There were shrunken T-shirts, cut jeans, and espadrilles that she loved. There were the babydoll dresses that few but actress Mia Farrow ever wore with more elan. There were the striped Breton sweaters she helped popularize. There was the dress crocheted with sheer podiums she once wore to a French Arts Union gala, whose plunging neckline was strategically, albeit barely, pinned with a brooch. There was the ragged fringe she’d kept all her life that looked like she’d cut it herself with a pair of cuticle scissors.
“Her style was very different from the American style,” Ms. Sui said, and it introduced “something new to our fashion vocabulary.” What exactly was up with that style, the designer was asked? “There was something British about it, that slightly rumpled English look, but fused with the classic French codes,” she said.
Perhaps the Hermès Birkin bag is ultimately the best example. Before its invention, Mrs. Birkin was often photographed carrying a wicker market basket full of make-up, keys and various paraphernalia. “I was known for carrying a basket,” she explained in a 2018 interview on YouTube. “So obviously I knew that girls like to have tons of things in their handbags.”
It was her bulky basket and overflowing contents that caught the attention of Jean-Louis Dumas, the CEO of Hermès, on a flight from Paris to London and inspired him to create a bag spacious enough for all of her things. “I would have loved to have been a kind of neat person and wear a Kelly,” Ms. Birkin once explained, referring to a neat square-style handbag made and named after the movie star Grace Kelly. “But I never thought you could get enough of it.”
The bookbag-style Birkin, made of supple leather, was based on an earlier design, the Haut à Courroies, made by Hermès circa 1900. With its loop handles, closed with a strap attachment anchored to a signature piece of hardware (and usually left unlocked to reveal the Hermès logo), the bag became a globally recognized symbol of status and wealth. With a base price of over $10,000, Birkins remain infinitely desirable and customizable (a Diamond Himalaya version became the most expensive handbag ever at auction when Sotheby’s sold it for over $450,000 in 2022) and are worn and collected by celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, whose handbag closets are a part of online fashion pornography, as well as Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B.
