> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://tokyobrainie.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Column 007｜バーキンを持っても、あなたはバーキンにはならない——僕はバッグの付属品ではない｜I Am Not a Handbag’s Accessory - URL: https://tokyobrainie.ghost.io/column-401bc361-e923f056-en/ - Published: 2026-10-23T03:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T03:00:00.000Z - Description: The other day, I wrote about meeting a young AI researcher. Learning about the AI he wants to create, and the originality and forward reach of his thinking, felt to - Author: TokyoBrainie - Tags: Column, English, #Import 2026-11-11 08:54 [English](https://tokyobrainie.ghost.io/column-401bc361-e923f056-en/) · [简体中文](https://tokyobrainie.ghost.io/column-401bc361-e923f056-zh-hans/) · [日本語](https://tokyobrainie.ghost.io/column-401bc361-e923f056-ja/) The other day, I wrote about meeting a young AI researcher. Learning about the AI he wants to create, and the originality and forward reach of his thinking, felt to me like a rare stroke of good fortune. His enthusiasm rubbed off on me. I want to acknowledge that plainly. So today, rather than borrow his expertise to discuss the future, I want to return to a world in which I have spent much of my own life: fashion. Meeting a young person who could explain, in his own words, what he wanted to create made me reconsider what I have chosen and what I have valued. Then I saw Reuters' report on the Birkin's scarcity and resale prices. \[1\] ## Buying the whole rack will not buy you an eye for style When I shop at a luxury house, my first question is simple: **Is there a design this season that moves me?** I do not start with the name and accept anything carrying its logo. Nor do I point to a rack and say, “Everything from here to here.” Being able to buy and being able to choose are very different things. To me, a collection resembles a company's vision of its future. What will it take into the next season? Will it repeat yesterday's success or revise its vocabulary? As when I read quarterly results, I want to look beyond the polished surface. Seeing a look from the front row does not automatically give me a reason to buy it. I examine what survives when a runway look reaches the store: the material, construction, silhouette and character it takes on when worn. Sometimes I decide not to buy. Respect for a house and judgment of an individual piece are separate. Affection is not a standing order. ## I am buying more than a bag Now, the Birkin. A doorman opens the door. I speak with a familiar sales associate. Suggestions reflect my preferences. I look, touch, choose and eventually receive the object. For me, the purchase includes that entire sequence. Look only at the product, and you miss the time that goes into it. There is something of a carefully staged attraction about the experience. Yet what remains in my hands carries both the artisan's work and my own reason for choosing. A Birkin can be one destination within that accumulated relationship. This is my account of what I value in luxury, not a universal account of how to buy a bag. I collect Louis Vuitton trunks and sometimes commission custom orders. I have no intention of assembling my own collection through resale. There is surely pleasure in inheriting someone else's choices. In fact, one of my family homes is a château in France, and my collection of coffee cups came to me from my grandmother. But what I want here is the history of consulting, choosing and receiving for myself. **Buying the finished object alone would not complete the purchase I want to make.** ## If the scarcity premium falls, what have you lost? Reuters reports greater resale supply and shrinking premiums, while also including a reseller who says prices remain firm. \[1\] My question is what happens to someone's affection for a bag when the potential resale profit changes. The leather, stitching and usefulness are unchanged. Yet the moment someone else is willing to pay less, your bag becomes less interesting. What, exactly, did you love? Jane Birkin's work and way of living? The shape? The craft? Or were you relying on the claim that “not everyone can buy one” to put a price on you, too? **Owning a Birkin does not make you a Birkin.** Confuse those things, and the bag stops accessorizing the person. The person becomes the bag's accessory. ## Do not outsource your personality to a logo Living in Japan, I encounter the impulse to classify people, including ourselves, through possessions: the expensive-watch person, the tower-apartment person, the Hermès person. We purchase a shelf to belong on and substitute its label for our name. I have heard some people involved in yakuza or other criminal groups say that they cannot have bank accounts or keep cash anywhere they feel is safe, so they spend the money they have almost as soon as they get it. To my eye, that is painfully gauche. Behind those expensive logos, all I can smell is vanity. Where are these people going with their splendid bags? AEON Mall? Or back to the department-store Hermès to buy the next one? The destination is not what I am laughing at. The absurdity is that shopping for one's life can become a pilgrimage to confirm one's capacity to shop. Money from selling land, from a company or from an inheritance can all open the door to beautiful things. Its source cannot supply an eye. Old wealth and yesterday's wealth face the same requirement. By “nouveau-riche taste,” I mean neither a bank balance nor a birthplace. **I mean using an amount of money in place of your own reason for choosing.** A sales associate I trust has told me about the difficulty of dealing with customers' unreasonable demands and complaints. Some of those stories were unsparing. This was a private conversation, not an assessment of customers as a whole or a house's official position. What stayed with me was the sense that **even from the other side of the counter, purchasing power and aesthetic judgment are not the same thing.** ## Three Birkins, and the act of commissioning When I lived in France, I bought three Birkins without having to wait. That is my experience, not a purchase method available to everyone today. It is also why I cannot make “I waited so long” or “I finally managed to buy it” the essence of the bag. There is also a world in which you can add your own name or mark and work with an artisan on an object suited to your needs and preferences. Hermès' bespoke service and Vuitton's personalization offer entry points, subject to acceptance and limits on specifications. \[2–3\] I do not equate adding a name or commissioning a bag with Haute Couture in its formal sense, a designation with its own history of accreditation. \[4\] With that distinction made, **for me, the essence of fashion resides in Haute Couture.** Rather than making a bigger display of the same emblem as everyone else, I am drawn to the intensity of the search for a form: between body and material, maker and wearer. This does not dismiss expensive ready-to-wear. I have chosen it myself. Whatever I wear, I want to retain my reason for choosing that shape. Money can place an order. It cannot answer on my behalf why that garment belongs in my life. ## Between Furukawa Electric and SoftBank Group My relationship with a house I trust resembles what I feel when researching a company I love, Furukawa Electric. I want to see the work and accumulated practice behind the name. I do not feel that connection with SoftBank Group. This describes my interests and preferences, not an objective ranking of enterprise value. With so many names under its umbrella, what has it become? In my mind, that question overlaps with collecting logos to construct an identity. SoftBank Group's investment results and a bag's merits still require their own separate assessment. Holding a stock does not transfer a company's judgment to you. Wearing a house does not make its designer's sensibility your own. In investment and shopping, the remaining question is what I saw and why I chose. ## I choose my own time Buying a fund on a seller's pitch, ignoring its reports and then making a fuss because the outcome differs from the story resembles, to me, buying only a scarcity narrative and waiting for the price to rise. I want to keep researching, choosing and reviewing the results of my investments for myself. That is no guarantee of profit. It is a way of refusing to hand my judgment over wholesale. Likewise, I want to keep seeing collections: receiving the invitations that still arrive, sitting in the front row and deciding what I love and what I will not buy. Moved by the young researcher's enthusiasm, I returned to my own world and found that same attitude. Just as he spoke about the intelligence he wanted to create, I can speak about the life I want to choose. **I will not place my time in a queue for approval that may never arrive.** Investment returns can take time. I also choose to wait for an artisan's work. But I will not wait for pretension to turn into a personality. I am not a handbag's accessory. I want to remain the one choosing my life. --- [Original Notion archive](https://app.notion.com/p/401bc361ccd2818c803ec7eae923f056?pvs=204&ref=tokyobrainie.ghost.io)