Two years ago, all of Mumbai’s high society was giggling about a socialite who lives in a Worli bungalow and claimed to have walked into an Hermes store in Milan and walked out with a Birkin. “Does she not know that they have a two-year waiting list?” cackled one. “It’s obviously a fake,” tittered the other, fiddling with her yellowed two-carat solitaire earring.

The Birkin Bearer seems to be having the last chirp as the waiting list is no more than a fable. All she had to do was to appear classy and spend some serious Euros at the Hermes store and the Birkin would be hers. Rather unlike many of our Indian Page-three Peroxide Pals who trundle in, ask for it, get refused and sign up on a register no one will probably look up.

But all of the newspapers covering last fortnight’s India Couture Week spent more time Birkin-papping rather then trends-spotting. So we now know that Anu Dewan, Shilpa Shetty, Kaykasshan Patel and Anisha Chaturvedi have joined Haseena Jethmalani, Vanita Bhandari, Laila Lamba, Nisha Javeri, Anita Khilnani, Anju Taraporvala in the Birkin Bearers club. Many of these have signed and re-signed the register, others have called friends in important places, jumped the queue, but few have truly ‘earned’ themselves a Birkin (or even two).

I’ve just put down Michael Tonello’s superfabulous Bringing Home the Birkin, an honest-to-God account of a Boston-based make-up artist who found himself jobless and work permit-less in Barcelona, a city he fell in love with and found love in. In order to stay on, he had to earn his bread the quasi legit way: he became a reseller on eBay. When he found his old Prada coat and Polo Ralph Lauren scarf sparked a passionate rivalry amongst online bidders, he knew he had cooked a damned good “career chopsuey”.

... contd.