The It Bag

How did a practical, essential tool become an expensive status symbol? For photos and links, head to articlesofinterest.substack.com https://articlesofinterest.substack.com Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Are we rolling?

• 0:01Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Okay, cute. This is my Louis Vuitton Richard Prince bag.

• 0:05Avery Trufelman?

  What?

• 0:06Speaker 00

  It's painted canvas with the Richard Prince print, and it's a custom dyed orange python. And as you can see, this is destroyed.

• 0:16Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, wow. You really wore this thing.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. I really love to wear my bags.

• 0:22Avery Trufelman?

  Maya loves bags.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Oh, my goodness. A bag is, to me in fashion, the only blend of utility and art object. And I think they're so fascinating because they're the extremes of both. Like, most people, you need a bag to carry your stuff. No one's pockets are that deep.

• 0:42Avery Trufelman?

  So may I ask you to introduce yourself?

• 0:44Speaker 00

  My name is Maya Kodamori. I am a writer, specifically in fashion. When this comes out, I will be the news writer at Heist Nabiety.

• 0:53Avery Trufelman?

  Can we go look at your bags?

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's look at my bags.

• 0:56Avery Trufelman?

  Many handbag collectors have a similar trajectory.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  My very first bag that I got for my eighth grade graduation was a Coach Poppy bag.

• 1:04Avery Trufelman?

  And that was the gateway drug.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Coach was like the smoking your first cigarette. You go from your Coach bags, then maybe you get your first Michael Kors bag, then you get some of the cooler Marc Jacobs bags. And then maybe after that, you get your very first Louis Vuitton. It's literally like Louis Vuitton is like weed, and then any bag after that is cocaine or heroin.

• 1:23Avery Trufelman?

  Not that we're condoning any of this.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Drugs are bad. I do not use any of those drugs.

• 1:29Avery Trufelman?

  She just got deep into bags.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  This was my first designer bag. It's the Balenciaga Bizarre Tote. And this bag cost $1,600 that I spent of my own money. First of all, that was the most amount of money I'd ever spent on anything in my life.

• 1:43Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Speaker 00

  I was 18 years old. I had been saving money every year for my birthday, from when I was, I believe, eight. Also, from like working in my dad's office as a secretary, like literally 10 years of birthday gifts on this one Balenciaga bag.

• 1:58Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, how did it feel going into the store and plunking down this amount of money?

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. Well, I was just like, I was trembling. I also didn't have a credit card until like four years ago. So this is like money in my bank account. They gave me champagne, which I couldn't drink, but...

• 2:13Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  They gave me champagne, and my parents were just sitting there drinking the champagne, being like, okay, Maya, like, that's cool. I guess you can do this.

• 2:20Avery Trufelman?

  But as she got deeper and deeper into the handbag culture, Maya got very into buying rare secondhand bags and getting very good deals.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  The Prada Serniera. I got this on the real real for $248.

• 2:33Avery Trufelman?

  She got really into researching the histories of each undersung bag from the past.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  And I was like, oh, this is all a world. Michael Kors era Celine, I got that for $250. Alexander McQueen bag for $156.

• 2:46Avery Trufelman?

  In the stereotypical trajectory of the bag collector, as they go from Coach bag into rarer, weirder things, there has been traditionally a crown jewel, an ultimate goal, the great get of handbags, the Hermès Birkin.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  I think most people would agree that it is the biggest status symbol bag in the history of bags to date and also today.

• 3:09Avery Trufelman?

  It has long been the holy grail of handbags, like when Rory was given a Birkin on Gilmore Girls.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Do you like it? Hello, I'm a girl, it's a purse. Not just a purse, it's a Birkin bag.

• 3:19Avery Trufelman?

  And Samantha tried to get a Birkin on Sex and the City.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  And there's a waiting list. I assumed. Five years. For a bag? It's not a bag. It's a Birkin.

• 3:29Avery Trufelman?

  What's up with the Birkin?

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Girl.

• 3:31Avery Trufelman?

  The legend goes like this. In 1984, the famous actress and singer Jane Birkin was on a plane, and next to her sits the head of Hermès.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  Jean Louis Dumont, who was the executive chairman and creative director of Hermès from the 70s until 2006, famously sat on a plane with Miss Jane Birkin, who was carrying all of her items, as one proto manic pixie dream girl does, in a basket. And her stuff was spilling everywhere. And he says, goodness me, girl, you gotta get a bag.

• 4:03Avery Trufelman?

  And Jane Birkin, then 40 years old, was like, okay.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  And he was like, I'll design one for you. And you know, that's how the Hermès Birkin was born.

• 4:10Avery Trufelman?

  The bag was big and capacious and very practical. It was like a glorified tote bag or a piece of luggage. But then, style icon Jane Birkin carried it around everywhere and wore the hell out of it.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  The actual Jane Birkin bag is not clean, is dirty. And the fact that it was Jane who had this running through streams barefoot vibe makes it interesting that it's become the most expensive bag and has this elitism behind it.

• 4:37Avery Trufelman?

  And Maya seemed to actually have a Birkin. Is that a real Birkin?

• 4:41Speaker 00

  No. No, I'm like, I actually don't think I would ever own a real Birkin.

• 4:46Avery Trufelman?

  Why?

• 4:46Speaker 00

  The Birkin as a status accessory is something that's for a lifestyle that I just don't have.

• 4:51Avery Trufelman?

  There are many aspects of the Birkin bag that Maya cannot get into. Like, one of the big stinks about the Birkin is traditionally, the bag is supposed to be extremely difficult to get.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  You have to know someone that can put you on the list. And getting on the list isn't really gonna do anything.

