Drake Isn't the Only Man Who Loves Birkins

On a recent balmy afternoon, the professional sports bettor Dave Oancea, better known as Vegas Dave, found a brief window in his “super busy” schedule to ponder the allure of the Hermès Birkin bag.

“I mean, which one?” he asked. “The $500,000 one, or the $100,000 ones?”

Oancea, who owns a total of six Birkins, was referring to a video he posted to YouTube in 2019 in which he entered Las Vegas’ Trump International Hotel and paid a record half a million dollars for an Hermès—“air-mays,” as Oancea pronounces it—Himalaya Birkin bag with 18-karat white gold hardware and over 200 diamonds, widely considered by Birkin acolytes the rarest in the world. There is just one other such bag in the world, and it is owned by Steve Harvey’s wife. In the video of his purchase, Oancea, clad in a white leather embossed Louis Vuitton vest, practically wags his tongue as he asks whether Kim Kardashian “will hear about this.”

But I was speaking more generally. For a man like Dave, I wondered, what’s the appeal of a handbag that’s been the most elusive object in female consumer culture over the past thirty-something years?

He was quick to answer. “To me, wealth and prestige. Success. A lot of people laugh at me, but, you know, the bag’s worth more than their house,” he said. “I use them for branding, to get people to talk about me.” He’s run a bikini contest with a Birkin as the grand prize, and poses in his floor seats at Lakers games with a selection of the bags proudly displayed at his feet. “I do it for investment, but I also do it, [with] the $100,000 ones, for everyday activity,” he says. Plus, they’re functional: “I put my laptop in it, my wallet, everything in it.”

Is it weird to him that he’s carrying a women’s purse? “I don’t really care what anyone says about me, because everyone talks shit anyways,” Oancea says. “I just know that it’s dope, and it’s $100,000.”

Oancea is just the tip of the diamond-studded iceberg when it comes to men discovering the Birkin. Virgil Abloh has been carrying Birkins since before he was “VIRGIL”: he owns more than a dozen, and regularly includes them in Instagram tableaux. Abloh even created a custom Birkin for Off-White in 2015 (with a generous nod to Raf Simons). A sky-blue Birkin is a frequent accessory in Houston Rocket P.J. Tucker’s tunnel fits. Young Thug rapped about scoring one for himself in 2017’s “Homie”; Gunna’s 2019 single “Baby Birkin,” meanwhile, celebrated his intention to buy Birkins for his future daughter, with the accompanying video featuring a rainbow array of the bags. Drake has famously been collecting Birkins for his future wife for years—though one wonders whether he might actually be collecting them for himself: a recent Architectural Digest feature showed them displayed in his house like blue-chip art. Somehow, the most famous women’s handbag has turned into a cult menswear object—the quintessential grail. What began as fashion’s most understated symbol of wealth is now its most universal.

The hypebeasts are entering their heritage brand phase, and Birkin-loving men are leading the way.

First, There Was Birkin's Birkin

Though most closely associated with its famous female owners, the Birkin in fact has roots in gender-fluid fashion. It is named, and was first designed, for actor Jane Birkin, whose fashion-icon status was shaped with a wardrobe of men’s sport coats and trousers. Her resistance to handbags is where this one's history begins: when her wicker basket toppled as she attempted to put it in airplane overhead storage, her seatmate, Hermès chairman Jean-Louis Dumas, spent the flight sketching a carryall with a closable top. He delivered the first black leather Birkin to Birkin in 1984.

Since then, it’s evolved from a subtle signifier of wealth the global icon for the luxury arriviste. To control the market, Hermès makes the bag difficult to get. While the brand once kept a waitlist, the process to acquire a Birkin has transformed into something like courtship ceremony, only with a lot more subterfuge. To purchase a Birkin through Hermès (prices begin at $11,000), one must be an established Hermès customer, having already ingratiated oneself with the house by purchasing products outside its leather-goods offerings, like home goods and ready-to-wear. 

The web is peppered with stories about how to get a Birkin through Hermès that read like breathless recaps of the ornate mating rituals of rare birds, in which one never knows when success may strike. This is for good reason: stores may only have one or two at a time, they are never on display, and it is estimated that about 200,000 total are in circulation in the world. While the popular idea of the It Bag peaked in the early 21st century, a 2017 study reported that the Birkin's value has increased 500% since its release.

Of course, all these factors have only made the bags more desirable—especially, and perhaps even unsurprisingly, to men.

The Man Birkin Rises

StockX, the self-proclaimed “stock market of things” where menswear enthusiasts hunt for the world’s rarest sneakers, launched a handbag vertical in 2017, with Birkins as a marquee offering. “I think the Birkin has gained more cultural relevance over the past year, and now more men are recognizing the bag outside of uber exclusive luxury fashion circles,” says Rachel Makar, the site’s Director of Luxury. In addition to their rising status in menswear, they have also transcended their cult status into popular culture: Quavo made headlines in early July when he bought girlfriend Saweetie two Birkins for her 26th birthday; Cardi B and Offset raised eyebrows when they purchased their two-year-old daughter Kulture a Birkin in July.

