I have spent the last three weeks walking through Paris. Saint-Germain, Saint-Honoré, Canal Saint-Martin, the streets around Le Bon Marché. Most days I take the same twenty minute walk from the 7th to the 6th for coffee.
What I have noticed, quietly, is that I have barely seen a Birkin.
Not on Parisians, anyway. The Birkins I have seen have mostly been on tourists standing outside the Mandarin Oriental, and influencers walking past with shopping bags. It is possible I have missed others simply because I have been living a local life and have not spent much time on Avenue Montaigne. The ones I did see were flawless, freshly out of the boutique, photographed as they passed. They are not the bags I am seeing on the women who actually live here.
This is not to say the Birkin is over. The waitlists are still long, there is no shortage of customers inside the boutiques, resale prices are still firm, the bag is still iconic. But something is happening with how stylish Parisians are using their bags right now, and the Birkin is not at the centre of it.
Let me tell you what I am actually seeing.
In the 6th arrondissement, hand-carried on the arms of beautifully put-together women, the bag I have noticed again and again is the Bottega Veneta Campana in the medium size. Soft, slouched, intrecciato leather, no logo, the kind of bag that says nothing and somehow says everything. It is light and elegant and moves like part of the outfit, rather than something its owner has to defend and protect.
In the 8th, near the corporate buildings where the BNP Paribas offices sit, the Bottega Andiamo has appeared on younger women in trendy cafés. Structured, also un-logoed, more office-appropriate than the Campana but cut from the same cultural cloth. Both bags whisper.
I am not personally a fan of Goyard, but it is its own phenomenon here. There is a queue outside the boutique on Saint-Honoré most days I walk past it. And in the 7th, where some of the city's most elegant lycées sit, I keep noticing schoolchildren with worn Goyard totes slung over their shoulders. Bags that have clearly been in the family for years, used to carry textbooks and gym kit. There is something quietly moving about the casualness of it. A bag that in any other city would be treated as a status object is here being treated as luggage.
The casualness is the status.
And then there are the women who can carry anything well. One afternoon, I saw an older woman wearing a worn brown Fendi Peekaboo with a jacket whose colours echoed the bag almost imperceptibly. Not matchy. She looked completely herself. I saw a younger woman in a white tee and linen jeans carrying a vintage Louis Vuitton bucket bag, the kind that has been knocked around for two decades. She looked completely herself too. French women have always understood that the bag does not make the outfit. The way it is carried does.
The thread running through all of this is not really about quiet luxury, even if that is the easy label. Quiet luxury implies a category of bags that have replaced loud ones. What I am actually seeing is something looser and more interesting, and I think it is very Parisian. It has never been one bag to rule them all here. Stylish Parisians are not all carrying the same thing. They are carrying what suits them, what suits the outfit, what suits the day. The unifying idea is individual style, not the signalling of status.
The Birkin, by contrast, is a one-note instrument. It says one thing, and it says it loudly. In a moment when individual style is doing the work, that single note feels out of tune.
There is an economic backdrop to this too. People are watching their wallets more carefully than they were a few years ago. A twenty thousand dollar bag in a colour and silhouette designed to be seen feels off-key when even comfortable people are cancelling subscriptions and skipping holidays. Quiet luxury has been growing as a sensibility for a few years already, but a tight economy accelerates anything that already moves in the direction of restraint. The performative wealth signal feels increasingly like the wrong signal.
The bag I reach for almost every day is my Canteen by The Row. It is silent, it goes with everything I own, the quality is exceptional, and I can throw it on for a ten euro lunch at a local café or for an expensive brasserie without thinking twice. It is not asking to be looked at. It is just doing its job beautifully. When I am shopping on Saint-Honoré or wandering the 6th or the 7th, I carry my vintage Box Kelly from 1981. It has the heritage I want, the patina of forty years of being loved, and the discretion that makes it feel right on those streets.
The Birkin, meanwhile, stays in its dust bag.
Which brings me to the question I keep coming back to. Why do we still own the Birkin?
There are good answers, and I want to give them their due, because none of this is to suggest the Birkin has stopped being meaningful. It is a piece of heritage. It is, for many of us, the bag we first dreamed of owning, the marker of a certain kind of arrival. It is an asset, often the most liquid bag in any collection. It is the bag you bring out for private parties, for the events where its presence carries weight, for the rare days you want to feel exactly that. It is, in some cases, the bag you intend to pass on to a daughter who is not even old enough to know yet what she is being promised.
But that is a different role from the one the Birkin used to occupy. It used to be the bag you carried because it announced who you were every day. Now, for stylish people who already know who they are, it has moved into the role of the trophy piece. The watch you keep in a box. The piece of jewellery you wear on the night that earns it.
The bag has not lost its value. It has been reclassified.
What I am not sure about is whether this is the bottom of a cycle or the beginning of something more lasting. Cycles in fashion, like cycles in the financial markets, almost always turn, and it is entirely possible that in five years' time the Birkin will once again be the bag stylish Parisians carry to the boulangerie. The pendulum has swung this way before, and the bag has survived every swing of it. That is part of what makes it the Birkin.
But it is also possible that something deeper has shifted. The idea that one bag could signal everything about its owner belonged to a more uniform culture than the one we live in now. Individual style is harder to fake than logo recognition. It rewards taste, time, and knowing yourself. The cultural ground may simply have moved under the Birkin in a way that does not move back.
Either way, the bag is not going anywhere. It is too well made, too historically loaded, too sought after on the secondary market to disappear. It will continue to be one of the most important bags in any serious collection, and one of the most liquid pieces in any vault. What is changing is what we use it for. Less daily companion. More occasional piece. Less identity signal. More heirloom in waiting.
For now, mine stays in its dust bag, and I keep reaching for The Row.