• 5:09Avery Trufelman?

  The way up the list is to become a regular Hermès shopper.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  V I C's very important clients are the people that are gonna be the first ones to get offered top spots on the list because they have a proven track record.

• 5:22Avery Trufelman?

  You gotta buy a lot of things at Hermès.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  It's more than just the bag because it's the journey that it took to get to the bag.

• 5:28Avery Trufelman?

  And then, there's the matter of being able to actually afford the bag itself, which has only gotten more and more expensive over the years.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  The Birkin 25 has increased roughly 44% over the past decade, moving from $9,400 starting in 2016 to $13,500 in 2026.

• 5:49Avery Trufelman?

  I was just reading a profile in The Times about a choreographer in New York City who makes that much in a year, $13,500. And to someone else, that is just a bag.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  So that is the starting price. That's like a starter leather. We're not talking pebbled. We're probably talking the silver or the palladium hardware. We're not talking any of the bells and whistles, like your starter Birkin.

• 6:12Avery Trufelman?

  So what do you make of this?

• 6:14Speaker 00

  That price is ridiculous. I would love, I would love to see what they look like mirrored to actually how much things cost.

• 6:21Avery Trufelman?

  Funny, you should say that. So as part of this story, I have asked my friend to sew me a Birkin.

• 6:26Speaker 04

  Do you want a Birkin in particular?

• 6:30Avery Trufelman?

  Because you have a Birkin.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:31Avery Trufelman?

  Do you know Dylan Keone? She is not a leather worker by trade at all. She was just holding an amazing Birkin bag, and she's like, I made it. She's like, no, you didn't. That's a lie. And she's, no, I did.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Uh, I just wanted a Birkin, and I think the idea of making a fake Birkin is really funny.

• 6:49Avery Trufelman?

  Again, I want to make this clear. Dylan is not a professional leather worker. She's actually a runway model and a stylist and a polymath who thought this would be a fun experiment to do the research to figure out how to make a Birkin bag by herself. Because that's how they're made.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  That's the whole thing with Birkins is that they're made by hand, one person start to finish. You have one person the whole way through, which is cool. I think it's really special.

• 7:14Avery Trufelman?

  So I will be following Dylan as she makes a Birkin with her own two hands, watching costs and watching time and wondering, how much is a handbag actually worth? And how did the bag, something that's supposed to be so practical, become a status item in the first place? Maya Kodamori, Dylan Keone, and I will investigate after the break.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  Hey there, it's Robyn from PRX. If you're a longtime listener of Radiotopia, you may know that we had a podcast that ran from 2016 to 2020 discussing every episode of the show The West Wing. Well, I'm excited to tell you The West Wing Weekly is back. Joshua Molina, whose star on The West Wing is Will Bailey, and Rishakeesh Hirway, creator and host of Song Exploder, have reunited to discuss the hit Netflix political thriller, The Diplomat. Just as they did in their original run, they're discussing each episode of the series in sequence, joined by special guests from the show and from the real world of diplomacy. Rishi and Josh will be wrapping up the first season with a special live taping at Union Chapel in London on November 14. Subscribe now to The West Wing Weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

• 8:26Avery Trufelman?

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• 9:10Avery Trufelman?

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• 9:54Avery Trufelman?

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• 10:38Avery Trufelman?

  That's J O I N B I L T dot com slash articles. Use that link so they know I sent you.

• 10:46Avery Trufelman?

  Bags are essential to human beings. They have been, in fact, vital to our evolution. At least, this is the argument that Ursula K. Le Guin makes in her classic essay slash manifesto, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction."

• 11:00Speaker 00

  I do definitely know it.

• 11:01Avery Trufelman?

  Which I mentioned to Maya Kodamori.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  I have not read it. So you tell me about the Ursula K. Le Guin.

• 11:08Avery Trufelman?

  It's really short, but it's essentially this idea that like, we're often told some of the earliest tools in human evolution were a hand axe, a stick, a spear, something long and hard and used for hunchering. But she cited a bunch of historians and actual scientists who are talking about, well, maybe that's not the first thing, because early humans grazed. They were gatherers more than hunters. One could argue that the earliest piece of human technology is, in fact, a receptacle. If you don't have a receptacle, you're only living in the moment. You can only capture the calories that fit in your hand.

• 11:47Avery Trufelman?

  She says, "It is a human thing to do, to put something you want, because it is useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people. And then later on, you take it out and you eat it, or share it, or store it up for winter, and put it in the medicine bundle, or the shrine, or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred. And then the next day, you probably do much the same again. If to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am human being after all, fully, freely, gladly."

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Well, everything is bag, when you think about it. No, your body is a bag. It is.

• 12:28Avery Trufelman?

  Blood bag.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  It's a blood bag. Your organs are bags. It really, it is, it kind of makes sense as the earliest technology in that sense, because we created containers because we are containers and because we live in containers, because the planet is a container. And to me, that is like now the bag as reflecting human evolution. Like, the explosion from the bag as tool into the bag as commerce. That's where the it bag comes in.

• 12:54Avery Trufelman?

  What is an it bag and how do you feel about them?

• 12:57Speaker 00

  An it bag is a bag that is able to, after an era, define that era.

• 13:03Avery Trufelman?

  It is the hot bag of the moment.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  It's like the bag that all the celebrities have. Perhaps they were gifted it. It is something that is easily recognizable as, "She has that? Wow, she must be important." The value just comes from other people wanting it and from branding and advertising telling you that you should want it. That's the it bag.

• 13:24Avery Trufelman?

  And so how did this happen?