Makar says StockX doesn’t track customers by gender, though anecdotally she maintains the core customer is female. Still, “given the shift at the macro trend level, and what we know about the typical sneaker consumer, it isn’t a stretch to think that there are an increasing number of male handbag consumers on the platform, including those on the hunt for a Birkin.”

She also points to the growing number of male celebrities carrying the bags. “We’re seeing more and more ballplayers, celebrities and entertainers (particularly in the music space) carrying Birkins or talking about Birkins,” she says. “It’s become the ultimate symbol of luxury and wealth.”

Rhuigi Villaseñor, designer of the brand Rhude, is a proud Birkin fanatic. So unabashed is Villaseñor’s affection for the Birkin that his latest bag, the Jacq, is a direct tribute to it, with his signature triangle cut out of the bottom and braided shoulder strap. Though he initially intended the Jacq as a launchpad for his debut womenswear collection, he decided to postpone the line and release the bag as a gender-neutral offering. It features heavily in his Spring 2021 men’s collection. “I wanted to create something that could live and breathe in its own space,” Villaseñor says, “but also have baked-in nostalgia to some people.”

Those people include himself—Villaseñor counts three Birkins in his own collection, including a black canvas bag with leather trim, a brown leather classic, and another in “blue jean” leather.

Undoubtedly, the “exclusivity and aspiration” of the Birkin have made it “more attractive for men,” Makar notes—and indeed, streetwear’s scarcity mindset, driven by the drop model, has become a dominating motive for menswear enthusiasts shopping at every level from $38 T-shirts to half-million dollar bags.

On StockX, Makar says, the average price for a Birkin is $10,300, with no song and dance required. Indeed, many menswear buyers, like Villaseñor, use a secondhand dealer, many of whom work through Instagram or WhatsApp to make sales. Oancea found his Himalaya through Instagram, but otherwise, “I have go-to [dealers],” he says. “They don’t like me sharing who they are, because they asked me to keep that confidential.”

Besides, Oancea says, if you work with the dealers, you can find some really unusual stuff. When he takes his bag into an Hermès store, he says, “They’ve never seen the bags I have, that are like half a million dollars. I took one, one time, [and] the whole staff shit their pants in Beverly Hills.”

It Bags for It Boys

But scarcity isn’t the only driving factor behind the rise of the Man Birkin—there’s an aesthetic appeal, too. Villaseñor philosophizes that the bag's rising status in menswear is further evidence of the increasingly gender-neutral nature of fashion, in which hype sneakers often come from womenswear, and menswear designers are zeroing in on the handbag market. (Villaseñor already has a hit with his an oversized garette case crossbody bag.) Bags are now “a recurring theme of genderless design. For the past five to seven years now, I think men’s bags is just more exciting” as a category, Villaseñor says. He adds that many of his peers have been collecting womenswear bags—he also has a collection of Chanel bags, for example, as do rappers like Gunna, Future, and Young Thug.

Before its developing role as a menswear luxury staple, the Birkin’s most familiar countenance was as a kind of shield carried by various villains within the Real Housewives empire—though perhaps that was a sort of blip. On Abloh’s dresser, or in Villaseñor’s palms, or even cozied around Oancea’s feet at the Staples Center, the bag looks more like a briefcase, returning it to its sexy beginnings as a secret weapon for the menswear obsessive in the know. (In fact, Makar says the smallest Birkins—25 centimeters in width—are now the most coveted size among female shoppers.)

While the man Birkin shares much with the hype-iest of hype goods, it differs in one significant way: it gets used. A rare sneaker or a special Supreme grail is often seen as too valuable to sweat in or crease, but many male Birkiners actually use their bags. Vegas Dave isn’t afraid to tote around his Himalaya, which is made with super-rare albino crocodile skin painstakingly dyed to mimic the snow-dusted peaks of that Asian mountain range. Abloh carried the bags almost exclusively in his pre-Vuitton streetstyle days, and Villaseñor often carries his, too, though he says his girlfriend sometimes borrows them.

Though Oancea appreciates the bags’ functionality, at the end of the day, he’s still Vegas Dave—a betting man. “They’re going up 15%, so I’ll stash it for 10 years and sell it later,” he says. “I’m now selling my baseball cards. I just was in the news: about to break the baseball card record with a $4 million baseball card that I paid $400,000 for two years ago.” He adds, “I’m just doing different investments.”

Gambling, fast cars, expensive art—and now, it-bags. The Birkin is an iconic handbag—but now it looks like the new keystone of the taste-crazed man's diversified portfolio.

Originally Appeared on GQ