How a Designer Handbag Became Worth More Than a Car

Hermès Birkins cost $13,500 today—up 44% in a decade—yet a skilled amateur can handcraft an identical bag for $2,455, revealing the gap between labor value and luxury markup.

Summary of The It Bag. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:24 — Handbags uniquely blend utility with art, making them fascinating because they serve both practical and aesthetic purposes that few other fashion items do.
• 00:01:29 — Coach transformed itself from affordable heritage brand into a status symbol by introducing ‘accessible luxury’ before going public in 2000, eventually capturing 40% of U.S. bag market share.
• 00:03:33 — The Hermès Birkin was born in 1984 when executive Jean-Louis Dumas sat next to actress Jane Birkin on a plane and offered to design a bag for her overflowing possessions.
• 00:05:35 — Birkin prices have increased roughly 44% over the past decade, rising from $9,400 in 2016 to $13,500 in 2026, with even higher costs for exotic materials.
• 00:13:57 — The Prada backpack in the late 1980s was the first true ‘it bag,’ showing luxury conglomerates they could generate massive profits by creating desire through marketing rather than exclusivity.
• 00:17:23 — Luxury handbag markups have escalated dramatically—from 10-12 times production cost in the 1990s to 25-30 times today, meaning a $100 bag sells for $3,000 or more.
• 00:26:16 — Handbags became gendered feminine in the 1920s-1940s through advertising that connected them to menstrual products and makeup for maintaining appearance, permanently associating them with women.
• 00:41:44 — When one person handcrafted a Birkin-style bag investing 100 hours of labor, the material and construction costs totaled $2,455—less than one-fifth the retail price of an actual Birkin.
• 00:43:34 — The fashion industry has exhausted new bag designs and now recycles old ‘it bags’ from decades past, suggesting the era of innovative luxury handbag design may be ending.

In depth

The myth of scarcity, and how Hermès built it

The Birkin’s origin story, as told in the episode, is almost too neat: in 1984 Jane Birkin spills her belongings on a plane, Hermès executive Jean-Louis Dumas offers to design her a proper bag, and a legend is born 00:03:33. But the episode is careful to note the irony buried in that story — the real Jane Birkin bag was never precious. It was practical luggage that she wore hard and dirty, which makes it strange that decades later the bag’s value rests on exactly the opposite qualities: exclusivity, pristine craftsmanship, and inaccessibility 00:04:23.

That inaccessibility is largely manufactured, Maya Kodomori argues. Getting a Birkin isn’t just about money; it requires becoming a known Hermès client first, spending heavily on other goods to prove loyalty before you’re even offered the “real” bag 00:05:09. Avery frames this as a journey that is sold as being as important as the object itself 00:05:24. And even once you clear that bar, the price keeps climbing — a base Birkin 25 rose about 44% in a decade, from $9,400 to $13,500, and that’s before any exotic leather or hardware upgrades 00:05:35.

But the episode’s twist is that this scarcity strategy may be backfiring. Kodomori argues that the explosion of resale platforms has quietly broken the illusion Hermès spent decades building: bags that were supposed to be rare, generational heirlooms are now flooding secondhand markets because owners realize there’s profit in letting go of them 00:42:37. She goes so far as to predict the Birkin’s symbolic reign won’t last — not because people stop wanting it, but because the mythology of impossible scarcity cannot survive a marketplace where getting one is, increasingly, just a matter of saving money and being patient 00:43:08.

The it-bag as the economic engine of the fashion industry

Fashion historian Dana Thomas supplies the structural argument underneath the whole episode: handbags aren’t just accessories, they are the financial backbone that keeps luxury houses solvent when their actual clothing collections fail. She traces this to the corporatization of fashion houses in the 1980s and 90s, when family ateliers were absorbed into conglomerates and had to start selling to as many people as possible rather than a tiny elite 00:13:40. The watershed moment, in her telling, was the Prada backpack — a genuinely novel object that suddenly appeared everywhere, memorably captured when New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham stood on a single corner and shot wave after wave of people carrying the same bag 00:14:08. That was proof of concept: desire, not scarcity or utility, could be manufactured and monetized at enormous scale.

Thomas explains why bags specifically became this vehicle rather than clothing or even perfume. Unlike clothes, bags don’t require fitting a body type, don’t go out of season, and work as gifts — they are, as she puts it, strangely egalitarian across cultures and markets from Japan to South America 00:15:42. Perfume comes close but still has to smell right on an individual person; a bag just has to be seen 00:15:34. This is why even couture-rooted houses like Saint Laurent now lean so heavily on handbag sales to stay afloat, something Thomas finds almost embarrassing given their tailoring heritage 00:16:10.

The markup math makes the stakes explicit. When Thomas researched her book Deluxe in the 2000s, luxury bags were marked up 10 to 12 times production cost. Today, she says, that multiple has climbed to 25 or 30 times — a $100-to-make bag now retails for $3,000 or more 00:17:23. Crucially, she stresses that this escalation often has nothing to do with materials; some of the most hyped it-bags are made from cheap canvas or pleather, meaning the price reflects pure marketing and manufactured belonging rather than rarity or craftsmanship 00:17:46. Even Louis Vuitton’s $20 billion in annual sales undercuts any claim to rarity — you cannot call something rare while selling it at that volume 00:17:55.