• 13:26Speaker 06

  It could come somewhat from the Birkin, which was invented or designed in the 80s. But what really hit hard was the Prada backpack, which was really the first it bag.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Dana Thomas is a fashion historian and informant, I believe is the term that she likes to use on her website, which I think is fantastic. And she has written one of my favorite fashion books of all time called Deluxe, and it's all about how the fashion industry works from a commerce standpoint.

• 13:55Avery Trufelman?

  In the 1980s and 1990s, luxury fashion companies, which used to be small, family-run ateliers, started to go corporate. They were gathered up into conglomerates, they went public. And then suddenly, it wasn't about making luxurious goods for the elite few. It was about selling a lot of stuff to as many people as possible.

• 14:15Speaker 06

  That was in probably around, hmm, 90, 89, 90, 91, 92, somewhere in there.

• 14:20Avery Trufelman?

  And the Prada backpack showed how it could be done.

• 14:24Speaker 06

  The Prada backpack was completely a new idea, but it was also super young in its feeling and its allure and its use. You could ride a bicycle with it, you could go on the subway with it. And I remember sort of the moment that it was super, super insanely white hot was when Bill Cunningham of the New York Times went and stood on the corner of 57th and 5th Avenue and just photographed young women or young people going by with the Prada backpack, because it was just everywhere. So that really solidified the idea of heritage brands building their entire existence, their profits, their sales and everything, on a bag.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  They realized that that was a perfect storm and started channeling all of this money around the 90s into accessories and kind of creating this like really big boom of designer bag, designer bag.

• 15:15Speaker 06

  By the late 90s, everybody was in on the game.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Today, it bags are what keeps everything afloat.

• 15:21Speaker 06

  There's brands that now say, "Oh, we'll be fine if we can just get an it bag, if we can get a hit it bag that would just sell so much that they could exhale and be like, "Well, if the clothes don't work this season, the bag is going to keep us in the black."

• 15:34Avery Trufelman?

  Why are bags a better insurance policy than clothes?

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Because they can work for everyone.

• 15:40Speaker 06

  The handbag, you don't have to worry about sizing, you don't have to worry about seasons, you can buy it as a gift and it works. I mean, Chanel number five kind of did that for Chanel for years and years and years. But then suddenly, with this Prada backpack, that shifted. It's easier to sell handbags than even perfume. Perfume has to smell good on you. It's a very personal thing, scent.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  Dana Thomas talked about how the bag almost seems egalitarian.

• 16:05Speaker 06

  The Japanese woman is not built the same as the Midwest American, right? But they can carry the same handbag. The handbag works in Japan, the handbag works in China, the handbag works in India, the handbag works in South America, the handbag works in North America, it works across Europe. It works in any culture.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Instead of owning like the jacket, which maybe they never made in your size or whatever, if you had the money, you could buy the bag.

• 16:27Speaker 06

  It just matters that you have an it bag that sells really well. Saint Laurent's been saying this for a while, you know, which is kind of annoying, because at its core, Saint Laurent was a couture house.

• 16:36Avery Trufelman?

  So many famed tailors, the masters of couture and bias cuts and shoulders and cloth, have instead had to bow to the eternal allure of the handbag.

• 16:47Speaker 06

  It really doesn't matter what your business or what your core is, or what your heritage is. It feels like it can't be a player in fashion, or even just make enough money to please shareholders until it's selling enough handbags.

• 17:01Avery Trufelman?

  Although I don't want to sound too negative about it, a hit handbag can be a major boon for a small designer.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Let's talk about how Telfair was able to build that brand. His brand was operating like out of an apartment for a really long time. That plastic bag came out, he was selling that like hotcakes. That finances the brand. I think for a designer, going into bags, once you've already ascended in an indie scene, is kind of like opening a 401K. It's like, now that I have this leather product, I am ensuring future money forever.

• 17:34Speaker 06

  With handbags, the thing is, they can raise the prices because there's so much hype behind them. And they've been working on this hype since that it bag happened. And the markup on it is enormous. When I was writing the book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, the markup was between 10 and 12 times the cost. If it cost $100 to make it, sell it for $1,200. Now it's like 25 or 30.

• 17:56Avery Trufelman?

  Like, if it costs $100 to make a bag, sell it for $3,000, at least. The prices go up and up and up, which is wild, because some of the quote-unquote "it bags" are made with really inexpensive fabric, or vinyl, or pleather.

• 18:12Speaker 06

  So you're not even paying for rarity. That rarity thing is a mirage. I mean, if Louis Vuitton is doing $20 billion a year in sales, there's nothing rare about a Louis Vuitton product. So what are you paying for? You're paying for hype, you're paying for marketing, and you're paying for the idea that you feel like if you have this thing and you've made it, you belong to a group. You're buying into, they call it the dream, I call it the marketing message.

• 18:42Avery Trufelman?

  But again, Hermès likes to set itself apart. They say the Birkin isn't just hype. It's a truly rare, carefully crafted product made by one individual artisan. Which brings us back to my friend Dylan Keoni and our experiment of making a homemade Birkin bag, starting with the leather. So where are we?

• 19:04Speaker 04

  We're at District Leather. I mean, it's like most things in the garment district, where there's no storefront and you just sort of have to know it's there.

• 19:11Avery Trufelman?

  District Leathers is a hoot. It is so obviously a former office. It still has desks and cubicles, but it's completely feral, draped with the most outlandish, unusual leathers you could imagine.

• 19:23Speaker 07

  This is American bison.

• 19:25Avery Trufelman?

  Damn.

• 19:25Speaker 07

  And this is water buffalo.

• 19:27Avery Trufelman?

