Primates of Park Avenue

by Martin,Wednesday

  Later, I breathlessly sketched it for a friend of mine who squealed when I gave her the key/lock detail and said, “Oh, you mean a Birkin! An Hermès Birkin bag! Of course, everyone wants one!” She went on to extol the bag’s beauty and rhapsodize over the casual yet reverent ways Frenchwomen carried their Birkins, often with their worn Guide Rouge inside, or a baguette poking out. It was so . . . French. And so expensive, she explained. I sighed, feeling pained and jet-lagged as I translated the francs into dollars, sure at first that I must have made a mistake. I was a graduate student at the time, and given my budget, wanting a Birkin was about as reasonable as wanting to be the president of France.

  The Hermès Birkin bag is storied and the story of its origins is, like the clochette that dangles from it, is inextricable from its aura, its Birkin-ness, its irresistible appeal. Legend goes that in 1981, free-spirited English actress and singer Jane Birkin—she of the decades-long romantic and artistic collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg—was boarding a plane with a straw weekend bag whose contents scattered to the floor as she tried to load it into the overhead compartment. Like a rarefied knight in shining armor, Jean-Louis Dumas, then chief executive of the world’s preeminent and most exclusive leather maker, Hermès, was there to help her pick up the pieces. Thanking him, Birkin explained that she simply didn’t have a bag that did the trick for her jaunts between London and Paris and that, so the story goes, got him thinking. And, apparently, designing.

  In 1984, Hermès first offered a black leather tote of remarkable craftsmanship, refinement, and tact that somehow managed to hit a few pitch-perfect bohemian notes as well. A scaled-down version of a bag Hermès originally created to hold horse saddles a hundred years before, it had history, two handles, and a top you could choose to leave folded back and open or buckle closed. Sure, you could hook it over your arm, but you could also just swing it in your hand. Or sling it over your shoulder—the handles (two make it feel somewhat young and free-spirited, more like a cool socialite with a career than those one-handled lady-bags-who-lunch) were just about that long. It was something between a pocketbook and a weekender in its size and its look and its very essence, chicly functional. It was the opposite of the Kelly, that other iconic bag designed by the house of Hermès specifically for Princess Grace to help hide her pregnancy. The Kelly bag is all propriety, all matronly, blushing correctness. The Birkin, in contrast, makes no excuses for being pregnant before she is married. She is the Kelly’s wilder, funner, younger sister.

  That doesn’t make her cheap or easy—mais non! From the very beginning, the Birkin was made in extremely limited quantities—only 2,500 per year. This is at least in part because making a Birkin is so labor-intensive, requiring close to fifty hours of attentive, detailed and exacting work from start to finish. Birkins are made almost entirely by hand by workers who must apprentice with Hermès’s senior leather craftsmen for at least two years to qualify for the job. Birkins are works of art, in this sense, and to shore up that notion, each Birkin is made by a single artisan who “signs” and dates his creation with a special stamp denoting the year and his initials. The Birkin’s proportions are strict—whether the Birkin is of the 25-, 30-, 35-, 40- or grandiose 55cm variety, the ratio of length to width to height is precise, its silhouette unmistakable and beyond reproach. Only the French could marry the Enlightenment and the sexual revolution as Hermès managed to in the Birkin. It is the modern little black dress of handbags.

  Today, you can get a Birkin in Blue Jean (no, it is not the color of dark denim or any denim for that matter, but a whimsical, summer-perfect summer-sky shade). Or gold. This is a “beginner’s Birkin” according to those who have several, and it is not gold at all but a tawny caramel with white contrast stitching that invokes candy and makes your mouth water. There are dozens of other colors, each so vivid and unexpected that they make even the uninitiated pine. (“What color is that?!” a friend who is an artist demanded of the startled owner of a fuchsia ostrich Birkin on a gray winter day. “I have never seen a pink like that before, ever!”) The starting cost for a basic model—made of calf’s leather rather than crocodile or ostrich skin, with gold or platinum-colored palladium hardware versus a diamond-encrusted placket and lock—is $8,000. There is a dizzying array of leathers to choose from—Togo is calf’s leather, Clémence (the heaviest), is from a baby bull (taurillon clémence). There are Birkins made from lambskin and goatskin, too. An exotic skin—lizard or crocodile or ostrich— or custom model can set you back $150,000 or more. The waiting list, supplicants are often told, is two to three years long. In Hong Kong and Singapore, where Birkinmania has reached an all-time fever pitch owing to the sizzling economy, upscale black-market vendors do a brisk business selling brand-new, certified authentic Birkins recently purchased from Hermès. For the privilege of circumventing those four-year wait lists, there is sometimes a markup of 50 to 100 percent. “HERMÈS PARIS MADE IN FRANCE” is stamped in three perfectly spaced lines of silver or gold above the lock of every Birkin.

  Men could have their sports cars, their affairs, their fifteen-thousand-bottle wine cellars or whatever their midlife binkies and blankies and psychic boo-boo fixers might be. But the Birkin—the leather and the hardware and the contrast stitching and the myriad details that made it a Birkin and made it desirable, including and perhaps especially the virtual impossibility of getting it—would be mine. For all that I had lost and stood to lose still (we lose these things more slowly in Manhattan, committed as we are to looking like we’re in our twenties or thirties until we’re in our fifties, but we do still lose them)—taut thighs, unwrinkled skin, fertility, the ability to experience excitement about the latest issue of Vogue—I would have that boxy, structured, expensive, playful, sexy, functional bag. I was done, I decided, with bridge-line tote bags and compromise formation bags like the Marc by Marc Jacobs numbers that I had noticed of late that the twentysomethings and even teen girls on the Upper East Side toted around. I was getting on, and I wanted the real thing, and I felt that I was finally, somehow, entitled to it. I was middle-aged, it was true, a reality that made me choke whenever it occurred to me. But I was still young enough, still beautiful enough and blond enough and thin enough that a Birkin and I could shine together, and I was also old enough to afford it and perhaps connected enough, after this much time in Manhattan, to get it. This age, my age, was obviously the sweet spot of Birkin acquisition, and the Birkin was somehow now both my consolation prize and my right.

  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 mega-celebrity 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 waitlist 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, we murmured sympathetically—in the hopes of building up the amount of goodwill needed to prove to the sales people 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 probably never get a Birkin now.

  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 ten thousand dollars 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 that 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 application, 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 of 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 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 opinion 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 each other—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 me? 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 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 between 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, excited as a naturalist spotting a rare South American bird in Central Park in winter. If I were 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 had 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 or 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 imp
rove 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 like bagsnobs.com and Iwantabirkin.com. I spent night after night after my son was in bed on eBay, 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-colored 35cm 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.