I am aware that there is an accessory known as the ‘Birkin bag‘, created by the fashion house Hermès in response to a need expressed by the late actor Jane Birkin. It has become a much-sought-after status symbol that the manufacturer exploits by imposing scarcity that results in prices ranging from $10,000 to $500,000. It has a waiting list for up to six years and is often resold at higher prices. It is an example of a Veblen good, named after the economist Thorstein Veblen who described “a type of luxury good for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve”, making them visible examples of conspicuous consumption and thus status-seeking symbols.
But just having a lot of money is not enough to get this bag and some people go to extraordinary lengths to try and obtain one, as this article attests.
The Financial Times has compared the hype that surrounds the bags to the tulipomania that seized seventeenth-century Holland. Both the Birkin and the smaller but nearly as coveted Kelly—created in the nineteen-thirties but popularized by Grace Kelly, who used it to camouflage her pregnancy in the fifties—are known in fan circles as “quota bags.” Hermès decides who gets them and who doesn’t, refusing to sell them online and tightly controlling their availability in boutiques. Because of the bags’ popularity, Hermès has developed an unusual relationship with some of its clients, who ask not only what Hermès can do for them but what they can do for Hermès. At the L.A. show, I met a pair of young women named Brittany Kane and Andrea Henderson, D.M.D. and D.D.S., respectively. (“We love dentistry and we love fashion,” Kane told me.) Henderson explained later that “you don’t go into the Hermès store and ask for a Birkin” off the bat, adding that she’d broached the topic only after paying her respects by buying jewelry and shoes. This works for some people but apparently not for others. In 2024, three customers filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Hermès uses the promise of handbags to induce people to buy teacups and trinkets and seven-thousand-dollar wastepaper baskets, all the while knowing that many of them “will not in fact get a Birkin bag.” The suit was dismissed. Hermès told me, “Under no circumstances is the sale of a product conditional upon the purchase of another.”
The “Hermès game,” as it’s known, has spawned an entire repellent vocabulary. The ancillary purchases, for example, are euphemized among shoppers as “pre-spend” or “Birkin bait,” and tales circulate of aspirants attempting to curry favor with sales associates, or “S.A.s,” by offering cash and trips on private jets. In order to justify the expenditure, or perhaps the humiliation of having to beg for the privilege of parting with their money in a public store, some participants tend to treat what is realistically a one-way capitalistic transaction as some sort of bilateral spiritual quest. Reddit abounds with threads such as “What was your journey to a Special Order?”(A “special order” allows a client to customize her bag.) One lucky buyer replied, “In my case, I think my SA felt that I had enough neutral bags (two Birkins, an Evelyne, a KTG) that it was time for me to go through a special order to get a bag unique enough for me.”
There is a long tradition of rich people trying to gain access to something that has a certain cachet by cultivating someone who can provide it. The thing that comes to mind are those seeking dinner reservations to exclusive restaurants by bribing or becoming friends with the people who allocate reservations because being seen in such places means that one is ‘someone’. So trying to ingratiate yourself with sales people so that they will sell you a bag seems like just an extension of this phenomenon, although it seems pathetic to me.
I swear to god, I will never understand what drives rich people to behave like this. Despite having so much money, how weak must their sense of self-worth be to so strongly desire such things?
I have always called them “people with more money than sense”.
A lot of this is just next-level “keeping up with the Joneses”.
I think, at some level, it really boils down to ‘not wanting to lose’, where the rules of the game are self-defined and actually counter-productive. People who aren’t really rich usually learn at some point that this particular game isn’t worth trying to ‘win’ because you’ll go bankrupt first. (Though that doesn’t stop everyone in time, of course.) But for people who have never really known what it is like to not have enough money (which generally means second-or-later generation rich people), who don’t really have anything better to do than spend money and be socialites, and who mostly compare themselves to others in similar social circumstances because that’s who they hang out with… they simply may never learn that lesson and continue to treat ‘stuff I have that my friends/rivals don’t’ as the way to ‘win’ the game of social approval.
