Jag beundrar inte bara Gillian Tett. Även Allison Schrager är smartare än en femteklassare; Birkin bags“Je t’aime … moi non plus,”
Social media algorithms know me better than I do.
Who knew I’d get such joy from watching Love Luxury,
a handbag reseller with a YouTube channel that typically features bereft women trying to sell Birkin bags gifted from former lovers? “It is just too painful to keep,” one says. “Oh, and the stickers are still on … can I get $50,000 for it?”
It is everything I want to see: beautiful and inaccessible fashion, romantic drama, and regularly updated economic lessons about artificial scarcity.
Luxus, the aptly named asset manager, has a hedge fund that buys Hermes Birkin and Kelly bags on the secondary market and then flips them.
The return would’ve been even higher if the fund had bought on the primary market (in this case, a Hermes boutique). But it is nearly impossible to buy a bag that way, as I know from personal experience:
You need a relationship with a sales associate who will advocate for you when a bag becomes available. If you then turn around and resell your bag, you could destroy your relationship and be shut out of the primary market forever.
Fashionable women may rationalize their expensive handbag habit as an investment strategy, not decadent consumption, because they can see rising prices on the secondary market.
The secondary market for luxury goods has exploded in the last decade, growing at more than 10% a year — more than the primary market — and is now worth more than $200 billion.
Allison Schrager Bloomberg 2 January 2026
Allison Schrager: I love markets. I also love diamonds.
What Hermes has managed to do is create scarcity out of abundance. It controls the supply of Birkins, and won’t sell that many bags.
Not only does this keep demand high, but it diverts demand to other Hermes goods.
Birkin: The Bag, the Woman, the Myth
This month the original Birkin bag, made by Hermès for the British actress Jane Birkin in 1984, sold for $10.1 million at Sotheby’s in Paris.
All of this is happening two years after her death on July 16, 2023, following a cancer diagnosis and more than a decade of treatment.
Ms. Birkin, who was born in London, became a revered actress who appeared in more than 70 films and a musician whose most famous song, “Je t’aime … moi non plus,”
“Je t’aime … moi non plus,”
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