You Too Can Play the Handbag Stock Market. Don’t think of those totes and saddle bags as just pretty accessories. They could also be an investment portfolio.

Earlier this year Kylie Jenner, the beauty mogul and Kardashian-Jenner family member, gave one of her patented home tours to Architectural Digest.

It featured her collection of Pop Art, arcade games and her “purse closet,” a special room that includes a reported 400 bags (or more), encompassing many Hermès Birkins, Chanels and Diors, and that has been a point of pride for Ms. Jenner.

“I have been collecting these bags for a minute,” Ms. Jenner said enthusiastically in another tour, chronicled on YouTube in 2018. “They’re also a great investment.”

That’s the kind of statement that can make viewers roll their eyes and cringe, except that she is not exactly wrong. Hermès handbags have spawned a singular secondary market and have sold for jaw-droppingly high prices at auction. (One of those apocryphal fashion sayings has it that an Hermès bag is a better investment these days than gold.)

But lately it seems that Hermès is no longer alone. High-end handbags, like high-end sneakers, may be turning into an asset class of their own.

Which implies it may be time to stop thinking of that purse closet — or shelf, or wicker storage bin — as part of your wardrobe and to start thinking of it as part of an investment portfolio, complete with blue-chip stocks, the opportunity to short some names, and to make more money while doing so.

That’s what Charles Gorra thinks, anyway. He is the founder of Rebag, a luxury handbag resale site, and on Oct. 24 he is introducing Clair, a.k.a. the Comprehensive Luxury Appraisal Index for Resale.

It is an algorithmic tool that shows bag owners the resale spot prices of their bags if they were to liquidate them immediately by selling to Rebag. (Unlike other resale sites, Rebag buys stock outright, rather than giving the owner a percentage of the sale when it occurs.)

Over the next few months, Mr. Gorra will introduce tracking features that allow you to see the rise and fall of those prices, the better to calculate the future value of a bag — and make a buying or selling decision in the moment.

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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/style/rebag-clair-handbag-stock-market.html