Hermès Birkin 30 / Matty Boy

This Hermès Birkin 30 was hand-painted by Los Angeles artist Matt DiGiacomo, better known as Matty Boy, and displayed at ComplexCon Las Vegas in November 2024. Across its blue-green leather surface, the ordered geometry of the Birkin is interrupted by DiGiacomo’s brightly coloured handwritten words and cartoon-like marks, including phrases associated with his wider visual language such as SEX, SAMPLE, CONCEPT, PROOF and VANITY. A contemporaneous photograph from ComplexCon circulated within the Chrome Hearts collecting community immediately after the event, prompting sharply divided reactions to the intervention. The Disndat Archive photograph documents the same blue-green, graffiti-treated bag at the event.

The underlying Birkin is one of the most established forms in modern luxury. Hermès dates its creation to 1984, following a chance meeting between Jane Birkin and then Hermès chairman Jean-Louis Dumas on a flight from Paris to London. Dumas sketched a rectangular, spacious leather holdall in response to Birkin’s complaint that she could not find a practical bag suited to everyday life. The design subsequently became one of Hermès’ most recognisable objects.

Yet personalisation is not foreign to the Birkin’s history. Jane Birkin herself rejected the idea that the bag should remain pristine, attaching stickers, beads and worry beads to the examples she actually carried. “There’s no fun in a bag if it’s not kicked around,” she told Vogue in 2010. Lady Gaga similarly turned a white Birkin into a graffiti-covered object that same year, describing the transformation as a way of converting an inaccessible symbol of luxury into something closer to her own audience and identity.

DiGiacomo’s relationship with the Birkin developed within this broader history of intervention but through the visual world he built around Chrome Hearts. By 2016 he was already publicly documenting Birkin projects connected with the brand. In January 2017, Chrome Hearts Tokyo staged Pete Punk Offspring and Artist Matt DiGiacomo Converge, presenting a custom collection spanning apparel, bags, jewellery, shoes and wallets, much of it produced as one-off or tightly limited work.

By 2018, DiGiacomo was explicit about why he kept returning to the form. Speaking to L’Officiel about the Chrome Hearts Sex Records project, he described Birkins as a favourite because of their existing exclusivity, explaining that he would then add his own artwork and Chrome Hearts hardware to make the resulting objects harder still to obtain. In the same interview, he characterised his visual vocabulary through lips, eyes, cartoons, logos and characters drawn from his own experience of West Coast culture.

The significance of the ComplexCon example is therefore not that somebody simply “graffitied a Birkin”. The tension is structural. Hermès derives much of the Birkin’s authority from material control, craft, scarcity and a highly codified luxury system. Matty Boy takes that finished object and treats its surface as unfinished: something available for handwriting, jokes, colour, irreverence and personal authorship. The intervention risks reducing conventional resale desirability while simultaneously creating an object that is less replaceable than the unmodified bag from which it began.

That contradiction has become increasingly relevant to contemporary collecting. Luxury bags are frequently surrounded by charms, chains, toys and personal objects, while younger collectors often treat expensive products less as pristine end points than as foundations for further expression. The logic is closer to Jane Birkin’s own heavily used and personalised bags than to the immaculate examples traditionally privileged by the secondary market. Sotheby’s later documentation of Jane Birkin’s original bags makes the point clearly: stickers, handwriting, attachments and signs of use became inseparable from their cultural importance rather than defects to be removed.

Disndat encountered this example on display at ComplexCon Las Vegas in November 2024 and had no commercial involvement with the object. It was neither owned, sold nor authenticated by Disndat. It entered the Archive because it presented, in unusually concentrated form, several ideas central to contemporary collecting: the collision between established luxury and youth culture, the tension between preservation and alteration, and the possibility that changing an object’s context can be as culturally consequential as changing its underlying design.