MOST EXPENSIVE RESOLD HANDBAG

Just 10 months after a pink crocodile Hermès Birkin bag sold for a record $222,000 at auction through Christie’s, another Birkin has toppled its price to become the new most expensive handbag resold in the world. The new record holder, which was sold through Florida-based luxury bag dealer Privé Porter for $298,000 to an anonymous buyer in Los Angeles, is a 35-centimeter Birkin from 2008 in rouge Braise croc skin with 18-karat white gold and diamond hardware. According to the seller, the bag has never been used. Most likely, it never will be.

The secondary handbag market is booming with auction houses like Christie’s building in-house teams to obtain and resell luxury bags. And though styles from Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Judith Leiber appear at auction, the most covetable bags by far are those from Hermès, specifically the Birkin and Kelly shapes. Specialists attribute Hermès-mania on the secondary market to the high quality of the house’s materials—the best Birkins feature exotic skins that are almost perfectly symmetrical, something essentially unheard of outside the walls of the Hermès maison.