What kind of woman spends £49,000 on a used handbag?

An elderly but extremely handsome woman in pink, trailing a fur coat and a very young husband behind her, wafts in to Christie’s grand hall and tries to find a seat in the auction room. There, the crowd - mostly men in suits and women wearing silk scarves and expensive blow-dries - sit in reverential silence, their faces hardened in focus. All of them are here to buy one thing. No, not a classical painting or an antique vase - they’re here for a handbag. So, what’s so special about this bag? ictoria Beckham is rumoured to own 100 of them worth £1.5 million, Lady Gaga enraged fashion lovers across the world by defacing one, there’s a six-year waiting list to have one made, but now you can own your very own (albeit second-hand) version... if you’ve got a spare £49,000, that is. Yes, you read that right. Yesterday, at Christie’s, an anonymous bidder paid £49,000 for a second-hand bag. But this was no ordinary bag: this was a limited-edition Hermes Birkin bag and, it appears, women will do (or pay) whatever it takes to get one over their arm - even in the middle of a recession. Forget the British Fashion Awards last night, yesterday’s bi-annual auction of Hermes bags at Christie’s is the real fashion event of the year. Fifty-one handbags went under the hammer, and the Rouge Moyen alligator Birkin, 1998, which sold for £49,250, broke Christie’s records as the most expensive handbag ever sold. ‘The most sought after bags are always the Birkins and Kellys [named after actresses Jane Birkin and Grace Kelly],’ says Pat Frost, Christie’s director of fashion and textiles. ‘And the interesting thing is that yes, of course, they’re bought by wealthy people, but we don’t see the same people coming back over and over again. The mentality seems to be that you search for your perfect Hermes bag and once you find it, you’re done.’ So why the eye-watering price tags? ‘The really expensive bags are the ones made of exotic leathers: crocodile, lizard, alligator and ostrich. With the croc bags, which command the very highest prices, the paler the colour, the more the bag is worth because it’s extremely hard to dye the skins successfully. ‘In addition to that, there is only a limited supply of crocodile in the first place. ‘Hermes don’t give us the details of their distribution and production but, for example, we know that the Sloane Square store gets only four crocodile bags to sell off the shelf each year.’ And the buyers at yesterday’s auction know that all too well. Read more: www.replicashermes.com