THE Original Birkin Bag to Be Auctioned in Paris

The Hermès Birkin bag was designed for the late legendary French-English actress, singer, and activist Jn Birkin. She used the bag for many years and photographed with it everywhere she went. Birkin had it covered in stickers if you can believe that and the bag still bears the residue from those stickers on the surface! Now this iconic bag is being auctioned off in July 2025.

It was 1981 ad Birkin was seated next to Jean-Louis Dumas on a plane. Dumas was artistic director of Hermès at the time. As she rifled through the bag she bemoaned how no bags seemed to fit all the stuff she needed for this busy time in her life. Dumas took it upon himself to create a bag for her that would be big enough for a busy mom and he asked if they could name it after her.

Dumas modeled the purse on an earlier Hermès bag intended to hold gear for horseback riding. That bag was called the Haut à Courroies (or HAC for short). Dumas gave Birkin a black version of the new bag, complete with her initials embossed on the front near the handle. The bag was presented to her in 1985 after years of designing and tweaking the bag to perfection.

A personal touch that Birkin added, which remains on the bag, is a pair of nail clippers attached. The actress famously enjoyed short nails and wanted to be able to clip her nails at any time.

Birkin famously wore the bag nonstop for the next 9 years, only giving it up when she donated the bag for a charity auction to benefit AIDS patients in 1994. Four other Birkin bags were gifted to her by Hermès over the years, but the first one in black leather was her favorite.

The Birkin bag has spawned countless remakes and copies and is seen as the ultimate “quiet luxury” piece. And the price of a true Hermès Birkin bag reflects that. The cheapest one new costs around $20,000, but some can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars! Which brings us to the price of the original Birkin bag.

Since this is the original prototype bag and has the provenance of being owned by its namesake we would expect the auction estimate to be quite high. But, like the current new Birkin bags on the Hermès site, with prices unavailable, the auction estimate for this bag is available only upon request which leads us to only one conclusion: this is going to be a big one! If we get the results of the auction afterwards we will update this story with the price. But, until then it remains a mystery how much this bag could go for.

The bag features design elements not found in Birkin bags today and also shows signs of just how often she carried this bag. There’s no mistaking just how special it was to her and what a big part of fashion history it symbolizes. The bag is set to displayed in New York from June 6th-12th with the auction ending on July 10th in Paris (the city she called home for many decades) through Sotheby’s.

See more of this iconic bag in the video below.

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