  Whoa. Alex Bass is the owner of District Leathers. That's gator.

• 19:31Speaker 07

  That's gator.

• 19:32Avery Trufelman?

  How much is a gator skin?

• 19:33Speaker 07

  That size is maybe like 600, 700 bucks.

• 19:36Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 19:37Speaker 07

  That's pure rucu, that's less expensive, those are like 300.

• 19:41Avery Trufelman?

  That's fish?

• 19:42Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:42Avery Trufelman?

  Brazilian piranhas, Asian stingrays, and of course, any and all varietal of cow and sheep, which is the part that Dylan and I, two non-meat eaters, had to make our peace with.

• 19:54Speaker 07

  It's all food industry byproduct.

• 19:55Avery Trufelman?

  All of it.

• 19:56Speaker 07

  With the exception of like maybe one or two things in this room, the exotic room, the demand for meat is so much larger than the demand for hides, that more often what we hear from our Brazilian suppliers, that the hides are going to waste because they're killing the cows for the meat, but then there's no use for the hides because there's not enough demand for leather.

• 20:14Avery Trufelman?

  So the farms and the slaughterhouses sell their hides to a broker.

• 20:18Speaker 07

  And the hide broker collects them and sorts them and grades them and then sells them to the tanner. And then they sell those.

• 20:24Avery Trufelman?

  After looking at so many different leathers, I ultimately just chose the exact same leather that Dylan used for her bag, because I'm an original and I really like Dylan's Birkin. But also, this is objectively a very cool leather.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  This is gonna be amazing.

• 20:37Avery Trufelman?

  Yeah, yeah, this is it. It's extremely thick, and it's a little strange. It's got this wild rippling texture to it.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  It doesn't wrinkle, it rolls.

• 20:45Avery Trufelman?

  Because it is from a horse. Sorry, horse girls. That's so crazy. It's just the back of the horse. Specifically, the horse's butt.

• 20:56Speaker 04

  There's curve in the leather from it being the cheeks.

• 20:59Avery Trufelman?

  It's more than a little perverse. You could really see the outline of the butt.

• 21:02Speaker 04

  I can get a whole bag out of that.

• 21:04Avery Trufelman?

  So I bought the horse's butt, and I bought a little lambskin for the lining. And all in all, the leather alone was $345. $345. Okay.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  Great.

• 21:17Speaker 06

  Less than a Birkin.

• 21:18Avery Trufelman?

  Although with so many luxury handbags, they have all kinds of different options for more rare, more exotic, more expensive animal skins. Because they always want to find ways to make handbags more deluxe.

• 21:29Speaker 06

  If you're the 1%, you'll get the ostrich skin with diamond clasps.

• 21:34Avery Trufelman?

  Dana Thomas again.

• 21:36Speaker 06

  So there will always be limited edition. We've only made three of them. We've only made five of them. They will bake into the massification of these items, a culture of version of it.

• 21:47Avery Trufelman?

  There will always be more reasons to spend more money on a new bag with fun new shapes and new designs and new ways to show off your wealth or your taste. And this is the mission of the It Bag. It is supposed to be as fleeting and fickle as fashion, a carrot perpetually dangling over you. Now that you see the fashion industry for what it is, one would assume you might be like, I'm out of the bag game. This is bullshit. But you're not.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  I'm not.

• 22:15Avery Trufelman?

  Why not?

• 22:16Speaker 00

  I'm not because I'm a human being.

• 22:17Avery Trufelman?

  Maya is well aware that this is the goal of an It Bag: to create desire.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Why do I want them? Because it exists. And that's the thing. It's like, if you build it, they will come. If you were to summarize the whole thing, that's how the fashion industry works, is if you build it, they will come. And then honestly, people kind of seeing what they can get away with and realizing they can get away with a lot.

• 22:39Avery Trufelman?

  The concept of the It Bag: generating cute, new styles with strong brand identities, constantly stoking desire. This was a completely new approach for a company that had once been famous for humble, unassuming leather bags that were supposed to last a lifetime.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  At the time, it was all about durability, value, function, quality, so the bag wears in, never wears out. And this was a period in the late 70s before the European brands really penetrated the United States with any significance.

• 23:16Avery Trufelman?

  This idea of the status bag even spread to a legacy American brand like Coach. Can you tell me who you spoke with at Coach?

• 23:25Speaker 00

  I spoke with the Mr. Lou Frankfurt.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  I had a real vision for what I thought Coach could be.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  He was a longtime CEO at Coach and essentially helped turn it into a $5 billion company by the turn of the century.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  And there were many ways I thought about growing the business.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  And he was like, Coach can be the American legacy heritage bag in the same way France has both Louis Vuitton and Hermes. And he basically copied their business models.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  It became clear to us that the real opportunity to grow our business was to introduce a distinctive, compelling, high-quality combination leather and fabric. And the fabric carried a visible moniker of the brand.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  It was paying attention to the Coach logo and being able to multiply that, oh, this is the middle-class aspirational luxury bag.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  We also began to attract an aspirational consumer, a consumer that's had to save to buy Coach, a consumer who wanted to carry a product where they would be able to convey their identity and who they were.

• 24:36Avery Trufelman?

  And this was, of course, the case for young Maya. A Coach bag was her first It Bag.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  In the 2000s. That was the most expensive bag I had ever seen.

• 24:45Avery Trufelman?

  It was an early lesson in status.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  My cute little Coach bag, this is how I win. Like, this is how I let everybody at school know that I am better than them.

• 24:53Avery Trufelman?

