Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  But of course there could be no fantasy of having a Birkin without confronting the question of actually getting it. How? As is the case with so many Manhattan “gets,” asking and being rebuffed were part of the Birkin game, as was waiting, being put on the wait list, and being told the wait list was closed—this I knew from friends who worked in the fashion industry and friends who were simply fashion-obsessed. Sometimes, if you knew someone at Hermès, I had heard, you could get a Birkin more quickly—perhaps in six months or a year rather than three years.

  The mother of my girlfriend JJ had once told us both, over cocktails, about being in Hermès one afternoon when a nice-enough, well-dressed-enough woman about the same age as JJ and me walked in and announced, “I’d like a Birkin.” She was quickly informed that, in fact, there were no Birkins and that, in fact, the wait list was currently closed. “You didn’t hear me; I would like a thirty-five-centimeter black Birkin with gold hardware,” she insisted, her voice rising, and when her request was refused again and yet again, she threw her hands up in exasperation and huffed, “Fine! I didn’t want to do this, but I’m bringing my husband in here!” Seconds later she reentered with her megacelebrity comedian husband, and was promptly ushered into the back room where Birkinbusiness is conducted. A triumph.

  Far more common are the anecdotes about humiliation and rejection at the hands of the ferocious and notoriously froid guardians of le Birkin. Like the one about the friend of a friend who actually cried, right there in the store, when she was icily informed that the wait list was closed. She had gone in every week for months, she told her girlfriends, buying a belt or scarf she didn’t need each time—that was a lot of scarves and belts, they murmured sympathetically—in the hopes of building up the amount of goodwill needed to prove to the salespeople that she was Birkinworthy. Or the woman who made her husband, who was traveling on business, take a side trip to a certain Asian capital city to get her a Birkin (his business trip was to Germany). There’s the woman who was offered Kelly bags in every shape, size, and color by the Hermès staff but turned them all down in her single-minded fervor for a Birkin, only to learn later through a fashion editor friend who knew someone on the staff that she had been pegged as “difficult” and would now probably never get a Birkin.

  Of course, it was humiliating and stupid to be told that a wait list was closed, like some kind of nightclub you weren’t important or fabulous enough to get into. It was absurd to have to wait at a velvet rope of sorts for the privilege of plunking down at least $10,000 for a bag. I knew all that. But these hurdles were not merely an obstacle. The difficulty of this particular get, its near-impossibility, was part of the thing-in-itself, as intrinsic to the Birkin as the story of its origins and its date stamp.

  Somehow, it would be worth it. I knew this the same way I knew that the Birkin came in a big orange box, festooned with brown ribbons, and that inside there was tissue paper of a very specific thickness folded just so into, I kid you not, a special little pillow for the purse to rest on. I had been in Manhattan for twenty-odd years, and I knew something else as well: that I was setting out on the kind of quest—clichéd, easy to ridicule, the apex of frivolity, really—that was likely to make me hate my town more than I ever had. It was another version of trying to get school applications or fighting for a better table at a restaurant (“Please just give me a nice table first, so we can skip the step of me complaining and you moving me. Please,” I began saying to hostesses and maître d’s as sweetly as I could manage toward the end of my second pregnancy, when my patience with everything, including my town’s sadistic rituals concerning who sits where, had worn threadbare). I knew that my Birkin quest threatened to leave me wrung out and resentful. And maybe even disappointed, should I have the luck and fortitude to actually get what I wanted so badly after jumping through all the requisite hoops.

  Even as I decided for a fact that I must have a Birkin, I felt tired and defeated just considering it. I also felt fired up and ready for the kill. Manhattan has a funny way of turning your desires inside out so that you can see their seams, what they are really made of. Here on the Upper East Side, I was learning, we organize our wants and our identities, in part, around specific rarefied gets or rather, “impossible-to-gets.” A Birkin signifies many things, and one of them is the utter plaintiveness of not-having, even (especially) in a world of excess. Sure, the Birkin is something you want, but it is also the essence of the experience of wanting, with deferral and disappointment and waiting and hope sewn into its every stitch.

