Michael Tonello - Bringing Home the Birkin: My Life in Hot Pursuit of the Worlds Most Coveted Handbag

My Life in Hot Pursuit of the
Worlds Most Coveted Handbag

For Marilyn

Dear Sir:

Owing to serious problems with the supply of skin qualities necessary to the manufacture of your items as well as of production, we are really sorry to inform you that we have today no other options than canceling your orders, i.e.:

1 Fuchsia lizard Kelly clutch bag

1 White bull calf, 30cm, Birkin bag

1 Fuchsia goatskin, 36cm, Haut Courroie bag.

With our most sincere apologies for not being able to give you satisfaction and thanking you in advance for your understanding, we remain,

Sincerely yours,
Serge de Bourge
Leather Department

The sound of the fax machine drew me to the other side of the room. I saw the Herms letterhead and scanned the letter peremptorily, then read it again, comprehension dawning. I thought it fairly unlikely that the largest luxury leather goods company in the world was having serious problems with its leather supply. Come on. That excuse was about as real as their two-year waiting list for Birkins. I had a sneaking suspicion that my globe-trotting and Herms-hopping days were numbered.

The only problem Herms had was with methey must have come to the conclusion I was a reseller. (I preferred the term leather liaison, but why quibble?) It was pretty unbelievable to have arrived at this point, especially since five years ago I hadnt known what a Birkin was. Since then, I had managed to buy them in such quantity that now I had been banished to the Birkin blacklist. Id come into this by serendipity; encountered blackmail, bribery, and fraud, all in pursuit of a coveted handbag that the world had an insatiable appetite for. Millions of dollars later, maybe it was time to get off the Birkin roller coaster. Maybe I needed a new start.

Who could I call with my quandaries? Who did I know that truly understood how crazy this all had gotten? Well, Kate had been there from the beginning

Ive always thought the use of a ringing phone to symbolize the onset of great personal change was a cheap plot device, and a gross oversimplification of the various factors that inspire human metamorphosis. However, now I know better: sometimes you really can trace it all back to a phone call.

In my particular case, that life-changing phone call came early one wintry Cape Cod dayearly enough that my roommate, Kate, and I were still cheerfully ensconced in our morning routine of Peets coffee, PJs, and Rosie ODonnell. Neither the caller nor the subject matter was by any means unusualit was the Boston-based agency that represented me, giving me my newest assignment. A weeklong hair and makeup job for IBM in Barcelona, it had the allure of an escape from the drab and drear of mid-March Provincetown. The call certainly felt routine at the time, but we dont always know our Rubicon when it rings

At least workwise, things werent so shabby. I had a career that people who didnt know better might consider glamorous. As a beautician who specialized in commercial photography, I had spent most of the last decade trigger-happy with a can of hairspray and a powder puff. And somehow, along my merry way, I had also cofounded a company. Named TEAM, it was an agency that represented artists who worked, in one capacity or another, in the photography and advertising industries. The concept was both convenience and strength in numbers. Normally, an advertising exec needed to make about half a dozen phone calls to pull together a photo shoot. What my company did was turn those six calls into one. Makeup artists, hairstylists, wardrobe stylists, location scouts, production managers, food stylistswe had it all under one roof. But good as it had been to me, my initial euphoria at being part of the fashion industry I had always worshipped as spectator was starting to wane. I had learned that celebrities were just people with name recognition, and photo shoots were as tedious as board meetings, once you had been to hundreds of them. Ten years of crafting updos and vanquishing shiny noses had driven me to uncharacteristic self-analysis. Was this really how I wanted to spend the rest of my life? Maybe not, but for now I knew one thing: I was going to Spain.

I loved traveling for work, eagerly snapping up what the industry called go-away jobs. Nomadic by nature, I took the adage home is where the heart is literallya hotel room morphed into home as long as I was in it (with the added bonuses of crisp sheets, fresh towels, and chocolates on my pillow). But lately I found myself becoming more jaded by my globe-trotting. Not because of the silly things you always heard those bridge-club biddies bemoaning in the airportit wasnt lost luggage or the lack of a proper bagel that had me down. I didnt mind the calculus of currency conversion or the etymology of exotic entres. No, it wasnt the inconvenience inherent to travel that was burning me out. It was boredom. I had increasingly noticed a sinister sameness about each of these foreign cities. Before my very eyes, every place was turning into every place else. I fervently hoped that Barcelona would prove to be the exception.

I sighed with disappointment and slumped against the hot vinyl seat of the taxi. Other than the flamenco music on the radio and the blinding glare of the Catalan sun, so far Barcelona felt about as foreign to me as Boston. Tacky billboards advertising electronics and cheap hotels flashed by my window at an alarming rate. Was there any place left in the world that didnt look like one giant strip mall? Maybe it was time for me to settle down. Maybe I needed the white picket fence and the Weber grill after all.

A mere five minutes later, my cynicism forgotten, I was as mesmerized by the view as a midwesterner crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. I didnt know which way to look. To my left loomed the impressive bulk of the 1992 Olympic Stadium, capped off by a towering white spire that was an unlikely mating of futuristic space station and computer-generated sculpture. To my right, the Mediterranean. I was dazzled not only by the turquoise shimmer of the sea but by the hundreds of boats lining the docks. Luxury cruise ships, privately owned yachts, behemoth tankers, modest sailboatssomehow, seeing one of the worlds biggest ports was far more impressive than reading about it in Fodors. Suddenly, I was as excited as a little kid on his first field trip.

But it wasnt until we left the highway and entered the citys perimeter that I truly fell under its spell. None of my extensive jet-setting had prepared me for Barcelonas unique urban landscapepalm trees edged the narrow streets, ornate buildings leaned companionably against each other, and laundry adorned nearly every balcony. The architecture spanned centuries of designgothic intermingled with modernist, contemporary coalesced with classic. It could have been jarring to the senses, but as I would later learn, Barcelona had a way of turning the incongruous into the harmonious. It looked like the European city I had always dreamed of but, of late, had despaired of ever finding. I was captivated.