birkin bag”, complaining they were heavy and “snobbish”. Three years later, she asked Hermès to rename a crocodile-skin version because of concerns about the treatment of the animals used to produce it.
The original bag has been exhibited at MoMa in New York and the V&A Museum in London. The prototype is a different size to later models, has a shoulder strap and brass hardware, later replaced with gold-plate rings, clasps and “feet”.
“People love it because of its origin and its history. It’s like a celebrated work of art, it has an energy and soul of its own,” Vassy said. “This bag was the very beginning of Le Birkin and we know Jane was proud to have it.”
The bag will be sold on 10 July at the beginning of haute couture week in Paris.
