The Invite-Only Superfake Birkin Economy of the Upper East Side

Plus: Is Los Angeles the Next Capital of the Power-Table Restaurant?

Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you (genuinely) for the welcome. I launched Rich People Shit on Saturday morning the way I do most things: quietly, without much ceremony, and assuming we’d see what happened. What’s happened has been better than I expected.

Thank you to everyone who shared it, forwarded it, mentioned it on social media, and generally did the polite but powerful work of spreading the word. And a special thank you to those of you who became paid subscribers so quickly. I don’t take that lightly.

During this first month, I’m especially curious to hear what you think. If you have thoughts, you know where to find me: here on Substack, or on Instagram at readrps

I’ve got a couple different things for you today, from replicas to reservations. Now let’s get this party started, shall we?

The Ledger: Inside the Invite-Only Superfake Birkin Parties of the Upper East Side

Hermès inspires many things. Devotion. Anxiety. Group chats. Entire secondary markets. What it doesn’t inspire very often is restraint.

More than a decade ago, I was covering a charity luncheon on the Upper East Side. I don’t remember the charity. But I do remember the wine, the live auction, and the creeping sense that lunch had slipped its boundaries.

A trip to Paris came up for auction. Two women at my table went for it. They bid like teammates and rivals at the same time. When it was over, they had collectively spent a mid six-figure sum on a trip I could have planned for them online in an afternoon.

We started chatting, as one does after watching strangers light money on fire for a good cause. At some point, I complimented one of their handbags. It was a crocodile Kelly in an outrageous color. The woman smiled, proudly. Then she handed it to me. It’s fake, she said. She wanted me to feel it. To really look. She explained it was a superfake and told me what she paid for it. Well over a thousand dollars. Not cheap, but not insane considering the cost of a real Kelly bag.

At the time, I didn’t have the Hermès fluency I have now. This was before Birkin discourse returned to the mainstream, before TikTok, before influencers, before women in their twenties started carrying the bags again thanks in part to the Olsens. I couldn’t reliably tell a good fake from a great one.

She explained that she and all her friends had them. A whole group of Upper East Side women just like her. They all owned the real thing too, but these were in addition. They bought them at a party. A secret, invite- and referral-only, party hosted in an apartment nearby.

These women obviously had the money to buy the real thing. They had just announced that to the room in six figures. But for them, superfakes weren’t about aspiration. They were about efficiency.

A real Hermès Birkin or Kelly now starts comfortably in the mid five figures at retail, assuming you are offered one at all. Exotics move quickly into six. On the resale market, prices regularly exceed retail, sometimes by tens of thousands of dollars.

No one wants to commute, travel, or leave unattended something that costs as much as a car. Or a year of private school. The superfake allowed a kind of flexibility the real thing discourageed. Most people buy their actual Hermès bags in conservative colors because resale value matters. (Black, gold, etoupe). The superfakes let you indulge a neon phase without explaining it later. A test drive without capital exposure.

It took me years, but I finally attended. I had tried to pitch the idea as a story. The problem was always the same. The outlets I write for require sources on the record. None of these women were willing to be named. Not even anonymously to fact-checkers. To attend at all required swearing, repeatedly, that nothing identifying would appear. No names, no addresses, and certainly (God forbid!) nothing about their husbands. I was in a secret society in college and this came with more conditions.

The party itself was exactly what you’d expect. A tony Upper East Side apartment clearly worth high seven figures. Bags laid out on tables in neat rows. Different sizes, different colors. Women drifting from one to another, oohing and aahing, drinking coffee and sparkling water out of expensive crystal. Staff, who appeared to work for the hostess full-time, waiting on us quietly.

No one talked about where the bags came from. No one asked questions about how they arrived. Selling counterfeit goods is illegal, even in a beautiful apartment, but the illegality was treated like a minor detail. Possibly part of the appeal. Like a low-grade drug operation disguised as a weekday coffee date. For what it was worth, the bags looked real.

I got the sense that the woman hosting was something of the grand dame of Hermès superfakes on the Upper East Side. No one said it outright, but no one needed to. Whether she took pride in it or just enjoyed doing something slightly illegal from a very legal-looking living room was unclear. I’m pretty sure there was a Basquiat in the living room.

There has been plenty of stories recently about how the global counterfeit luxury market is estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, with handbags among the most lucrative categories. At the low end, there are the obvious fakes, spread out on blankets up and down Canal Street. At the high end, there are replicas that cost four figures and are produced with near-obsessive attention to detail.

Hermès, for its part, has engineered the opposite experience. Scarcity is structural. You cannot simply walk in and buy a Birkin. You build a relationship. You buy other things. Shoes, jewelry, home goods. Eventually, if the right person decides you are ready, a bag may be offered. The process is part of the product. These superfakes, and these women, exist alongside that system, not against it.

I didn’t buy anything at the party. The only Hermès bags I’ve carried myself have been on long-term loan from friends, family, or resale platforms like Fashionphile. But it permanently altered my perception. I have been skeptical of every Birkin I’ve seen on the subway ever since, because once you understand the system, you start seeing its signals everywhere.

Rumor Has It.

First came battling with the reservation bots. Then came members’ club fatigue. And if all that weren’t bad enough, there may be an entirely new thing to complain about when it comes to going out to dinner.

A few people with deep visibility into the restaurant world have told me that Mark Birnbaum (co-founder of Catch Hospitality Group) and Will Makris (Makris Hospitality, Prince Street Hospitality) are quietly conceptualizing a new restaurant idea in Los Angeles: the place would operate under a Rao’s-like system of table ownership in which tables function like time-shares for celebrities and ultra-wealthy VIPs. There would be no open reservation system. The only way in would be to know someone who already “owns” a table and is willing to give up their slot.

This is next-level exclusivity…and, frankly, kind of genius. As far as anyone can tell, it’s never really been formalized anywhere outside of Rao’s itself. I reached out to both Mark and Makris. Neither responded (c’mon Mark, we used to be neighbors!), though both opened my emails several times (thank you, MailSuite, for enabling this very specific kind of neurosis).

If the idea is real (and the attention suggests it might be) Los Angeles could be on the brink of something new before anywhere else: a post–members’ club dining model where access isn’t sold, applied for, or reserved, but inherited, traded, and quietly controlled. After the membership card comes the table. And once that happens, dinner stops being something you book and starts being something you’re granted. Now that could really make everyone lose their minds.

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