Piece of old croc could put you in pound seats

An elderly but extremely handsome woman in pink, trailing a fur coat and a very young husband behind her, wafts in to Christie’s grand hall and tries to find a seat in the auction room. There, the crowd - mostly men in suits and women wearing silk scarves and expensive blow-dries - sit in reverential silence, their faces hardened in focus. All of them are here to buy one thing. No, not a classical painting nor an antique vase - they’re here for a handbag. So, what’s so special about this bag? Victoria Beckham is rumoured to own 100 of them worth £1.5 million (R16.1m), Lady Gaga enraged fashion lovers across the world by defacing one, there’s a six-year waiting list to have one made, but now you can own your very own (albeit secondhand) version… if you’ve got a spare £49 000 (R527 558), that is. Yes, you read that right. At Christie’s, an anonymous bidder paid £49 000 for a secondhand bag. But this was no ordinary bag: this was a limited-edition Hermes Birkin bag and, it appears, women will do (or pay) whatever it takes to get one over their arm - even in the middle of a recession. Forget the British Fashion Awards, the bi-annual auction of Hermes bags at Christie’s is the real fashion event of the year. Fifty-one handbags went under the hammer, and the Rouge Moyen alligator Birkin, 1998, which sold for £49 250, broke Christie’s records as the most expensive handbag ever sold. “The most sought-after bags are always the Birkins and Kellys (named after actresses Jane Birkin and Grace Kelly),” says Pat Frost, Christie’s director of fashion and textiles. “And the interesting thing is that yes, of course, they’re bought by wealthy people, but we don’t see the same people coming back over and over again. The mentality seems to be that you search for your perfect Hermes bag and once you find it, you’re done.” So why the eye-watering price tags? “The really expensive bags are the ones made of exotic leathers: crocodile, lizard, alligator and ostrich. “With the croc bags, which command the very highest prices, the paler the colour, the more the bag is worth because it’s extremely hard to dye the skins successfully. “In addition to that, there is only a limited supply of crocodile in the first place. “Hermes don’t give us the details of their distribution and production but, for example, we know that the Sloane Square store gets only four crocodile bags to sell off the shelf each year.” And the buyers at the auction know that all too well. An elegant woman in her 60s, dressed in purple, fought with an internet bidder to snap up a black matte alligator Birkin for a mere £32 450 - an anniversary present from her husband. “I’ve always loved Hermes bags, I had my eye on a few here today. I particularly wanted crocodile or alligator skin - they’re almost impossible to come by,” she said. Right. Understood. Material limited and production tricky - but you could say the same thing about state-of-the-art computers or cars, and they don’t seem to be holding their value so well. In fact, the Hermes bag is almost unique in its position as a “recession-proof status accessory”. While most designers have conspicuously not shown “It” bags on their catwalks of late, the Hermes bag fever continues unabated. “The point about Hermes bags is that they’re more than fashion accessories,” says Rebecca Lowthorpe, Elle magazine’s fashion features director. “They’re more comparable to collectable works of art. We are talking about the absolute pinnacle of heritage luxury… We just wouldn’t be having this conversation about a bag made by, say, Chanel.” So how did so many of these bags - 16 Kellys and 19 Birkins, to be precise - make their way to auction if they’re so beloved by their owners? As well as some antiques from the ’60s, quite a few of these bags were made only this year or last. Leonie Ashfield, press officer for Christie’s, explains that many end up at auction for the same reason that eBay is bursting with unwanted presents in January. “Often brand new bags end up here because a husband has bought it for his wife in the wrong colour or style,” she says. “You want to make sure you get it right because it’s a real investment.” Other fashion insiders tell me that the stories behind the bags help bolster the seemingly unstoppable cult of Hermes: the Birkin story being the most famous. So are you sitting comfortably? Once upon a time on a flight from Paris to London in the early ’80s, Jane Birkin was wrestling with a tattered old straw bag (or a plastic bag, depending on which version of this fashion myth you subscribe to) from which her possessions were spewing forth. Complaining that she just couldn’t find a good size handbag and musing upon how nice it would be if Hermes were to make one, she discovered that the man next to her was none other than Hermes boss, Jean-Louis Dumas.