  When you ask yourself why everyone in Manhattan, including you, wants a Birkin, and why there is such a fervor for the thing itself, it is easy to fall into circular logic. The answer is so self-evident: Because I just do. There are more-nuanced theories, of course. In a town that values its signifiers of privilege and success—obsesses over them, really—the Birkin is a megastatus symbol, perhaps the ultimate one, for women. And, not coincidentally, also for the men who can get them for us. “A wife with a Birkin is an excellent narcissistic extension for a successful man,” Manhattan clinical psychologist Stephanie Newman mused when I asked for her thoughts. “He gets to prove how powerful and special he is—he got her this expensive, rare thing.” For the one in every million women who insists that No, no, no, she doesn’t want a Birkin, I can only say, give her one and see if she doesn’t use it. The cachet, the social turbocharge it provides, would be too much to resist, sort of like her choosing the Hyundai over the Porsche when both sets of keys are proffered. I don’t think so. You want it because it is somehow, vaguely, within reach—a stretch, but not utterly impossible. And because it is beautiful. And, it’s true, because you would command a very particular, twisted form of Manhattan respect, also known as envy, from others—other women in the know, other women whose opinions you value and whose admiration you covet—with a Birkin.

  It is a game among a certain set to incite the envy of other women, I was realizing as I logged my days on the Upper East Side. Much has been written about the male gaze—how it objectifies, redraws the hierarchy between men and women, renders one a looker and one the to-be-looked-at. But to live on the Upper East Side, it was dawning on me, is to see and feel the “looks” exchanged between women, or imposed upon us by one another—a gaze that is not infrequently ravenous, competitive, laser-like in its precision and intent. The gaze draws you into the game, even if you don’t want to play. It is a way of defending yourself, sometimes, of propping yourself up. Don’t you give me that look, you say with your look; that’s not nice! Other times women use it to build themselves up by tearing another down: Where is the flaw? women ask with this gaze, assessing other women. Where is the imperfection in what you have—your belt, your shoes, your outfit, your hair—that will reassure me, make me feel it is not so good after all, that you are no better than I am? Birkins, lusted after and “scarce,” bring out the girl-on-girl hostility, the female fascination latent in so many interactions and gazes between women in Manhattan, gazes that crisscross the sidewalk and the street and the restaurant of the moment and the charity event—at the Pierre or Cipriani—as we check out one another’s shoes and other accessories, gazes laden with significance, with sumptuous, shiny, covetous, delicious meaning that our husbands and children are blind to. There are the covert and not-so-covert gazes as we wait for elevators in school hallways, gazes that take in an entire wardrobe in an instant, women swallowing other women whole like boa constrictors, in order to digest them and pick apart the details later: Who is she? Why does she have one? Who’s she married to? What does she do? Why her and not me? Relations among women on the Upper East Side are charged as they are perhaps nowhere else in the country or the world, and handbags, like cars, just might serve a lot of different functions all at once. A communication about where one stands in the inevitable hierarchy of Manhattan, a barometer of your wealth and connectedness and clout in a city where money and connections and clout are everything. A fashion statement. A security blanket, a way of
self-soothing in a uniquely stressful town.

  My request wouldn’t surprise my husband, I knew, because I had been talking about Birkins for years. Not in the same unironic way as Other Women, I hoped, but still. “There’s one!” I would tell him, pointing and squinting, as excited as a naturalist spotting a rare South American bird in Central Park in winter. If I was lucky, I would have an opportunity to size up the bag and the owner, convinced that this juxtaposition would let me know whether it was a fake. The bag, I mean.

