Major Bling Birkin: Sac Bijou

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#9
A bejeweled handbag with a metallic top that resembles reptile skin and a lock-shaped clasp.

Hermès’s new Sac Bijou. Price on request, hermes.com.Credit...Still life by Matthew Avignone. Set design by Gemma Bedini
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FIRST OF ITS KIND, LAST OF ITS KIND

Is This the Boldest Birkin Bag?​

Hermès’s latest iteration is encrusted with almost 3,000 gems.
Hermès’s new Sac Bijou. Price on request, hermes.com.Credit...Still life by Matthew Avignone. Set design by Gemma Bedini

By Lindsay Talbot
  • Sept. 19, 2024
First of Its Kind, Last of Its Kind tells the story of an exceptional accessory and the archival piece that inspired it.
Sign up for the T Magazine newsletter. A weekly roundup of T Magazine recommendations, plus insider travel guides, expert beauty advice and the latest stories from our print issues. Get it sent to your inbox.
In 1984, on an Air France flight from Paris to London, the English actress and singer Jane Birkin dropped her straw carryall, spilling its contents across the floor. The man in the seat next to hers, Jean-Louis Dumas, then the executive chairman of Hermès, suggested that she get a replacement with compartments big enough to hold her things. Birkin, who had three children, complained that nothing practical was ever elegant enough. As they flew over the English Channel, they traded ideas and sketches for what would become known as the Birkin, a handbag so enduringly popular that it can still take months or even years to acquire. “I think I drew it on the sick bag — or the not-be-sick bag,” Birkin, who died last year, would later recall. “And he said, ‘I’ll make it for you.’” In his prototype, Dumas incorporated the trapezoidal shape and top flap of the Haut à Courroies, the French luxury house’s first bag, which was introduced in the late 1800s and could fit a saddle as well as riding boots.
Image
A large leather bag, in horizontal blocks of color: from top, mustard yellow, dark blue, pink and red.

An Hermès Sunset Rainbow Sellier Birkin from 2020.Credit...Courtesy of 1st Dibs
This fall, Pierre Hardy, Hermès’s creative director of high jewelry, unveils the Birkin’s most exuberant iteration yet: a bejeweled take on the classic bag, with asymmetrical slabs of white or yellow gold that give the illusion of crocodile leather. To achieve the piece’s vibrant gradient — which was partly inspired by the house’s archive of over 75,000 different colors of silk — Hardy encrusted each one with nearly 3,000 diamonds, amethysts, spessartite garnets, aquamarines and sapphires in pale blue, yellow and pink. “Color is a natural resource on which we can draw infinitely,” says Hardy, who studied art at L’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in Paris. “I have not sought to restrict but rather to allow.”
Photo assistant: Hugo Varaldi


A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 8, 2024, Page 130 of T Magazine with the headline: First of Its Kind Last of Its Kind. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: Jane Birkin
 
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MillStream said:
A bejeweled handbag with a metallic top that resembles reptile skin and a lock-shaped clasp.

Hermès’s new Sac Bijou. Price on request, hermes.com.Credit...Still life by Matthew Avignone. Set design by Gemma Bedini
SKIP TO CONTENTSKIP TO SITE INDEXSection Navigation
Account

FIRST OF ITS KIND, LAST OF ITS KIND

Is This the Boldest Birkin Bag?​

Hermès’s latest iteration is encrusted with almost 3,000 gems.
Hermès’s new Sac Bijou. Price on request, hermes.com.Credit...Still life by Matthew Avignone. Set design by Gemma Bedini

By Lindsay Talbot
  • Sept. 19, 2024
First of Its Kind, Last of Its Kind tells the story of an exceptional accessory and the archival piece that inspired it.
Sign up for the T Magazine newsletter. A weekly roundup of T Magazine recommendations, plus insider travel guides, expert beauty advice and the latest stories from our print issues. Get it sent to your inbox.
In 1984, on an Air France flight from Paris to London, the English actress and singer Jane Birkin dropped her straw carryall, spilling its contents across the floor. The man in the seat next to hers, Jean-Louis Dumas, then the executive chairman of Hermès, suggested that she get a replacement with compartments big enough to hold her things. Birkin, who had three children, complained that nothing practical was ever elegant enough. As they flew over the English Channel, they traded ideas and sketches for what would become known as the Birkin, a handbag so enduringly popular that it can still take months or even years to acquire. “I think I drew it on the sick bag — or the not-be-sick bag,” Birkin, who died last year, would later recall. “And he said, ‘I’ll make it for you.’” In his prototype, Dumas incorporated the trapezoidal shape and top flap of the Haut à Courroies, the French luxury house’s first bag, which was introduced in the late 1800s and could fit a saddle as well as riding boots.
Image
A large leather bag, in horizontal blocks of color: from top, mustard yellow, dark blue, pink and red.

An Hermès Sunset Rainbow Sellier Birkin from 2020.Credit...Courtesy of 1st Dibs
This fall, Pierre Hardy, Hermès’s creative director of high jewelry, unveils the Birkin’s most exuberant iteration yet: a bejeweled take on the classic bag, with asymmetrical slabs of white or yellow gold that give the illusion of crocodile leather. To achieve the piece’s vibrant gradient — which was partly inspired by the house’s archive of over 75,000 different colors of silk — Hardy encrusted each one with nearly 3,000 diamonds, amethysts, spessartite garnets, aquamarines and sapphires in pale blue, yellow and pink. “Color is a natural resource on which we can draw infinitely,” says Hardy, who studied art at L’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in Paris. “I have not sought to restrict but rather to allow.”
Photo assistant: Hugo Varaldi


A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 8, 2024, Page 130 of T Magazine with the headline: First of Its Kind Last of Its Kind. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: Jane Birkin
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Thank you, I was on the train when I posted. :flowers:
 
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