Should You Beat Up Your Birkin? Why Worn-In Luxury Bags Are Selling Fast
Stylish women are pooh-pooing pristine purses. Is it fueled by inflation? Y2K nostalgia? Is it just cool? An investigation into the tattered-bag trend.
4 min
ABOUT 20 YEARS ago, while dining in San Francisco, Lisa Unger Sandman was nearly startled out of her seat. “Oh, my God! That should never be on the floor!” shrieked a woman at a nearby table, pointing to Ms. Unger Sandman’s black Hermès Kelly bag. Chastened, Ms. Unger Sandman, now a retired banker in Raleigh, N.C., snatched up her purse which, in the current market, often costs at least five figures. “It caught me off guard,” she recalled. Today, Ms. Unger Sandman, 60, would ignore such a reprimand and isn’t so worried if her Kelly risks bodily harm. “If a bag has a scratch on it, that means you’ve enjoyed it. I’m happy with the patina.”
Ms. Sandman’s attitude reflects a growing trend. Lately, women are both embracing their handbags’ scratches and stains and seeking out visibly worn-in styles on the secondhand market. In its 2023 luxury consignment report, resale site the RealReal noted higher demand than ever for bags in “fair” (i.e., heavily worn) condition. Similarly, at resale platform Vestiaire Collective, co-founder Sophie Hersan reports that sales of worn-in designer bags have jumped 13% in the last six months.
Why the sudden craving for beat-up bags? One of the biggest draws, posits Katie Devlin of trends and insights company Stylus, is the Y2K revival and the resurgence of “indie sleaze,” a grungy, aughts-era aesthetic. She references the circa-2010 style of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Famously on their arms back then: decimated Hermès Kellys and Balenciaga bags (like the one shown here). “It’s the idea of looking expensive but like you don’t care—of not looking overly curated,” said Ms. Devlin.
In that regard, the trend, which encompasses luxury bags by the likes of Chanel, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, as well as label-free vintage styles, may be a backlash to the picture-perfect world of Instagram and wealthy reality TV stars (see the seemingly untouched designer bags that line the Kardashian clan’s walk-in closets). “There’s a move away from this idealistic, filtered look we’re so used to seeing,” said Dayna Isom Johnson, a trend expert at online marketplace Etsy, where searches for Y2K handbags are up 51% in the last three months compared to the same period last year. “Now people are really embracing the realness and messiness that comes with living everyday life.” Not using something that costs so much, Ms. Isom added, makes people feel “very wasteful.” Elizabeth Layne, chief marketing officer of resale site Rebag, has observed a resistance to feeling “too precious about [luxury] workhorse bags of lower grades. You don’t have to worry if it gets a scuff.”
New York stylist Malina Joseph Gilchrist agrees. “There’s a quiet luxury thing happening…a reaction to a congested market of handbags that are logoed and attention-seeking.” With a worn-in bag, she said, “you look like you’re not trying too hard.”
For Sapna Bhatla, 42, a business strategy consultant in Philadelphia, beat-up bags—whether trendy or not—speak to her identity. After immigrating to the U.S. from India, her style-savvy mother would combine her traditional attire with vintage estate-sale finds. So “pristine feels contrived and inauthentic to me,” Ms. Bhatla said. “If you see my body, I have scars. I have marks. I have a life that’s been lived. And I’m happy to have signs to remind me of it. I like things that show a test of time and sturdiness and resilience.”
She owns an arsenal of worn-in designer purses—some she marred herself, others that she scooped up on eBay. Among her favourites is a decades-old, no-name leather bag she found at a Paris flea market. “I’m not so crazy about brand names when it comes to vintage. If it’s here today, it’s already good quality.”
Those scars should not be haphazardly patched up, said Sofia Bernardin, founder of luxury vintage platform ReSee. “There’s nothing worse than a badly repaired bag. It’s like a woman who’s had too much Botox—she’d have been better off not doing anything.” Still, not all decay is desirable, said Kristin Whalen, 36, a San Francisco senior director of client management and bag obsessive who’s had some of her styles since high school. For her, protruding structural wires and age-induced deformities are nonstarters. Trend analyst Ms. Devlin maintains that, while the optimal degree of destruction is a personal choice, “if it’s not functional and your strap is falling off, it’s time to say goodbye.”
Is inflation driving this so-called “trend”? Recently, the cost of new luxury bags has skyrocketed. According to Jefferies Group, the price of Chanel’s coveted small classic flap bag increased about 60% between 2019 and 2022 in the U.S. Meanwhile, on the RealReal, bags in “fair condition” cost on average 33% less than already-discounted “good condition” options, said Noelle Sciacca, that site’s fashion lead. Lara Osborn, reseller Fashionphile’s vice president of procurement, offers a reality check. “We have to ask ourselves: Is a [worn-in] bag really chic, or is the economy just dictating that we’ll be wearing bags with a lot more love?”
