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Earlier this year, I had my first-ever celebrity-bag sighting. I was eating lunch alone at an overpriced hotel when a cosmetically altered matron of indeterminate years pulled up a stool beside me, ordered a $22 glass of champagne and placed her black crocodile Birkin bag on the bar for all to see.

I couldn't help staring and she didn't seem to mind. No one spends $40,000 on a purse to hide it, after all. Sure, I'd clamped eyes on a few Birkins before (in the window of Hermès, on the arms of fashion editors at the shows in Milan and Paris), but this was my first sighting in the wild.

There is something ghastly about an accessory that costs more than the annual operating budget of an African orphanage. But for people who go in for fashion, this shock value only adds to its appeal. It was obvious that this woman, with her blown-out hair and plumped face, was not worried about appearing ostentatious in light of the economic situation in Burkina Faso. Her Birkin bag was working the room and she was happy to let it.

A young waitress stopped in her tracks. "Oh. My. God," she said breathlessly, eyes trained on the bag. "Is that a Birkin?"

The collagen death mask gave an icy affirmative nod.

"Oh-oh-oh," hyperventilated the girl, pulling her co-worker over by the sleeve to look. "Can I touch it?" she asked.

Betty Botox would obviously rather eat a bowl of glass than let this little guttersnipe paw her purse. But what could she do? Everyone was watching. She squirmed. She scowled. Finally, she shrugged.

The waitress squealed and slipped the Birkin over her wrist. Turning to look in the mirror, her face lit up with what can only be described as a materially induced orgasm.

"I would do anything for one of these," the waitress cried to no one in particular. "Absolutely anything!"

Herein lies the mythical (and in many ways inexplicable) appeal of the Birkin bag.

It is a value that Hermès invented and has been exploiting for decades (ever since the luxury French leather-goods label designed the bag in honour of the singer Jane Birkin in the early 1980s). But it's also the thing that made Michael Tonello, a former hair and makeup artist and American expatriate now living in Barcelona, a tidy little fortune.

In his recently published memoir, Bringing Home The Birkin: My Life in Pursuit of the World's Most Coveted Handbag, Tonello recounts the strange and serendipitous tale of how he went from cleaning out his closet to being one of the busiest Internet resellers of Birkin bags in the world.

After dumping a few Hermès scarves on eBay for a healthy profit, Tonello received an e-mail from an Hermès enthusiast (songwriter Carole Bayer Sager, actually) asking if he had a line on any Birkin bags.

"At the time I had no idea what a Birkin was," he acknowledges during a press lunch in New York earlier this year. "I thought she wanted me to find her CDs by the French singer/actress."

Tonello soon got up to speed and before long he was trawling Hermès boutiques all over Europe in a search for these fiendishly expensive accessories (starting price is about $7,500) with the hope of reselling them at a profit ($2,000 to $5,000, depending on the rarity of the bag).

The problem with acquisition, as Tonello quickly found out, is that Hermès severely restricts the supply of Birkins allowed on the market. There are two-year waiting lists and waiting lists to get on those waiting lists. In other words, you cannot just walk into an Hermès store and buy a Birkin, even if you have the money. That's the theory, at any rate.

With a little trial and error (and a whole lot of all-American moxie), Tonello soon developed what he calls "the Formula" for nabbing a Birkin.

In essence, he discovered that you have to spend money to make money. By experimenting, Tonello found that if he dropped a minimum of $1,000 on other items (scarves, notebooks, etc.) - buttering up the salesperson the entire time and parading his newly acquired Hermès knowledge - then politely inquired as to whether there were any Birkins available, he walked away with a bag nine times out of 10.

As he writes in the book: "The Formula was like any other sleight of hand - once you knew how it was performed, you couldn't remember why it had mystified you in the first place. And simple as the Formula was, there sure were a lot of people 'on the waiting list,' languishing away quietly, tortured by their unfulfilled quest for pricey leather purses."

When speaking with Tonello in person, it is obvious how he was able to charm his way into so many snooty sales clerks' good books. Holding court over a lunch of paella and Rioja in midtown Manhattan, the author is witty and refreshingly straightforward on the subject of luxury goods.

"The magic of Hermès has completely worn off for me because millions of dollars of merchandise has gone through my hands," he says, showing off the one Hermès item he kept from his reselling days: a simple silver bracelet - a gift from a client. "The allure is all in the accessibility. But as I found out, Birkins aren't actually inaccessible at all."

The fascinating irony of Tonello's business is that he found a way to profit enormously off the same brand he shamelessly undermined. A subversive act of fashion industry performance art, if you will. At the height of his Birkin blitz, Tonello had more than half a dozen resellers working on commission around the world, and he himself travelled constantly in search of new (ideally crocodile skin) purses. He even employed his mother in Palm Beach as a courier.

"People used to ask me all the time, 'Is what you do legal?' " Tonello says of his Birkin-selling days. "And, of course, it is."

While there is no love lost between Tonello and Hermès at this point (the flagship store in Paris eventually figured out what he was up to and responded by cancelling all his special orders), he is still quite fond of many of his former clients, a list that includes Rita Wilson (Tom Hanks's wife) and an assortment of stunningly decadent collectors.

"At times," he says with a laugh, "I felt like a drug pusher selling to junkies."

But if anyone is pulling a con in this situation it's Hermès, a company that perpetuates a false sense of rarity in order to make its bags all the more valuable to loyal, paying customers. It's the same mass delusion of value that is enjoyed by the diamond industry (controlled almost exclusively by De Beers).

At the moment Hermès has no comment on Tonello's tale, although they are expected to issue a statement next week.

Today, in addition to writing, Tonello continues to do a bit of Internet reselling, but nothing like his Birkin heyday - a wild ride that left him with terrifyingly expensive tastes.

"When you're buying $38,000 handbags, everything else becomes very cheap very quickly by comparison," he says. "I got a bit out of control, but I'm back down to reality."

And, presumably, wealthy fashion fiends are back to the waiting lists.