Hermès Birkin vs Kelly: differences, sizes and prices (2026)

At a glance

Drawn from Sotheby’s Birkin guide and Hermès’s Kelly heritage page. Clou feet sit on both classic builds.

The Birkin

The flight story is the one everyone knows. Jane Birkin, Jean-Louis Dumas, 1984, a sketch on an airline sick bag (her telling) for a bag that could take a young mother’s chaos. Treat that as lore. Reuters repeated it when her original piece came up in 2025; so did half the auction coverage.

The auction is not lore. Sotheby’s Paris: hammer €7 million on 10 July 2025; €8,582,500 with fees. Guinness calls it the most expensive handbag at auction. Done.

Sotheby’s checklist for a Birkin: two rolled handles, flap, sangles around a central turn-lock, clochette with padlock and keys, structured base with protective feet. Sizes run 25, 30, 35, 40. We track 25 and 30 in Togo.

Longer read on the sale and a decade of list prices: The Birkin: from a sketch on a plane to €8.6m. Item pages: Birkin 25, Birkin 30.

The Kelly

Hermès says Robert Dumas drew a trapezoid women’s bag with straps in the 1930s. Sac à Dépêches, later. In the late 1950s, on the house’s own telling, Grace Kelly was photographed with it and the name stuck. That is Hermès speaking, not a third-party archive.

Against the Birkin it reads taller and a shade more formal: one handle, padlock on the front, usually a strap in the box. Sellier (structured, external stitching) or Retourne (softer). We track a Kelly 28 Sellier in Epsom, a Kelly 25 Retourne in Togo, and a Mini Kelly 20 Sellier in Epsom on the Hermès house page.

Sizes

The number is roughly centimetres of width. Birkin 25 is the tight daily bag. Birkin 30 is the one that still swallows a paperback and a scarf without looking stuffed. Kelly 25 and 28 live in the same everyday band; Mini Kelly 20 is evening scale.

Leather changes how they wear. Epsom keeps its edges. Togo forgives scratches and feels softer in the hand. Neither bag has a public price on hermes.com. Boutique allocation is a different problem from list price, and we do not pretend to know who gets offered what.

US list prices we can source (2026)

Hermès will not put Birkin or Kelly prices on the site. We pull from Sotheby’s published US tables, market-data tier, each row dated. Boutique / list as they report it. Not resale.

Resale lives elsewhere. Published studies often put Hermès bags above retail; we keep those numbers on the resale ranking with their own dates. Do not mash an old multiple onto a new list price.

Leather and hardware

Inside one size, leather and hardware move the ticket. Togo and Epsom dominate the published US charts. Exotics and odd colourways sit higher and rarely show up in those tables. Palladium versus gold-tone hardware is usually a smaller step than switching leather. On the Kelly, Sellier versus Retourne changes both the look and the number; our Kelly 28 Sellier Epsom and Kelly 25 Retourne Togo rows show that spread with dates attached.

There is no public Hermès matrix of size-by-leather prices. Auction houses sometimes publish “retail equivalent” charts. We only take rows we can date and attribute. An undated blog “Birkin starts at $X” stays off the index.

Which one?

Two handles and a wider stance: Birkin. One handle, a strap, upright profile: Kelly. Neighbouring sizes sit close at list; leather and construction do the real work. We do not run an investment desk. We publish dated sources.

Questions