  My obsession with the Birkin faded and waned and returned over the course of two decades, periodically reactivated by stress (such as a Birkin sighting) like a dormant virus. Even now, twenty years after my first sighting, at a different, more financially comfortable point in my life, a point when I could almost justify such a crazy expenditure, getting one would require some doing. And some calling in of favors. And, horror of horrors for an antisocial writer, perhaps even some ingratiating. But first, some obsessing. That I could handle. No problem. Upper East Side mommies are experts at obsessing, after all. Whether it’s terrorism, finding a summer camp, researching a child’s impetigo or graphomotor issues, or downsizing from a classic nine so we can get a place in Aspen without selling the one in the Hamptons, I was learning, we obsess and obsess, spending long hours locating and then devouring the websites that abet and nourish our fixations. On our laptops and iPads, we follow our daydreams of the perfect summer vacation or stalk the shoe that will transform our wardrobes and improve our lives. My friend Candace has bookmarked seventeen real estate sites in her quest, one she readily admits she will never really pursue, to move to Bronxville. “It makes me feel better,” she says with a shrug.

  My obsessive quest led me inevitably to websites such as bagsnobs.com and iwantabirkin.com. I spent night after night on eBay after my son was in bed, researching Birkins—the prices, the hardware, the details that separated the Real from the fake. One night, after I had been cooped up there literally for hours, my husband came into my “office”—the former maid’s room, off our kitchen—and I quickly, shamefacedly logged off a site. “What was that?” he wanted to know as my computer screen swallowed an image of a Blue Jean 35-cm Birkin. “What were you looking at?” I answered him honestly: “Sorry. It’s porn.” This piqued his interest, until he realized I meant handbag pornography.

  “Well, why not?” Lily asked me as our kids played in the park one sunny day. “They’re made like tanks, those Birkins. They’re really one of the few truly well-made handbags left.” From her perch in the fashion world, she made the whole idea of getting a Birkin sound sensible.

  Over lunch, I spoke to Candace and we agreed, shaking our heads, running the numbers, that the Birkin cost as much as a quarter of a year’s tuition at a private school, as much as a winter warm-weather vacation. It was two or even three months of maintenance. Twice as much as a table at the Nutcracker benefit. “Well, when you put it that way,” Candace said, pushing her chopped salad around on her plate slowly, thoughtful now, her expression changing, “it’s not really that bad . . . if you keep it forever, which you will. And you use it all the time. And you stop buying other bags. When you monetize that . . .”

  My friend JJ’s mother, who told us the anecdote about the celebrity’s wife, had five Birkins and at least as many Kellys (or were they Kellies?) and JJ suggested she might introduce me to her salesperson at Hermès. “Just get it,” she said. Even though we don’t get paid much for what we do; even though you need one like you need a pair of sequined boots in the rain forest; even though it is insanely, stupidly impractical. Don’t just stand there, wanting, Lily and Candace and JJ were saying. Do something. This might have been my strangest and most self-indulgent call to action ever.

  My husband just sort of groaned when I told him. It was unlike me, really, to make a request for something expensive. It has always given me a certain sick feeling when women act as if their finances and financial well-being have nothing to do with their husbands’, as if these baubles don’t cost the couple as a unit. My husband knew that I was basically stand-up in this regard—when he asked what I wanted for the requisite push present when our older son was born, I requested that he put some money in my IRA, to the horror of one of my girlfriends, who’d asked for diamonds—and that counted for a lot. “I just think that I should have a Birkin bag,” I explained. “I just really, really want one.” Okay, my husband agreed. What color? He would get it tomorrow. I laughed—a loud, braying, mirthless, ungenerous laugh that seemed to alarm him. Then I sighed. He couldn’t, I explained. I handed him a list of contacts I had written out, starting with JJ’s mother’s name and cell number. “What’s this?” he asked, his eyes narrowed, squinting. “This is your dealer,” I said. “Or your fence. Or whatever. Please be nice to her. I really want this bag.”

  My husband would have to call JJ’s mother—we’ll call her Myra—who would in turn call her Hermès salesperson—let’s call her Deirdre—who would in turn assist my husband when he came in. But first, Myra, bless her heart, had a heart-to-heart with Deirdre. JJ called me and reported gleefully that her mother had told Deirdre that I was a well-known author (“Yes, I’ve heard of her,” Deirdre had said—here JJ and I shrieked with laughter at the idea of someone being so polite that she would fudge having heard of a nobody like me) and that I would be a very good customer, and that I deserved a Birkin, and that I wanted black leather, 35 centimeters, with gold hardware. Even though Myra thought this was a really big mistake; I should get palladium, which, she explained, was seasonless.

