The Walmart Birkin

Okay, here is the fashion opinion nobody would ever come to this blog for.

So I've never earned any money to speak of, despite working my butt off since I was 17.  I've never spent one second even thinking about owning a Birkin before.  But I am aware that it's a whole thing, and some people are outraged that you can't just walk into an Hermes store and buy one.  

At 2:06 in the above-linked video, there's a young lady who has found a knockoff Birkin at a brick and mortar Walmart.  They were available for a few days for under $100, until everyone lost their minds and bought them like locusts.  At this point you can't even order one on the Walmart app anymore, which all of the handbag bloggers had been sharing how to do.  Hermes has put its foot down.  You can still buy pre-owned Hermes bags on the Walmart app for many thousands, if you're insane.  Those will almost certainly be fakes, and you won't be able to tell.

And I have to say, Hermes didn't put its foot down when every Tom, Dick, and Harry came out with a bag that looks almost exactly like the Birkin.  Because they all did.  It really is a great bag.  But that's why there are so many other places you can get one that looks almost exactly like that, at very high quality and much lower price point.  So I wish everyone would just stop being silly.  Buy a really nice leather bag from them for a few hundred instead.

I have very mixed feelings about this.  I would feel differently about it had it been any other design house.

But as I understand it, Hermes has no marketing department.  They don't advertise.  They aren't looking for you as a customer, lady with crazy colored hair and caterpillar eyelashes, standing in a Walmart.  Not trying to be mean or to judge.  But Hermes is a very old business, a saddle maker, who bench makes bespoke bags for people who can routinely afford such things without asking the price.  They're not trying to have ladies at Walmart twist themselves into financial pretzels to get a Birkin.  They really aren't.

Back in the early 1970s, my mom met a woman, let's call her Honey.  They both played the piano.  And my mom glommed onto rich people every chance she got.

Honey's husband, Hal, was a stockbroker.  He would go everywhere in a chauffeur driven limousine.  He would show up sometimes at my school and pick me up in his limo.  And because it was the '70s, they would allow that.  The nuns would be like, sure, no problem, she can get into that random limousine instead of walking home and being unsupervised like usual.  Hal would take me out to a steak house where everybody knew him.

When they bought an apartment in Water Tower Place, they actually bought two apartments and combined them.   And I remember them discussing in passing that  it was upstairs from her favorite store: Hermes.  I believe she was showing my mother the scarf he had bought there for her that day, because her husband was super adorable like that.

When I said (age 11 or 12), "Oh, Hermes?" and pronounced it to rhyme with "herpes," because I had only ridden past there on the bus and of course wouldn't dream of trying to walk inside there, Honey was super nice about not laughing out loud.  She actually kicked Hal so he wouldn't riff on me too hard.  Because he was the biggest goofball of all.

So when I hear people being butthurt about how they can't get an appointment to try and buy this Birkin, it just seems kind of weird to me.  Like chasing after a guy who isn't interested in you.

Because I promise you Hal could've bought anything in the store.  He didn't need an appointment. He may have had to wait for certain things sometimes, because that's the kind of merchandise they produce at Hermes.  It's not a crap factory -- like a lot of the "luxury" houses really are nowadays.

Hal was their customer, the exact person they were in business for.  Every time he walked in there, I promise you they knew exactly how he took his coffee, and they fixed him one and had it ready.  They loved him.  Because his wife loved that place.  And so he'd pass by there whenever he had a chance.  And he didn't have to ask the price of anything.  He DGAF.  It was all a big lark to him.  Hal was their customer, the exact sort of person they were in business for.  His wife was exactly who they wanted to see their scarves on.  Stepping out of that limo in that camel cashmere trenchcoat.  They don't want to see their bag being worn with those nails at Walmart.  Just my guess, from having gone past Hermes a million times and looked in their tiny little display window each time.  The lady in the linked video doesn't have the Hermes vibe that I remember from their Chicago store.

So for me, I feel like these Walmart Birkin people should really continue to just buy fake Louis Vuitton and Chanel from Canal Street or the internet, really.  Those people often have equal of better quality, in terms of craftsmanship, than the real deal.  I was looking at bags from some of the biggest names, from their official websites, recently.  And some of the things I saw convinced me to never buy anything from them -- as if I could.  But the quality of the beading and embroidery and particular was deal-breaking.  You can get exact knockoffs that will look very close to the real deal, last a long time, for only a few hundred bucks.

If I had a few thousand dollars to spend on a bag, instead of an ultraluxury whatever, I'd get this, maybe. 

But why be silly and buy a plastic Birkin from Walmart?  If you love that bag, why not buy this?  Or this one, which almost looks exactly like a Birkin? Just save up and buy any one of a number of lovely, structured, well-made, leather bags that are very similar and will last a long time.  Don't buy fake plastic crap.  Spend like $500 and buy a high quality Birkin dupe or replica.  Teddy Blake will hook you up.

Don't be mad at Hermes.  They have been in business for a really long time.  They have always had a very small, very spendy clientele.  They're not the ones out here trying to bankrupt the brokes.  They didn't ask for this.  There are some very fugazi designers out there who totally deserve to get Walmarted.  It isn't Hermes.