Is This $5,000 Bag Really the New Birkin?
Leave it to The Row to design a worth challenger to the inimitable Hermès Birkin bag. I mean, The Row is probably the only fashion imprint that could ever dream of competing with one of the OG titans of French luxury in terms of both acclaim and aspiration.
So, yes, no one will ever really beat Hermès at its own game but if you listen to some of some the folks online, The Row actually achieved the impossible. Or, really, its Margaux bag did.
To some impressionistic fashion types, The Row's Margaux bag is the new Birkin. There is, I'll admit, at least some merit to their claims.
There admittedly has been much buzz about the Margaux since late 2023. It's been more reasonably deemed the Fall/Winter 2023 season's "it" bag and it's an objectively handsome piece.
Retailing from $4,000 to $7,000 for the largest leather variants, The Row's Margaux bag was originally created over a decade ago as a seasonal style that quickly proved popular enough to become a permanent piece.
The Margaux has become popular enough that The Row's many retail partners all carry their own hand-selected stock and it's appeared in the arms of perpetually stylish types like Jennifer Lawrence and longtime fan Kendall Jenner.
And you could argue that the Margaux is arguably even more quiet luxury than the Birkin, if you were crazy enough: it wears no branding, for one, and is distinguished solely by its quietly sumptuous bowling bag-like presence — not to be confused with The Row's actual Bowling Bag — and the shape of its handles.
Further, the Margaux is also wildly easy on the eyes, perhaps even moreso than the hard-edged Birkin, all curved lines of squishily plush leather.
The Row fans love this thing, too, clearly.
Over 20 iterations of the Margaux are currently sold out on The Row's website in ll hues as daring as forest-y green suede and timeless as black, the single shade best epitomized by painfully well-dressed The Row founders Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
So, the Margaux bag is clearly a winner. But a Birkin dethroner? Je ne le crois pas.
I totally get the argument that the Margaux is a contender for, say, the Birkin of the season. I also agree that viral bags like the Margaux, Telfar bags, and Coperni's ingenious Swipe are just as desirable (if not moreso) as Birkins to plenty of bag-lovers.
Like, I can easily imagine many younger consumers feel more comfortable both aspiring to own and wearing some of these buzzier bags because of the price, cultural connotations, or even simply to match their peers.
And, from that perspective, a $6,000 Margaux handbag might as well be $10,000 Birkin to this newer generation, assuming it's even still interested in this stuff. Certainly, The Row is prized among even folks who can't typically afford it (myself included).
Owning a Birkin is like owning a fancy car — plenty of people are rightfully content with more utilitarian options that are functionally identical. A cheap bag holds makeup and napkins just as well as a five-figure investment, y'know, and if you aren't buying a bag for the resale value alone, why not buy what you like?
On that front, by the way, there is an interesting dichotomy: Birkins command far higher values on the secondhand market, with some bags commanding prices over $20k. However, the Margaux is comparatively scarcer — either fewer Margaux are resold, more are being snapped up, or both.
But the point remains that there hasn't been a handbag designed yet that can actually go toe-to-toe with Hermès' signature handbag in the realms of influence, covetability, and value (both implied and dollar-wise).
There's a reason that Mary-Kate and Ashley themselves famously carry worn-out Birkins, you know.
There's also the question of quality. Though The Row's clothing is inarguably nice and the fabrication of its Italian-made handbags is never in question, you can't really compare anything to Hermès.
We're talking third-party factories contracted to produce leather goods at scale versus an established maison that owns its own ateliers and employs dedicated leather artisans.
I believe there's much apocryphal mythmaking about the supposed levels of excellence that distinguish high-end fashion goods from their affordable counterparts, to be clear. Consumers can be lead to believe that some brands are of genuine quality simply because their products look nice or cost a lot — sometimes it's obvious to see through the baloney, sometimes it takes a trained eye.
But in this case, we're really talking about a standard of excellence unattainable to any company smaller than Hermès.
Finally, perhaps due to all the buzz, the Margaux may be dangerously close to hitting oversaturation.
Even dyed-in-the-Loro-Piana-wool The Row aficionado Jennifer Lawrence is more frequently seen with her LOEWE tote these days, perhaps because she and so many other true The Row devotees have long since been on the Margaux grindset far before the wider audience got hip to it.
The sudden hype behind the Margaux reflects an interesting late-adoption dynamic between the general fashion-buying public and core luxury consumers.
It's less that the Margaux is the new Birkin and more that the Margaux is one of the rare quiet luxury-tier handbags to achieve Birkin-esque hype.
There are plenty of other low-key but top-tier bags out there that aren't getting similar buzz, not that they don't deserve it. Like, where's the Delvaux love, TikTok? (rhetorical question but also, still...)
Really, the only way that these proposed Birkin contenders can swim in the same waters is on an ideological level or as a descriptor.
Sure, call the Margaux the new Birkin because it now represents a similar IYKYK flex but until you have to befriend a The Row SA and drop thousands for the possibility to even be considered viable to purchase a Margaux at retail, methinks not.
The Margaux is indeed a great bag but it's its own thing. It can't be the new Birkin because, well, the Birkin will always be the Birkin.
