The Himalaya Birkin Bag by French luxury brand Hermès went under hammer at London’s Christie’s auction house for £ 230,000, converted € 254,500. And yet that is not yet a record for the rare handbag.
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The handbag in question, which is described as the holy grail for collectors, is made from the skin of the African Nile crocodile. She is hand-colored in a smoky gray, which gradually changes to white. It reminded the makers of the gradations in the snow-covered Himalayas, hence the name. Furthermore, the accessory is decorated with diamonds and eighteen carat white gold. The production process takes about forty hours.
It is not known who is the new owner of this copy worth a house.
“These handbags are very rare (Reportedly, only two are made each year, ed.). Our customers are international collectors. Most of them are women who want to show them off, while others prefer to just keep them or just take them out on special occasions, ”says Rachel Koffsky, head of handbags and accessories sales at Christie’s. The Daily Mail.
The average value of the handbag is estimated between 115,000 and 170,000 euros, but previous auctions have already shown that the Himalaya model often yields more. A copy was sold in Hong Kong in 2017 during a five-day auction to an anonymous Asian collector for a record amount of 338,000 euros, becoming the most expensive second-hand handbag in the world.
The Birkin handbag is named after actress and singer Jane Birkin. In 1984 she was on a flight from Paris to London alongside Hermès figurehead Jean-Louis Dumas. He dedicated a bag to her and the design has been extremely popular ever since. Investing in the handbag is a good plan, according to a 2017 study by the luxury online retail platform Baghunter. After all, this showed that the value of Birkin bags has increased by 500 percent in the past 35 years.
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