  And this was all a part of Coach's plan.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  We introduced the term accessible luxury before we went public in the year 2000. And we then had a decade where the business grew 10x. And we had, at one time, something like 40% dollar share in the United States of all bags purchased.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  See, this is the most fascinating thing about Coach to me. So I live in Bed-Stuy. And on my way here, I take the A train, my favorite train, because I think you see the perfect amount of people, especially coming all the way up here. I saw five different people wearing Coach bags that I could personally identify. Two that stood out to me is there was this woman that was sitting down, and on her lap, she had a leather Coach-printed backpack that looked army-style and had a printed camo on it. And at the same time, once we got to Penn Station, this man comes on, gorgeous, fragrant, smelled like oud, and was carrying a burnished leather cognac Coach briefcase.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  And this man was standing right next to this woman on the train. He smiled at her. And I thought to myself, I'm going to tell Lou this, because this is Coach.

• 26:05Avery Trufelman?

  And Maya noticed a key thing about Coach there, which is that Coach, notably, sells a lot of bags to men.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  At peak, the men's business was actually about 35% of the women's business.

• 26:19Avery Trufelman?

  Which is a pretty substantial percentage, considering that this industry, for so long, has been focused on women.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  A lot of men in my life actually carry really ugly tote bags or no bag.

• 26:31Avery Trufelman?

  Why do you think this is such a hang-up for men?

• 26:33Speaker 00

  I think it's because still to this day, there is a lot of femininity attached to the bag. It's almost proof that we haven't gotten away from the history of the handbag.

• 26:42Avery Trufelman?

  After the break, how the handbag became feminine, and Dylan continues to make a Birkin. Oh, here's my other.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, your whole hide. It's still in the shape of a butt.

• 26:54Avery Trufelman?

  After the break. If you are a small business owner, like I am, you don't just do the thing that you do. You are also the hiring manager, the payroll department, the benefits team, and the ombudsman all before lunch. You've got enough on your plate. Let Gusto handle everything else. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Gusto has automatic payroll filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp, 401K, you name it. It's all on Gusto, and it's super simple. I've worked on teams that use Gusto, and it's simply just where you go for everything.

• 27:38Avery Trufelman?

  It's quick and simple to switch to Gusto. Just transfer your existing data to get up and running fast, and you don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Try Gusto today at gusto.com articals and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com articals. One more time, gusto.com articals.

• 28:02Speaker 04

  It's so squeaky, it sounds like a couch. Do you want to be the first one to put a blade into your leather?

• 28:10Speaker 06

  No, I don't want you to.

• 28:12Avery Trufelman?

  Approaching leather is, quite fittingly in this case, like approaching a horse.

• 28:17Speaker 04

  It sends your fear.

• 28:20Avery Trufelman?

  Dylan says you have to move confidently. Leather is not like fabric. You can't fold it around itself. You can't really hide anything.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  Leather, you don't turn the edges like when you're sewing?

• 28:31Speaker 06

  Right, right. All the mistakes are out there.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:35Avery Trufelman?

  Again, Dylan is not a leather worker by trade. She is a braver, talented, more dedicated layperson than I am. She has truly figured out how to make a Birkin. But she is doing it all in her apartment.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  This is all just like cardboard pattern templates.

• 28:50Avery Trufelman?

  You got these from leathercraftpattern.com.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, real like bootleg Birkin shit.

• 28:55Avery Trufelman?

  We cut around these bootleg patterns in a very big, loose way, because when we flatten the leather, it's going to warp. So why are we soaking the parts of the bag in your sink?

• 29:06Speaker 04

  Because even after cutting it out, it still maintains a bit of the shape of the horse butt, so I need to form it totally flat.

• 29:15Avery Trufelman?

  So we soaked the leather pieces in water, and we pressed them flat, again, in a very non-professional way.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm going to throw a ton of art books on top.

• 29:23Speaker 06

  And that's it.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  This is just going to sit overnight, and then by tomorrow, it'll be ready, and I can start cutting out the actual pieces of your bag.

• 29:31Avery Trufelman?

  Aside from it being a bootleg Birkin and all, I am just so excited to have a bag like this. A big, sturdy, tough bag that I can lug around everywhere. Because I find I have grown dependent on having a big bag. I like to carry my phone charger, a book or two, an umbrella, sunglasses, sunscreen, a little kit of makeup, and I need to leave space for all the daily things life could throw at me.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  You never know what you're going to acquire during the day.

• 29:59Avery Trufelman?

  Maya's the same way.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Perhaps Chad is outside on Eldred Street selling a whole bunch of t-shirts. Maybe you get one of those. Maybe you have to get a little snack and put it in your bag to eat for later. Maybe you're dehydrated and you need some water.

• 30:11Avery Trufelman?

  Sure, I could probably just get by with my keys and my phone, but out and about all day, the bag is the toolkit.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. And in a way, that's kind of how it's always been.

• 30:23Avery Trufelman?

  But it is seen as the purview of women.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  That was something that Kathleen really pointed out to me.

• 30:29Speaker 05

  Everybody wants to have tools and resources with them as they go throughout the day. So I was interested in both how they became feminized, how they became the equipment of women exclusively, and thinking about how they've also been sexualized over history, too.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Kathleen B. Casey is a fashion historian, and she recently wrote a book, The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse in America.

• 30:52Speaker 05

  Early, early 1900s, you do actually see advertisements for men's purses. Now, they don't necessarily have straps, and they're not large, but the language changes so that the word purse does not get associated with men at all. And then what I discovered when looking at the 1920s, the 1930s, and even into the 40s, is that there was tons of advertising for purse-sized products. And so many of them were directly geared towards women and how Women could better discipline or manage their bodies.

• 31:27Avery Trufelman?

