My final undoing was a powerful talismanic object with nearly magical and certainly mesmerizing powers—an Hermès Birkin bag.
The first time I really noticed it happening, I was headed back home after a quick trip to the corner market. Swinging a plastic bag of bananas and a carton of milk by my side as I made my way from Madison toward Park on East Seventy-Ninth Street, I felt expansive and happy. The sun was out and the wide sidewalk was remarkably uncrowded. It was a lull period—morning rush hour over, not yet lunchtime—and there was hardly anyone out and about in our normally bustling neighborhood. For a Midwesterner accustomed to space and quiet, it felt, momentarily, a little bit like home—only with elegant prewar buildings and doormen in upbeat moods saying hello as you walked by. My son was in a good school. He had school chums, a social life, if you will, and so, by extension, did I. Sure, I wished the moms were a little friendlier, and I still felt distinctly on the outside most of the time when I dropped my son off and picked him up. But I was a good-enough mother of one, with another on the way. I was finally finding my way and my place on the Upper East Side, it seemed, and on this day I was pleased.
Half a block ahead I saw a solitary, well-dressed woman striding purposefully toward me. We walk briskly in Manhattan, and in no time she (perhaps in her midfifties) and I (late thirties) were closing the space between us. In keeping with Manhattan sidewalk etiquette—more like a traffic law, really—I did as cars and New Yorkers do and kept to the right. So why was this well-dressed, well-coiffed woman drifting to her left, directly into my path, with every step? Were we in England?
I adjusted to the right again, and yet again, to give her even more room as she continued her course toward me. If I kept moving to the right as she was quite clearly forcing me to do by bearing down on me in this way, I realized, I would walk directly into the big orange metal trash can now several steps in front of me. This was ridiculous, I thought, surveying the entire wide, empty sidewalk and slowing down. Just before the trash can, I came to an abrupt halt (what choice did I have? Dart in front of her to the other side of the sidewalk entirely?) and looked at her, for she was a mere six inches away from me now, in spite of the vast expanse to her right. She caught my eye and held my gaze while she deliberately and not at all gently grazed my left arm with her magnificent bag. Then she smirked—she actually smirked!—and continued her purposeful brush past me. I turned around to watch her back recede down the sidewalk, breathless with surprise that she had done what she had done. Whatever it was. What was it?
I had been charged. At least that is how it felt to the anthropologist in me, who in my undergraduate days had watched hours of documentary footage of chimps coming toward one another with aggressive bearing and intent—arms swinging, teeth displayed, emitting screeches and guttural vocalizations. Unpacking my groceries, I played back the encounter in my mind, feeling uneasy, irritated even. What the hell was going on? I realized, now that I thought it through, that this kind of thing had happened before—a woman taking the measure of me and then crowding me—but never quite as explicitly. It was time to start paying attention, really paying attention, to Upper East Side primate social behaviors.
Sure enough, I began to notice similar encounters unfolding all around me. In uptown crosswalks and upscale boutiques and the waiting room of a famous cosmetic dermatologist, I perceived that, subtly and not so subtly, women dressed to the nines not only took the measure of but also “charged” other women. Not infrequently, one of those other women was me. Sometimes, in these encounters, I actually had to step aside toward the curb or flatten myself against the wall of a building to allow a woman to stride by me, so adamant was she in her refusal to budge or swerve a fraction of an inch from her course, a course that had been altered as if to tell me . . . something. What, I wondered, did the woman who charged want the woman she was charging to do?
My previous territory, the West Village, was mere miles away, but another country, apparently, when it came to uniforms, customs, and warfare between women. Sure, I recalled now, once in a while down there you would encounter a blank-faced, freakishly tall supermodel striding down the narrow, buckling strip of concrete that ran alongside Bleecker Street as if it were her own personal catwalk. But that was just a professional narcissist doing what she did. Stepping out to run a quick errand on the Upper East Side, on the other hand, you could find yourself embroiled, unwittingly, in a remarkably antagonistic and neatly gendered game of chicken, in which one apparently high-functioning, well-dressed and otherwise-normal-seeming woman asked another, Who’s going to move first?
