Bag Lady

We’re told stories of profitable ideas that were sketched on the back of a napkin. Well, they’ve got nothing on one sketched on the back of an air-sickness bag. The original Hermès bag made for Jane Birkin just sold at auction for 7 million euros. (Ironically, that’s a price so high the purchaser may experience some nausea.) “The bag was born of a fortuitous encounter on a London-bound flight in the 1980s with the then-head of Hermès, Jean-Louis Dumas. Birkin recounted in subsequent interviews that the pair got talking after she spilled some of her things on the cabin floor. Birkin asked Dumas why Hermès didn’t make a bigger handbag and sketched out on an airplane vomit bag the sort of hold-all that she would like. He then had an example made for her and, flattered, she agreed when Hermès asked whether it could commercialize the bag in her name.”