It’s all about demonstrating superiority by making others in their limited circles jealous, and making sure others can’t do that to you. And like a lot of other limited social circles (see also the Manosphere and the like) the internal rules on what counts as ‘approval’ can be severely toxic and distorting to reasonable behavior.
Rolls Royce cars filled this function once. Now it is making a brief jump 7n a rocket to 100 km altitude or going on a cruise to Antarctica.
We also see the ultra-rich purchasing grotesquely large and ornate yatchs.
Fortunately the orange one will not have time to excavate a million granite blocks for a pyramid to his honor.
Alexander the mean brutal conqueror named a lot of cities after himself but that option is also not available.
One way to get fame is to burn down big temples. Dubya inadversely gained a similar kind of fame.
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Dolly Parton boosted her status by providing books for children, a road that is totally alien to most status seekers as it involves *giving stuff to others* without getting something in return.
There’s a saying that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and I’m just waiting for someone to miss the figure of speech and decide that this means vinegar-caught flies are more desirable than honey-caught flies.
I’m going to offer another possibility. It’s like an achievement in a video game.
Video games have illuminated some areas of human behavior which were somewhat opaque previously. Fifty years ago a person couldn’t feel as submerged in a fictional character as they can be now. Books, movies, television shows cannot reach the same level of immersion as a video game routinely does. Even in those games where there is a fixed narrative path, a video game can enable the player to think that their choices and decisions matter. With games now offering open worlds or a wide range of playing options/styles, as well as detailed character customization, players can feel deeply immersed in the playing experience.
And this has revealed things about human behavior which, as far as i can tell, were unexpected. One of the things which motivates humans is the feeling of accomplishment. This has been known for a long time. What hasn’t been well studied is that people can get a feeling of accomplishment from some of the most trivial and mundane tasks. It was assumed that the feeling of accomplishment a human being gets from building a business or closing a multi-million dollar deal would be greater than a feeling from accomplishment generated by, say, vacuuming a rug or mowing a lawn. This doesn’t appear to be the case. This may help explain why people who live mundane lives, consistently getting a feeling of accomplishment from completing small tasks, can appear to have more satisfaction in their lives then those who are working on larger projects which take years to complete.
Many of the early video games had earth-changing stories. Where the player had to defeat the ultimate evil monster which was going to devour the planet. Or overthrow a tyrant. Or battle the gods themselves. More recently a number of video games have found success by having the player perform more mundane tasks like power washing buildings, delivering packages, running a bakery, or mowing a lawn. I haven’t seen a carpet vacuuming game yet, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised that there was one.
So why do people play games like these? Power washing in the real world can be difficult, and hard work. In these games it generally takes time and patience. In the real world the reward for power washing is a clean building a feeling of accomplishment, and in my experience a subsequent feeling of disappointment as I notice the places I missed. In the video game land, you still see what was once a filthy object become clean, and get that feeling of accomplishing something. And because once the game decides you’ve worked hard enough it automatically removes any dirt you missed, you don’t feel disappointed for missing a bit. The game provides the rewards without the disappointments, so it’s not much of a surprise that people enjoy playing it.
I surmise that similar feelings are generated in people who get Birkin Bags. They know that it takes a certain amount of effort to acquire one of these bags, and when they get one they will have a feeling of accomplishment. It is a trophy, proving to themselves (and others) that they have accomplished something. For people who can basically purchase anything they wish, it may be hard to get that feeling of accomplishment, but it is something people appear to badly want. There are innumerable proverbs about how nothing is valuable unless it is worked for. While the overt interpretation of these proverbs is about the value of hard work, they may be also referring to the feeling humans get once a task has been completed. That feeling of accomplishment, which may motivate additional labor.
I don’t think this idea invalidates Veblen’s concepts, I feel it compliments it.