Ms. Joseph Gilchrist insists it’s the former. If your bag’s beat-up, she said, “you just look cooler.”
How to Make A Beautiful Disaster
Is your fancy handbag looking too new? Here, four inadvisable but foolproof ways to pulverise even the sturdiest purse.
1. Toss your pristine purchase in the washing machine—and choose the most punishing spin cycle. For extra distress, add bleach.
2. Give that immaculate purse to your puppy. If he seems uninterested, slather it in peanut butter and present it again.
3. Buy a top-notch bow and arrow and use your bag for target practice. Ignore its faint whimpers each time it’s pierced.
4. Drop it at an osprey breeding site so a hen can use it in her nest. Once the chicks have fledged, retrieve your totally tattered tote.
The Wall Street Journal is not compensated by retailers listed in its articles as outlets for products. Listed retailers frequently are not the sole retail outlets.
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This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
The 28% increase buoyed the country as it battled on several fronts but investment remains down from 2021
3 min
As the war against Hamas dragged into 2024, there were worries here that investment would dry up in Israel’s globally important technology sector, as much of the world became angry against the casualties in Gaza and recoiled at the unstable security situation.
In fact, a new survey found investment into Israeli technology startups grew 28% last year to $10.6 billion. The influx buoyed Israel’s economy and helped it maintain a war footing on several battlefronts.
The increase marks a turnaround for Israeli startups, which had experienced a decline in investments in 2023 to $8.3 billion, a drop blamed in part on an effort to overhaul the country’s judicial system and the initial shock of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack.
Tech investment in Israel remains depressed from years past. It is still just a third of the almost $30 billion in private investments raised in 2021, a peak after which Israel followed the U.S. into a funding market downturn.
Any increase in Israeli technology investment defied expectations though. The sector is responsible for 20% of Israel’s gross domestic product and about 10% of employment. It contributed directly to 2.2% of GDP growth in the first three quarters of the year, according to Startup Nation Central—without which Israel would have been on a negative growth trend, it said.
“If you asked me a year before if I expected those numbers, I wouldn’t have,” said Avi Hasson, head of Startup Nation Central, the Tel Aviv-based nonprofit that tracks tech investments and released the investment survey.
Israel’s tech sector is among the world’s largest technology hubs, especially for startups. It has remained one of the most stable parts of the Israeli economy during the 15-month long war, which has taxed the economy and slashed expectations for growth to a mere 0.5% in 2024.
Industry investors and analysts say the war stifled what could have been even stronger growth. The survey didn’t break out how much of 2024’s investment came from foreign sources and local funders.
“We have an extremely innovative and dynamic high tech sector which is still holding on,” said Karnit Flug, a former governor of the Bank of Israel and now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank. “It has recovered somewhat since the start of the war, but not as much as one would hope.”
At the war’s outset, tens of thousands of Israel’s nearly 400,000 tech employees were called into reserve service and companies scrambled to realign operations as rockets from Gaza and Lebanon pounded the country. Even as operations normalized, foreign airlines overwhelmingly cut service to Israel, spooking investors and making it harder for Israelis to reach their customers abroad.
An explosion in negative global sentiment toward Israel introduced a new form of risk in doing business with Israeli companies. Global ratings firms lowered Israel’s credit rating over uncertainty caused by the war.
Israel’s government flooded money into the economy to stabilize it shortly after war broke out in October 2023. That expansionary fiscal policy, economists say, stemmed what was an initial economic contraction in the war’s first quarter and helped Israel regain its footing, but is now resulting in expected tax increases to foot the bill.
The 2024 boost was led by investments into Israeli cybersecurity companies, which captured about 40% of all private capital raised, despite representing only 7% of Israeli tech companies. Many of Israel’s tech workers have served in advanced military-technology units, where they can gain experience building products. Israeli tech products are sometimes tested on the battlefield. These factors have led to its cybersecurity companies being dominant in the global market, industry experts said.
The number of Israeli defense-tech companies active throughout 2024 doubled, although they contributed to a much smaller percentage of the overall growth in investments. This included some startups which pivoted to the area amid a surge in global demand spurred by the war in Ukraine and at home in Israel. Funding raised by Israeli defense-tech companies grew to $165 million in 2024, from $19 million the previous year.
“The fact that things are literally battlefield proven, and both the understanding of the customer as well as the ability to put it into use and to accelerate the progress of those technologies, is something that is unique to Israel,” said Hasson.
This stylish family home combines a classic palette and finishes with a flexible floorplan
Just 55 minutes from Sydney, make this your creative getaway located in the majestic Hawkesbury region.