After a few weeks of watching and walking about while tuned in to the charging phenomenon, the female pedestrian in me was thoroughly inside the experience, constantly alert and ready to joust when out for a walk or en route from one place to another. But my inner social researcher wanted more data. And so, early one morning, having dropped my son off at school, I bought a coffee and parked myself in front of a doorman building in my neighborhood, and I watched. The next day and the next and the next I stood outside a store, and then near an intersection with real foot traffic. A few times I actually made observations inside buildings frequented by women, or rather the entrances to them, since entering and exiting seemed to be highly fraught and contentious moments when charging was likely to happen—high-end retail shops, a restaurant known to be the native habitat of a cross section (age-wise) of ladies who lunch, and a few lobbies.
Eventually, I observed nearly a hundred of the type of encounter I had that day on East Seventy-Ninth Street. My research was informal, of course, but I did come to some conclusions. Chief among them: women on the Upper East Side, particularly women in their thirties and women on the downhill slope of middle age, are utterly attuned to and obsessed with power. In many but not all of the encounters I observed, it was an older woman who “charged” a younger one, moving toward her until a kind of social crisis point was reached, when actual impact was avoided—often at the last second—as the younger woman quickly moved aside. The actors in these scenarios then unfailingly continued as if unaware of the (non-)exchange that had taken place between them. It was as if both players were complicit in some deep sense, agreeing to agree that what had just happened hadn’t.
Over and over, I watched encounters unfold, until an explanation began to take shape about women and their bids to assert their dominance over other women. It was their right, they said as they charged, to expand their space by forcing others to give it up. Their message, when I had observed enough of these encounters, was pretty clear. It was not simply “Get out of my way” but something more pointed: “I don’t see you. Because you don’t even exist.” Their handbags—heart-stoppingly beautiful and expensive-looking affairs slung across or hanging from their shoulders or dangling from their hands, quilted and dyed, snakeskin and lambskin and ostrich, with interlocking Cs or Fs or intricate buckles and locks—apparently had a lot to do with it. They were armor, weapons, flags, and more, it seemed: everyone who charged someone seemed to have a fantastic bag, and to revel in brushing her opponent with it. This was the coup de grace.
The late Nora Ephron wrote that people in LA have cars, and we in Manhattan have our handbags, and these encounters between women brought new meaning to this analogy for me. If handbags are our cars, as Ephron suggests—at once functional and utterly symbolic, our attempt to get ourselves and our stuff from point A to point B and also to be seen as we hope to be seen as we traverse the town—then, it seemed to me, all along the uptown avenues of affluence there was plenty of road rage. With nothing but a plastic bag from the grocery store on my arm, I had been asking for it.
I thought, too, of the dominance displays of Mike, a chimp in Jane Goodall’s Gombe troop. Mike is legendary among primatologists and students of anthropology for having shown the kind of remarkable resourcefulness that can reorder the world, or at least upend an entire, well-established social hierarchy. Small and low ranking, Mike was a relatively new transfer to the troop
when Goodall arrived in 1960; she observed that he often took a beating, literally, from the older and bigger chimps of Gombe. His life was that of a miserable, stepped-on outsider, an ostracized newcomer to the party.
And then, Mike got himself a beautiful purse.
Actually, he discovered a couple of empty, discarded, lightweight metal kerosene canisters with handles. And brilliantly, he realized he could incorporate these props into his dominance displays—choreographed performances in which male chimps seek to intimidate and impress the chimps they live with, without actually harming them. Usually in a dominance display chimps chase or body check one another, further making their point by shaking branches, slapping the ground, and throwing rocks, all the while issuing loud pant-hoot calls and excited screams.
Primatologists and wildlife photographers have frequently been on the receiving end of such dominance displays and report that they are startling, even terrifying. So imagine the surprise of the Gombe troop members when Mike came running at them dragging big, noisy unfamiliar things by their handles, banging them and swinging them through the grass like scepters. And then further enhanced his display by standing tall in the middle of the group and crashing the mysterious objects together, making an unholy, previously unheard-of racket that seemed to say, Now I own you! This groundbreaking social spectacle sent even Goliath, the reigning alpha male, into a cowering panic. The researchers of Gombe quickly removed the canisters, to little effect. The other chimps remained in utter awe of Mike, who rapidly dethroned Goliath in spite of his high-ranking supporter, the former alpha male David Greybeard, to become alpha chimp himself. For five entire years. Such was the powerful half life of a great handbag.
