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By Rachel Tashjian
On a recent and pleasant afternoon, professional sports gambler Dave Oancea, better known as Vegas Dave, discovered a brief window on his “super-charged” agenda to the appeal of the Herms Birkin bag.
“I mean, which one?” Asked. “The $500, 000 or the $100,000?
Oancea, who owns a total of six Birkins, referring to a video he posted on YouTube in 2019 in which he entered the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas and paid a record share of a million dollars for an air-mays, as Oancea pronounces it: Himalayan Birkin bag with 18-karat white gold curtains and more than two hundred diamonds. Array widely regarded Birkin’s acolytes as the rarest in the world. There’s only one other bag like this in the world, and it belongs to Steve Harvey’s wife. In the video of her purchase, Oancea, dressed in a Louis Vuitton vest in white embossed leather, almost moves her tongue as she wonders if Kim Kardashian will “listen”.
But I speak more generally. For a guy like Dave, I wondered what the appeal of a handbag has been the most elusive object of the women’s customer culture for over thirty years.
He was quick to respond. “For me, wealth and prestige. Success. A lot of people laugh at me, however, you know, the bag is worth more than their house,” he said. “I use them for the brand, so that other people can communicate with me.” Organize a bikini contest with a Birkin as a grand prize and pose in your seats in The Lakers’ ground games with a variety of bags proudly displayed at your feet. “I do it to invest, but I also do, [with] $100,000, for daily activities,” he says. Besides, they’re functional: “I put my laptop, my wallet, everything in it.”
Do you find it strange that I carry a woman’s purse? I don’t care what they say about me, because everyone talks anyway, Oancea says. “All I know is that it’s great and it costs $100, 000.”
P.J. Tucker dressed with a High BeltEd Bulbes, also known as the largest Birkin of all.
Oancea is just the tip of the diamond-splattered iceberg when it comes to men who find the Birkin. Virgil Abloh has been dressed with Birkins since before he was “VIRGIL”: he owns more than a dozen and lists them on Instagram. Abloh even created a traditional Birkin for Off-White in 2015 (with a welcome nod to Raf Simons). A Sky Blue Birkin is a common accessory in the Houston Rocket P.J. Tucker tunnel settings. Young Thug raped about scoring one for himself in “Homie” in 2017; Gunna’s 2019 single, Baby Birkin, celebrated her goal of buying Birkins for her long-term daughter, with the accompanying video featuring a variety of rainbow bags. Drake has been collecting Birkins for his wife for years, though one wonders if he collects them for himself: a recent Article by Architectural Digest has shown them in his space as world-class works of art. One way or another, the most prominent women’s purse has become an object of cult of men’s fashion: the Grail par excellence. What began as the ultimate discrete symbol of fashion wealth is now the universal maxim.
The hypebeasts are entering their heritage logo and Birkin’s loving men are leading the way.
The canvas is interspersed with stories about how to pass a Birkin through Hermes that are read as breathless summaries of mating rituals adorned with rare birds, in which you never know when good fortune can come. This is due to a smart reason: retail outlets can only have one or two at a time, are never exposed, and there are an estimated 200,000 in circulation worldwide. While it Bag’s popular concept peaked in the early 21st century, a 2017 study reported that Birkin’s price had increased by 500% since its launch.
Of course, all those points have only made the bags warmer, especially, and unsurprisingly, for men.
StockX, the self-proclaimed “object market” where menswear enthusiasts look for the world’s rarest sneakers, introduced a vertical bag in 2017, with Birkins as its logo offering. “I think Birkin has gained greater cultural relevance over the course of the year, and now more and more men recognize the outdoor bag of ultra-exclusive luxury fashion circles,” says Rachel Makar, the site’s luxury director. In addition to her growing prestige in men’s fashion, they also transcended her cult prestige in popular culture: Quavo made headlines in early July when she bought her friend Saweetie dos Birkins for her 26th birthday; Cardi B and Offset raised their eyebrows when they bought their two-year-old daughter, Kulture, in Birkin in July.
Makar says StockX doesn’t track consumers by gender, anecdotally saying the main visitor is a woman. However, “given the replacement in the macro trend and what we know about the typical consumer of sneakers, it is no exaggeration to think that there are an increasing number of consumers of male handbags on the platform, adding up those looking for a Birkin.”
It also highlights the growing number of male celebrities carrying handbags. “We’re seeing more and more baseball players, celebrities and artists (especially in the music field) dressed with Birkins or talking about Birkins,” he says. “It has the ultimate symbol of luxury and wealth.”
Rhude designer Rhuigi Villaseor is a proud birkin fan. Villaseor’s affection for the Birkin is so natural that his latest bag, the Jacq, is a direct homage to him, with his iconic triangle trimmed at the back and his braided shoulder bag. Although she originally designed the Jacq as the launching pad for her first women’s clothing collection, she postponed the line and published the bag as a gender-neutral offering. It occupies a prominent place in its men’s spring 2021 collection. “I sought to create anything that could just live and breathe in the space itself,” Villaseor says, “but also to have a nostalgia baked by some people.
These other people perceive themselves: Villaseor has 3 Birkins in its own collection, adding a black canvas bag with leather embellishments, vintage brown leather and blue jeans leather.
Drake’s Closet – Birkins on the left – at his home in Toronto
In StockX, Makar says, the average value of a Birkin is $10,300, with no songs or dances. In fact, many menswear buyers, such as Villaseor, use a merchant, many of whom paint Instagram or WhatsApp to make sales. Oancea discovered her Himalayan Instagram, but if not, “I have distributors,” she says. “They don’t like me telling them who they are because they asked me to keep confidential.”
Also, Oancea says, if you work with distributors, you can locate some unusual things. When she takes her purse to a Hermes store, she says, “They’ve never noticed the bags I have, they’re worth a million dollars. I took one once and all the staff in their pants in Beverly Hills.
Jacq bag inspired by Rhude Birkin, with bandana and olive green print.
Prior to its role as the progression of the luxury base for men, Birkin’s family maxim was a type of shield used through various villains within the Royal Housewives empire; this would possibly be some kind of blow. In Abloh’s dressing room, or in the palms of Villaseor, or even comfortably sitting at Oancea’s feet at Staples Center, the bag looks more like a briefcase, returning it to its sexy beginnings as a secret weapon for male fashion obsessives. (In fact, Makar says the smaller Birkins, 25 centimetres wide, are now the maximum coveted length among female buyers.)
While the Birkin type has a lot to do with exaggerated products, it differs in a significant way: it gets used to it. A rare sneaker or a special ideal grail is considered too valuable to sweat or wrinkle, but very young birkiner men actually use their bags. Vegas Dave is not afraid to walk around his Himalayas, which is made of incredibly uncommon albino crocodile skin and painstakingly dyed to mimic the snow-capped peaks of this Asian mountain range. Abloh used the bags almost exclusively in the days of the street before Vuitton, and Villaseor also uses her own, although she says her friend rarely borrows them.
Although Oancea appreciates the ability of the bags, at the end of the day he’s still Vegas Dave, a gambler. “They’ve gone up 15%, so I’ll hide them for 10 years and sell them later,” he says. “Now I sell my baseball cards. I’ve just been on the news: about to break the baseball card record with a $4 million baseball card that I paid $400,000 two years ago. And he adds, “I’m just making other investments.”
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