  As women start to leave the home to have more public lives, the purse became a way to maintain themselves in the way they were expected to appear.

• 31:37Speaker 05

  Purses start to come built in with mirrors. And you start to see way more advertising for makeup, purse-sized perfume bottles, of course, things like lipstick, so that they can reapply throughout the day.

• 31:51Avery Trufelman?

  Just keep looking great all the time while hiding all the effort that goes into it.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  It was, here are ways for you to keep being a lady mysterious.

• 31:58Avery Trufelman?

  But the mysterious lady thing that sealed the deal and really gendered purses were period products, when Kotex started selling sanitary napkins in the 1920s.

• 32:10Speaker 05

  Because they can't really show the product, at least in the 1920s. I felt like that would offend some people's sensibilities. So what they do is they show women with a bag smiling, or they show women talking about how they can fit a box of Kotex in their purse. And then when tampons come out with TamPacks in 1936, the same thing happens where a woman is like sliding a box of TamPacks into the sort of mouth of her purse.

• 32:36Avery Trufelman?

  You don't have to be Dr. Freud to see it.

• 32:38Speaker 05

  Purses really play a prominent role in advertising those products. They're connecting the purse with women's bodies.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  And it reminded me of this thing that Kathleen said where she was like, do you have any older black women in your family that call their vagina a pocketbook? And I was like, yes.

• 32:55Avery Trufelman?

  So your grandma would use it as like vagina?

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. She would just say, your pocketbook, or your purse, or your coin purse. There is even a rapper, Mona Leo. There was a line where she was like, the only time my purse goes on the floor is when I smack this coin purse on the concrete. I'm slamming this coin purse on the concrete. As in referring to, black women typically do not like to put our purse on the floor. It is always on a surface. And then slapping it on the concrete is when you hit a split and you are bouncing in the split and your vagina makes contact with the ground. So it's pervasive. And I, making that connection from everything she was saying about menstrual products in their earliest form and advertisements for women to be able to conceal their womanhood, and then the social usage of it for both of us as black women.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  I was like, this adds an entirely different layer to the femininity of the handbag.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  And by the time we get to the 40s, there's just really no discussion of men in purses and men in bags.

• 33:52Avery Trufelman?

  So the purse became the woman's purview for makeup and tampons, and soon, everything, even in fiction.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Hermione Granger in the books that shall not be named, her teeny tiny beaded bag contains multitudes. At one point, they even folded up their giant tent and would put it in the bag.

• 34:11Avery Trufelman?

  Of course, the famous example is Mary Poppins.

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Funny, I always carry it with me. It must be here somewhere.

• 34:17Avery Trufelman?

  Rifling around in her bag, pulling out a hat stand, a full mirror, a lamp, and a ficus.

• 34:23Speaker 05

  Never judge things by their appearance, even coffee bags.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Like, women have always been the holder of all of these things. Women are tasked with, if you have children, making sure that you have a Band-Aid, making sure that you have snacks, making sure that if anyone around you needs help, you have an item on your person that you can help them with. But also, you can't just carry that with like a big backpack or carrying armloads of things. You need a cute feminine accessory to let people know that you are doing both, as if those things shouldn't go together. And I think the ideas of women as caretakers and having all this responsibility, but how that responsibility must be hidden, that is what has led to the development of the bag in the ways that we see it today.

• 35:06Avery Trufelman?

  Although many women throughout history have subverted this and used their sweet, demure little purses to conceal all kinds of illicit or dangerous objects.

• 35:16Speaker 05

  And so women are also sometimes able to carry little snub-nosed pistols in their patent-loved purses and carry off this sort of like church lady look, but actually be ready to defend their lives unless it goes around them.

• 35:29Avery Trufelman?

  Even the it bags have acknowledged this. There's a devious little bag in Maya's collection, the Fendi Spy Bag.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  This little handle that weighs down the flap actually has a clasp here. You can put whatever you would like in here. And even though it was like a major bag that was advertised, hey, you can hide stuff in here, people at like clubs and things were not checking the little handle on your Fendi Spy Bag, being like, oh, I clocked that that's a Fendi Spy. Let me make sure there isn't an illicit substance in there, you know? You can have anything in your bag and no one has to know unless you want them to know.

• 36:05Avery Trufelman?

  Search your bag.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  People, people will search your bag. That's also what I think makes TSA so invasive.

• 36:11Speaker 05

  Just the idea that purses are these really private sort of cavernous spaces that you really need like permission and consent to enter.

• 36:20Avery Trufelman?

  Which is why I needed to buy a clasp and other various hardware for my bag, so that I could actually close it.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  We're at Pacific Trimming in the garment district.

• 36:30Avery Trufelman?

  And when we say trimmings, what does that mean?

• 36:33Speaker 04

  It's like little bits and bobs. I mean, like every kind of lace you can imagine, and then also a ton of hardware. It's mostly like zippers and ribbons and stuff here, but their hardware is nice.

• 36:45Avery Trufelman?

  Dylan guided me towards what we needed. We needed little feet for the bottom of the bag, clasps for the top of the bag, rings on the side to attach a strap.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  I'm worried if that will take the weight.

• 36:56Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, right, it's doing a job.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  It's, I mean, it's taking a lot of force.

• 37:00Avery Trufelman?

  All the trimmings were fairly affordable. None of them were made out of fancy materials. They were pretty sturdy metal alloys. And altogether, they sent me back about 50 bucks. Although, for the central clasp on the bag, I did buy a vintage silver belt buckle because I wanted something nice at the center of it. And that was about $66. So, so far, in raw materials alone, with the leather and the hardware, I had already spent $455. And it wasn't even a bag yet. It was just a pile of parts. So this is the front face?