Coach’s deliberate invention of “accessible luxury”

The episode’s interview with longtime Coach CEO Lew Frankfort reveals how consciously this status game was engineered, not just at the Hermès tier but at the mass-market level. Frankfort explicitly modeled Coach’s strategy on the French houses, wanting an American equivalent to Louis Vuitton and Hermès, and did so by making the Coach logo itself — not just the leather — a visible, repeatable signal of brand identity 00:23:23. He coined the phrase “accessible luxury” ahead of Coach’s 2000 IPO, and under that strategy the company grew tenfold over the following decade, at one point claiming roughly 40% dollar share of all bags purchased in the US 00:24:32.

Maya’s own biography is offered as a case study of this strategy working exactly as designed. Her first status bag, a Coach Poppy purchased as an eighth-grade graduation gift, was — in her words — the most expensive bag she’d ever encountered at the time, and it functioned precisely the way Frankfort intended: a signal of comparative social standing among middle-school classmates 00:24:22. She describes handbag collecting as following a near-universal trajectory, moving from Coach to Michael Kors to Marc Jacobs to Louis Vuitton to increasingly obscure secondhand finds, a pipeline she jokingly compares to escalating drug use 00:01:18.

A detail that surprised Avery during the reporting was how much of Coach’s business, at its peak around 35% relative to the women’s line, came from men 00:25:51. This becomes a hinge for the episode’s later argument about gender: Coach’s success proves bags can be sold to men too, yet the broader culture still treats bag-carrying as inherently feminine, which the episode goes on to trace back to specific advertising history rather than any inherent property of the object itself.

How purses got gendered — and what that gendering concealed

Fashion historian Kathleen B. Casey, author of The Things She Carried, lays out a surprisingly specific historical mechanism for why bags became coded as feminine, since men’s purses were advertised without controversy in the early 1900s 00:32:35. The shift happened as women moved into public life in the 1920s–40s and bags became tools for maintaining a composed, feminine appearance outward — compacts, mirrors, lipstick, personalized perfume, all designed to let a woman manage her looks invisibly while out in the world 00:33:10.

But Casey argues the decisive, almost accidental turning point was menstrual product advertising. When Kotex launched sanitary napkins in the 1920s, ad conventions of the era wouldn’t permit depicting the product directly, so ads instead showed women discreetly sliding a box into a purse; Tampax did the same when it launched in 1936 00:33:52. This linked the purse symbolically and functionally to women’s bodies in a way that, Casey and Avery note, persisted culturally for generations — down to older Black women using “pocketbook” as slang for the body itself, a connection Avery traces into contemporary usage by rapper Mona Leo 00:34:49.

The deeper argument here is that this gendering wasn’t neutral — it encoded an expectation that women would be the invisible caretakers carrying everyone’s contingencies (bandages, snacks, tools) while being expected to disguise that labor behind something “cute” and feminine rather than practical-looking, like a backpack 00:36:34. The episode notes this expectation was sometimes subverted — women in history concealing weapons in genteel purses for self-defense 00:36:59 — but the core double standard, that competence must be hidden inside prettiness, is presented as the lasting legacy. The episode closes this thread by gesturing at change: the rise of “everyday carry” culture in menswear, and designer Nur Abbas’s explicitly gender-agnostic, utilitarian Parcel bag system, suggest the feminine coding may finally be loosening 00:46:07.

What it actually costs to make a Birkin, and what that reveals

The episode’s most concrete evidence against pure markup-as-fantasy comes from its own experiment: having non-professional leatherworker Dylan Keone construct a Birkin-style bag from scratch, tracking every dollar and hour. The leather alone, a horsehide chosen partly for its texture and partly for comedic value, cost $345, with hardware and trim bringing raw materials to roughly $455 before a single stitch was sewn 00:39:00. That already undercuts the base retail price of an actual Birkin.

The labor turned out to be the real cost. Saddle stitching leather by hand — punching paired holes with a chisel and mallet, then sewing from both sides simultaneously with a double-ended needle — proved to be slow, physically demanding work; a single decorative element like piping added an estimated 30 hours on its own 00:41:01. In total, Keone spent about 100 hours building the bag. Avery paid her $20 an hour, bringing total labor cost to $2,000 and the bag’s full cost to $2,455 — still roughly one-twentieth the retail price of a real Birkin at that size 00:48:24.

Both women resist drawing a simple moral from this. Keone explicitly rejects the premise of the question “is it worth it,” arguing that luxury pricing is obviously inflated beyond reason, but that the sheer amount of skilled hand labor involved means the price isn’t entirely arbitrary either 00:41:19. The conclusion the episode lands on is double-edged: the Birkin’s cult of craftsmanship is not a total fiction — one person genuinely does hand-build each one start to finish, and that process is slow and skill-intensive 00:07:08 — but the retail markup extracts far more than the labor and materials justify, meaning buyers are paying overwhelmingly for brand mythology rather than the object in their hands 00:49:45.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.