My Birkin Blog

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Jane Birkin: ‘There’s no fun in a bag if it’s not kicked around’

The Telegraph

Jane Birkin talks of her nonchalant relationship with the luxury Hermès handbag named in her honour, ahead of eBay charity auction.

Picture the scene. Style icon of the moment, Alexa Chung, using her must-have Mulberry satchel, named in her honour, as a rain-shield while its contents dangle in a plastic carrier bag? Never going to happen. Is it even possibleto conjure an image of avid Birkin collector Victoria Beckham - whose collection of over 100 differing models is said to be worth £1.5 million - adorning hers with stickers?

But that's exactly what the charmingly down-to-earth Jane Birkin does with the bag, which costs upwards of £5,600, that Hermès created in her honour.

The British style icon and actress has told Vogue.com: "I always put on stickers and beads, and worry beads. I always hang things on my bags because I don't like them looking like everyone else's."

While we collectively scrape our jaws from the off the floor, it is worth mentioning additional nuggets bestowed from the 64-year-old's 'un-precious' school of thought: "I never have more than one bag at a time. I think one is already quite enough. Also, I hate changing bags, so I never have the thing of having ten bags."

In fact, Birkin says she has only owned four of her namesake totes since Hermès boss Jean-Louis Dumas created the bag back in 1984. The story goes that Dumas was sat next to Birkin on a flight from Paris to London, and the two got talking about how she was struggling to find the perfect weekend bag after the contents of her straw bag fell to the ground from the overhead locker.

Fittingly, for a woman who obviously doesn't consider a bag to be a piece of 'arm candy', two Birkins from her personal collection have previously been donated to charity auctions, and the same fate awaits number three: from today the black Birkin that has been toted around the world with the actress-turned-activist for the past five years will be auctioned to raise money for the Red Cross relief work in Japan.

Birkin also revealed that she is lobbying Hermès to diversify the iconic model, urging them to: "make it out of plastic or, even more fun, make it out of cardboard. Then it wouldn't be so heavy."

The only other person who might share Birkin's affection for customing is Lady Gaga. The highly-styled pop sensation was pictured last year with a white version of the infamous Birkin that had been inked with the Japanese alphabet, in what looked suspiciously like black marker pen....