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, that'll be this face of the bag everyone sees in the world.

• 37:34Avery Trufelman?

  Watching Dylan stitch this thing together was kind of profound. Sewing leather is wild, because with leather this thick, you can't just poke a needle through it. You have to punch in all the holes first before you stitch through them. And Dylan chiseled each row of stitches with a series of tiny, sharp forks. Oh my God, so the fork goes into it?

• 37:57Speaker 04

  I've got a big old rubberized nylon.

• 37:59Avery Trufelman?

  You really have to whack it?

• 38:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:01Avery Trufelman?

  And this gets logistically very tricky very quickly.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  I chiseled in the stitching holes, but didn't realize that I had done it from the interior face, which is then going to immediately have a lining put over it, which means that I will have to punch them out a second time and just pray they line up.

• 38:17Avery Trufelman?

  When the holes are all chiseled and they line up on both sides.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Finding the hole even from the other side can be its own challenge.

• 38:23Avery Trufelman?

  Then it's time to stitch.

• 38:25Speaker 04

  The stitching itself is like by far the most technically challenging side.

• 38:29Avery Trufelman?

  Dylan put a needle on each end of her thread, so it was double-headed. And then with both needles, she stitched through the holes. So you are stitching from both sides of the leather?

• 38:41Speaker 04

  At the same time into the same hole. This is saddle stitching. It's the way, like the really traditional leather stitching is done.

• 38:47Avery Trufelman?

  Honestly, just pushing each needle through was so hard.

• 38:51Speaker 04

  You can do it.

• 38:52Avery Trufelman?

  How did you do this?

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Just be brave.

• 38:54Avery Trufelman?

  Ow!

• 38:54Speaker 04

  If it's not going through easily, yeah, there you go. You got it.

• 38:57Avery Trufelman?

  How do you do this without a thimble?

• 38:58Speaker 04

  Um, force of will.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  You can do it.

• 39:04Avery Trufelman?

  No, you made it look...

• 39:07Speaker 04

  You got it.

• 39:07Avery Trufelman?

  So easy.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 39:08Avery Trufelman?

  And then, it was just a matter of time. Just hours and hours of sitting and stitching and puzzling through each individual shape, like the handles and the piping.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  Piping sucks. I think doing piping added a good 30 hours of work to the thing. Just little touches like that take like astonishing amount.

• 39:27Avery Trufelman?

  This is the true soul of a Birkin. It is someone else's time, patience, and skill.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  I get why they're so fucking expensive.

• 39:36Avery Trufelman?

  Do you think that price is worth it?

• 39:38Speaker 04

  I mean, worth it is a meaningless question. I'm not trying to shade you. I just, I just mean, like, I think people ask that question often colloquially about fashion to mean, is it a fair return for the quality of the materials? And of course not. And part of this is just like luxury marking up. But if you're asking like, is it a reasonable price as it regards the amount of labor that goes into it? I'd say it's probably not preposterous. I mean, it's obviously massively inflated by luxury or whatever.

• 40:09Avery Trufelman?

  As Dylan once said to me, I just think things should be worth more in general. And so, for her troubles, I decided to pay Dylan $20 an hour.

• 40:21Avery Trufelman?

  Oh my God, I've underpaid you.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  No, no, I'm happy to do it and it feels good to me. But there's a lot more that goes into a purse than you see. They're like really complicated to produce.

• 40:30Avery Trufelman?

  So at least with the Birkin, the rarity and the quality is not entirely manufactured.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  New ones are rare. That is true. They do not make a bazillion of them every year.

• 40:40Avery Trufelman?

  But Maya Kodamori says access to the Birkin is changing.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  They have become less rare, which is where their marketing strategy has failed because they actively created this very big barrier between us and the product. And they hoped that that would make us want it forever and ever. They weren't accounting for all of the various resale platforms for people to actually be selling their Birkins because they never thought that people would ever want to part with those bags. And they were mistaken because now there is an entire resale market for people like me who could technically, if I did it right, if I want to save up my money, I could do that. That is bad PR for the brand because it deletes all of this elitism that they've been trying to make with the Jane Birkin and oh, it's impossible to get whatever.

• 41:22Avery Trufelman?

  Do you think that the Birkin is here to stay? Do you think it'll stick around?

• 41:26Speaker 00

  No.

• 41:27Avery Trufelman?

  Really?

• 41:28Speaker 00

  I think that's what we're seeing right now is people are already parting with them because they're like, oh, this is something that other people want. Hmm, I don't really want mine anymore.

• 41:36Avery Trufelman?

  So is the it bag dying? What is the, what is the future in the current state of the it bag?

• 41:42Speaker 00

  The it bag is becoming meta. We're not just getting people creating new bags that become the it bag. We're getting people bring back it bags from 20 years ago.

• 41:51Speaker 06

  Brands are now, they're being really lazy by just reissuing things they know work rather than trying to come up with something new. I mean, it's like rerunning TV series on Netflix forever. Like, oh, we're bringing this back around again.

• 42:04Avery Trufelman?

  Again, Dana Thomas, author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster.

• 42:08Speaker 06

  Celine's doing that. They're reissuing one of their iconic bags from 10 years ago. It's like, you couldn't come up with anything new? So you're just going to try to jam this down our throats?

• 42:16Speaker 00

  We're in an era where we're just miming things from the past. That means that we're exhausted. That means that we don't, we don't need any more of that. Maybe we're just going to keep going with it until it collapses. But isn't that what the whole planet Earth is doing? And we aren't ready to say, stop this now.

