business trip because there in the epicenter of fashion and wealth, they would know the origins of my bag. It was a fake, not a knockoff per se, but a well-conceived handbag that was copied from an authentic luxury design. All of that didn’t dawn on me at the time because I was in love with its sheer size.
I broke my own promise to never take the bag to NYC because ultimately it functioned as my traveling closet. In NYC, I walked into an office with my portable closet where a woman, who had an extensive background in fashion (she had helped to launch Donna Karan’s DKNY Menwear line), came running and almost knocked me over. “Where did you get that Birkin bag?” She shrieked.
I didn’t know that my bag was a crudely done Hermès knockoff. I bought it for its sheer size; it was large and its many compartments were organized in just the right way. A bag can have too many compartments and turn into a leather snake-like labyrinth where you cannot find a damn thing. Especially if you’re like most women and you find yourself stealing a quick minute for yourself in between meetings and feeling around in the dark, fumbling to find a breath mint or a small sample size tube of lipstick. All of this was running through my mind when the Donna Karan lady was lunging forward in ecstasy, eager to touch my bag.
Harkening back to my working class roots, I retracted the bag from her grasp and stared at her incredulously. There was no way she was going to touch my bag.
Slowly I told her the truth. I had bought this cleverly done, oversized bag on sale at a Liz Claiborne outlet store in Seaside, Oregon. Not only was the bag a mere $39.99, I had a discount coupon, which had reduced its price. To further compound my savings, in Oregon there is no sales tax. I had scored the bag for twenty-five bucks.
Now she looked at me. Her glee turned to contempt. “Oh,” she said, but I think what she meant to say is How could you carry this cheap, disgusting thing around New York City. You ought to be a bag lady!
The experience with my twenty-five buck bag made me ponder the whole notion of owning an Hermès Birkin Bag. Going from the realm of Coach bags costing $300 to $600 bucks to a Hermès new world order of $10,000 to $150,000 was more than I could bear. Recently, a buyer at Christie's in Hong Kong broke the record for the priciest handbag ever sold at auction to the tune of $2.32 million. There is a growing market for Birkin bags, especially in China, where they are being acquired and sold the same way as stocks, bonds and art.
Call me pedestrian, but I will never aspire to own an elite handbag sold for a price that could feed the impoverished children in the combined populations of rural Alaska, Detroit, Milwaukee, and southern Kentucky for five years. No matter how loud a message owning a Birkin Bag would send to the world that I was as exclusive as the bag, it is too heavy a burden to bear.