I could not change or beat them, and no, I certainly could not and did not want to join these Mean Girl Moms west of Lex. Or maybe I did and could, kind of. What I needed was a kerosene canister of my own. Yes, something about these arrogant women, who pushed and crowded me as though I didn’t exist, let alone matter, made me want a beautiful, expensive bag. Like a totem object, I believed, it might protect me from them, these ladies who were everywhere in my adopted habitat and who said so much without a word, using only their eyes and their faces and, always, their handbags. Perhaps, I thought, a nice purse like the ones they had might trick them, mesmerize them into believing that they oughtn’t challenge me to sidewalk duels and all the rest. That it would be worth it to say hello, when we saw one another at a party or in the school halls or at a restaurant, without giving me a disdainful once-over. Plus, I reasoned, it might annoy them. With a gorgeous bag, I thought, I would not just have a sword and a shield. I would have something that they did not have, or something that they wanted, or something that they did have and didn’t want anyone else to have. I imagined the Queen of the Queen Bees trying to brush by me and getting stuck in her gut with my boxy Birkin. Really, you couldn’t put a price on that.
I had caught my first glimpse of an Hermès Birkin bag in Paris, in the late eighties. The bag the woman in jeans and a little tailleur was clutching was Perfect. It was red: not a predictable scarlet, not some insipid pinkish red. It was an insouciant, self-confidently uncommon brick red, the lipstick color you had been looking for for years and never found, the platonic ideal that drove you to buy tube after tube of not-right reds in pursuit of The One. The shape, too, was just right—just off the visual map of things you were used to, provocative in its subtle difference from a purse or a messenger bag. There were file folders in there, barely peeking out, suggesting a life of work and beauty. I actually followed the woman for a few blocks through the Eighth (of course it was the Eighth, the arrondissement of all things starchily, sexily French), stalking her handbag, trying to figure out what it was.
Later, I breathlessly sketched it for a friend of mine who squealed when I gave her the key/lock detail and said, “Oh, you mean a Birkin! An Hermès Birkin bag! Of course, everyone wants one!” She went on to extol the bag’s beauty and rhapsodize over the casual yet reverent ways Frenchwomen carried their Birkins, often with their worn Guide Rouge inside, or a baguette poking out. It was so . . . French. And so expensive, she explained. I sighed, feeling pained and jet-lagged as I translated the francs into dollars, sure at first that I must have made a mistake. I was a graduate student at the time, and given my budget, wanting a Birkin was about as reasonable as wanting to be the president of France.
The Hermès Birkin bag is storied, and the story of its origins is, like the clochette that dangles from it, inextricable from its aura, its Birkin-ness, its irresistible appeal. Legend goes that in 1981, free-spirited English actress and singer Jane Birkin—she of the decades-long romantic and artistic collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg—was boarding a plane with a straw weekend bag whose contents scattered to the floor as she tried to load it into the overhead compartment. Like a rarefied knight in shining armor, Jean-Louis Dumas, then chief executive of the world’s preeminent and most exclusive leather maker, Hermès, was there to help her pick up the pieces. Thanking him, Birkin explained that she simply didn’t have a bag that did the trick for her jaunts between London and Paris, and that, so the story goes, got him thinking. And, apparently, designing.
In 1984, Hermès first offered a black leather tote of remarkable craftsmanship, refinement, and tact that somehow managed to hit a few pitch-perfect bohemian notes as well. A scaled-down version of a bag Hermès originally created to hold horse saddles a hundred years before, it had history, two handles, and a top you could choose to leave folded back and open or buckle closed. Sure, you could hook it over your arm, but you could also just swing it in your hand. Or sling it over your shoulder—the handles (two make it feel somewhat young and free-spirited, more like a cool socialite with a career than those one-handled lady-bags-who-lunch) were just about that long. It was something between a pocketbook and a weekender in its size and its look and its very essence, chicly functional. It was the opposite of the Kelly, that other iconic bag designed by the house of Hermès specifically for Princess Grace to help hide her pregnancy. The Kelly bag is all propriety, all matronly, blushing correctness. The Birkin, in contrast, makes no excuses for being pregnant before she is married. She is the Kelly’s younger, wilder, more fun sister.