• 42:32Speaker 06

  They're all a bit desperate. I think they've all run out of ideas of what to do. And so they're trotting out old designs. They're trotting out things they know that work. You know, grasping at different ways to keep selling and selling more and selling more because they have to keep making money to please their shareholders.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  We're reaching this point of exhaustion where you're not really being excited about a new it bag that isn't just a redux of something that already exists because we've run out of ideas.

• 42:58Avery Trufelman?

  Well, this is where Noor comes in.

• 43:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  We started with this idea of what does it even mean to have a bag or to make a bag?

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Noor Abbas is a designer. He has his own brand called Noor, which is spelled with a G and I think is fantastic.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  We're kind of deconstructing the idea of kind of what a bag is.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  The parcel system is kind of like Noor's antidote to all of this.

• 43:21Avery Trufelman?

  And so what was he trying to achieve with the parcel bag?

• 43:24Speaker 00

  He was not trying to make an it bag. He was trying to make something that was stackable, practical and beautiful from a design standpoint, rather than from an aspirational or luxury standpoint.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Thinking about all the different ways that if you approach it without, I mean, excuse the pun, but without any baggage of what a bag should be, like what do you get?

• 43:46Speaker 00

  It looks like a rubber shower caddy.

• 43:49Avery Trufelman?

  It does look like a rubber shower caddy.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  It looks like that sort of thing. It was this really heavyweight rubber. It felt like something that a plumber would use.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  You can hose it down, you can wash it. It's not something that's meant to be this kind of luxury item. It's, yeah, definitely more tool.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  There was a really big one, there's a medium one, and there is a teeny tiny small one that's like clutch size. The small ones can fit in, the medium ones can fit in, the big ones, or you can stack them neatly inside of your closet, just like Tetris or Legos.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  This is just a tool that is gender agnostic. I don't know, that's something we were kind of considering all the way through this. I think the, the bag market has traditionally been seen as more feminine, but that is all changing now. Anyway, you know, the rise in recent years of EDC, everyday carry.

• 44:38Avery Trufelman?

  EDC? What is, what is this?

• 44:40Speaker 00

  The inmens where the EDC is, the everyday carry is the boy version of what's in my bag. What's your everyday carry? And it's like they pull out a handbag.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Shall I go grab my bag now?

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah.

• 44:51Avery Trufelman?

  EDC purse, whatever. It's essential.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  I always need my notebook. Like I always need my water bottle. I've got some snacks, bandana and some cord and other cables and, I don't know. That's the thing. I feel like even just in the past week, I slept in already four different places and had been on the road and on aeroplanes. And it's like a space to put things.

• 45:20Avery Trufelman?

  A bag is a home away from home.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  So you've probably seen it already. Ursula Le Guin, the writer, she has a great essay about bags. The bags that were maybe even defining of, you know, what it was to be human.

• 45:35Avery Trufelman?

  Outside of the animal kingdom, bag is man's best friend. And as such, it can inspire something like love. This is like the coolest, coolest thing.

• 45:48Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm so happy you like it.

• 45:50Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, how could I not? It's amazing.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you.

• 45:54Avery Trufelman?

  Are you ready to do the final part?

• 45:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:56Avery Trufelman?

  With glue, I secured the final buckle in place. Now the few edges are being glued and I'm holding it together around the belt buckle. It took Dylan about an hour to saddle stitch it securely.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  You did it. It's done. That's your purse, baby.

• 46:12Avery Trufelman?

  I'm happy. You like it? I, I more than like it. I'm obsessed with it. Dylan did a tremendous job. This is a truly Birkin-y Birkin.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  The insane price tag on luxury leather goods makes both more and less sense to me now. Like there's some stuff that is an absolute marvel to me, how they do it. Other things, it's like, oh yeah, that's pretty easy and I did in my apartment.

• 46:37Avery Trufelman?

  It took Dylan about 100 hours to make this Birkin. So I have paid her $2,000. My bag costs $2,455 in total. It is by far the most expensive accessory I own. Here she is.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Gorgeous color.

• 46:55Avery Trufelman?

  And yet it is a bargain compared to an actual Birkin.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  That would probably be like 20 Gs retail.

• 47:03Avery Trufelman?

  But like all the best bags, it's not just that it is beautiful or expensive or practical. The best bags represent something larger than them. And that's what Maya likes about them.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  These bags are relics and emblems of what was trendy at that time, almost like the stocks and bonds of each era. It was something that defined that era and now it defines people who understand that history, that it defined that era.

• 47:31Avery Trufelman?

  And that is why Maya also has an obvious, intentionally fake Birkin.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Now Birkins are very it right now.

• 47:39Avery Trufelman?

  The fake Birkin is our it bag. This is the bag of the moment.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  And so when you have something that's like making a joke out of it, the fashion as status and bags as status. For me, as someone who is like, I don't know, self-titled fashion intellectual, that's fucking hilarious. Like that's a Richard Prince painting.

• 47:57Avery Trufelman?

  So you're saying my Birkin is better than the real thing?

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Your Birkin is infinitely better than the real thing. And it's important because you made it. And you also worked with someone who you admire that has a skillset that you don't have. So there, we win, Avery.

• 48:15Avery Trufelman?

  Thank you to Maya Kodamori for your reportage. Dylan Keoni for your hands-on experience. And thank you also to Marissa Meltzer, author of It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin. Thank you also to Michael Smith of the Pair of Kings podcast for first making the fake Birkin with Dylan. And thanks also to McCall Clip for helping to make my bag. And if you'd like to see what my fake Birkin looks like and all the process images along the way as Dylan made it, head to articlesofinterest.substack.com.