Walmart started selling a handbag for around seventy-eight dollars late in 2024. It had the trapezoidal silhouette, the flap, the strap arrangement, and the general bearing of a Hermès Birkin, a bag whose entry price runs to five figures and whose waiting list has passed into folklore. The internet immediately dubbed it the Wirkin. It was sold out. Journalists asked Hermès executives about it in interviews, and they didn’t like the question. The curious thing about the Wirkin