Japan Firm Pays Record 1.5 B. Yen for Original Birkin Bag

   Tokyo, July 11 (Jiji Press)--The prototype Hermes Birkin bag was sold for about 1.47 billion yen to a Japanese company at a recent auction.
   At Sotheby's in Paris on Thursday, Tokyo-based Valuence Japan Inc. beat eight rivals in some 10 minutes.
   The auction firm said the bag, actually used by the late actor Jane Birkin, became the highest-priced handbag ever put up for auction.
   According to French news agency AFP, the previous record was approximately 75 million yen, also for a Birkin bag.
   It has been known that a complaint by Birkin, a popular British actor and singer in France who died in 2023 at age 76, to then Hermes chief Jean-Louis Dumas on a flight that there was no handbag of suitable size gave birth to the first of bags later named after her.

(2025/07/11-15:28)