That doesn’t make her cheap or easy—mais non! From the very beginning, the Birkin was made in extremely limited quantities—only 2,500 per year. This is at least in part because making a Birkin is so labor-intensive, requiring close to fifty hours of attentive, detailed, and exacting work from start to finish. Birkins are made almost entirely by hand, by workers who must apprentice with Hermès’s senior leather craftsmen for at least two years to qualify for the job. Birkins are works of art in this sense, and to shore up that notion, each Birkin is made by a single artisan who “signs” and dates his creation with a special stamp denoting the year and his initials. The Birkin’s proportions are strict—whether the Birkin is of the 25-, 30-, 35-, 40-, or grandiose 55-cm variety, the ratio of length to width to height is precise, its silhouette unmistakable and beyond reproach. Only the French could marry the Enlightenment and the sexual revolution as Hermès managed to in the Birkin. It is the modern little black dress of handbags.
Today, you can get a Birkin in Blue Jean (no, it is not the color of dark denim or any denim for that matter, but a whimsical, summer-perfect summer-sky shade). Or gold. This is a “beginner’s Birkin” according to those who have several, and it is not gold at all but a tawny caramel with white contrast stitching that invokes candy and makes your mouth water. There are dozens of other colors, each so vivid and unexpected that they all make even the uninitiated pine. (“What color is that?!” a friend who is an artist demanded of the startled owner of a fuchsia ostrich Birkin on a gray winter day. “I have never seen a pink like that before, ever!”) The starting cost for a basic model—made of calf’s leather rather than crocodile or ostrich skin, with gold or platinum-colored palladium hardware versus a diamond-encrusted placket and lock—is $8,000. There is a dizzying array of leat
hers to choose from: Togo is calf’s leather, Clémence (the heaviest) is from a baby bull (taurillon clémence). There are Birkins made from lambskin and goatskin, too. An exotic skin—lizard or crocodile or ostrich—or custom model can set you back $150,000 or more. The waiting list, supplicants are often told, is two to three years long. In Hong Kong and Singapore, where Birkinmania has reached an all-time fever pitch owing to the sizzling economy, upscale black-market vendors do a brisk business selling brand-new, certified authentic Birkins recently purchased from Hermès. For the privilege of circumventing those four-year wait lists, there is sometimes a markup of 50 to 100 percent. “HERMÈS PARIS MADE IN FRANCE” is stamped in three perfectly spaced lines of silver or gold above the lock of every Birkin.
Men could have their sports cars, their affairs, their fifteen-thousand-bottle wine cellars, or whatever else their midlife Binkies and blankies and psychic boo-boo fixers might be. But the Birkin—the leather and the hardware and the contrast stitching and the myriad details that make it a Birkin and make it desirable, including and perhaps especially the virtual impossibility of getting it—would be mine. For all that I had lost and stood to lose still (we lose these things more slowly in Manhattan, committed as we are to looking like we’re in our twenties or thirties until we’re in our fifties, but we do still lose them)—taut thighs, unwrinkled skin, fertility, the ability to experience excitement about the latest issue of Vogue—I would have that boxy, structured, expensive, playful, sexy, functional bag. I was done, I decided, with bridge-line tote bags and compromise formation bags like the Marc by Marc Jacobs numbers that I had noticed of late that the twentysomethings and even teen girls on the Upper East Side toted around. I was getting on, and I wanted the real thing, and I felt that I was finally, somehow, entitled to it. I was middle-aged, it was true, a reality that made me choke whenever it occurred to me. But I was still young enough, still beautiful enough and blond enough and thin enough that a Birkin and I could shine together. I was also old enough to afford it, and perhaps connected enough, after this much time in Manhattan, to get it. This age, my age, was obviously the sweet spot of Birkin acquisition, and the Birkin was now somehow both my consolation prize and my right.
Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir Page 8