  This conversation completed and the groundwork laid, my husband was notified by Myra that he could go in to meet Deirdre, which he did, and Deirdre very sweetly informed him that she was going to do her best, she was calling Paris, and she was trying very hard to make it happen; it just might not be by my birthday, which was, after all, right around the corner and she was, after all, bypassing the wait list, which was, depending on whom you spoke with, either three years long, a bunch of BS, or closed. The night my husband conveyed all this to me, I lay awake in bed at 2:00 a.m., having just started out of my sleep with the realization that I didn’t even know how much this bag would cost, exactly. “I mean, I get mine in Paris and Rome, and with the exchange rate, I don’t even know. I don’t know how much they are in New York,” Myra had told me when I haltingly, fumblingly asked about exact price in one of our phone conversations. “I only bought my Kellys here.”

  My friend Jeff Nunokawa is a professor of English literature. His specialty is the Victorian novel, and he often writes and lectures about the peculiar way Dickens, Eliot, and other Victorian novelists figure women not only as enthusiastic consumers of luxury commodities but also as luxury commodities themselves. I wondered what he would have to say about more contemporary luxury consumption by women, as exemplified by Birkingate, and about hostility and competition among women on the post-Baudelairean sidewalk. First, however, I had to explain the terms. Jeff is not one of the many friends with whom I have bonded over a love of fashion, and initially he thought I was talking about Birkenstocks. “I’m sure it really is a nice purse,” he began gamely, once I had explained that we were talking about bags, not sandals, and explained what a Birkin bag was, and what Hermès was, and gave him a quick overview of the madness of the Birkinquest in Manhattan circa the 2010s. Then he added, diplomatically, “And I do get that people care about these things.” He paused for a moment and then, gathering the various threads together, he asked, in a tone at once authoritative and playful, “But why women?”

  Liking “nice” things, coveting them, lining up for them, getting on a wait list for them, subjecting oneself to various humiliations in order to procure them, wanting them even more because they are allegedly out of reach, scarce—we are generally quick to dismiss this as feminine folly and false consciousness, as being suckered in and “duped by fashion,” Nunokawa summarized neatly. But, he suggested, we are wrong. Sure, it’s crazy, and sure, when we live in New York, we
sort of lose our sense of the craziness of such a quest, and it comes to seem normal. As in: women just want Birkin bags. And this ridiculous process of ingratiating oneself with a salesperson in order to get one, of obsessing and pulling strings, of hoping and waiting (“Let’s call them cake lines, shall we?” Nunokawa suggested gleefully) which seems like the dumbest and most pointless thing to do—well, Why? And why women? Here Nunokawa turned to the example of a fictional character from another era, Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart, deeming her “as real as it is possible to be in one sense—in her relationship to beautiful, expensive things.” As Lily’s quest to marry becomes increasingly urgent, propelling the narrative forward and playing with our own hopes, we realize that Lily does not just want things, Nunokawa reminded me, she wants them spectacularly and desperately because she, too, wants—she needs—to be a wanted thing.

  So, too, with women in Manhattan and our Birkinquests, Nunokawa suggested. “It’s not just that women—women of a certain class or social set, contemporary Lily Barts—love the fashionable commodity,” he explained to me. “It’s that they are the commodity form.” These Birkin pursuers are not just deluded or dumb, he continued. They are up to something, something more than just elbowing one another out of the cake line for a bag. By chasing Birkins we’re not just making ourselves into chasers of Birkin bags. “These women are reminding men, society, and themselves that they inhabit a privileged, identificatory relationship to those bags.” Going after and procuring something precious and scarce, we are also trying to rejuvenate our own scarcity, to reinvigorate the sense of everyone in our society of our own value. Our proximity to a sumptuous luxury item like a Birkin is selfish, frivolous—and efficacious, Nunokawa concluded.