Birkin bags were pricey if you could even snag one. Then a dupe showed up at Walmart.

Status symbols, like rich and hoping-to-appear-rich people who carry them, come in all shapes and sizes. In their desperate pursuit to mark their allegiance with the powerful and their difference from the less so, humans have invented enormous hats and tiny feet. Sparkly new Porsches and beat-up Volvos. (And new things designed to look old, like $595 pre-smudged Golden Goose sneakers.) This side of the island, and that one. Jeans with zippers at the hem, Stanley tumblers, having a butt and now, it seems, not having a butt.

These symbols come and go as the wealthy come and go from their seasonal enclaves - moving with a sense of timing and pace that is mysterious to outsiders - and what is revelatory to one group may not even register to another. It suggests that the most enduring human quality is simple insecurity.

An unusually sticky trophy of our era has been the Birkin bag, the shield of leather made by French luxury house Hermès and named for the late actress Jane Birkin that sells for over $10,000 at an Hermès boutique but is strangely opaque to acquire. The most reliable way to get one is on the secondary market, through Christie’s or Sotheby’s, say, where a bag might cost two or three times that.

So you can begin to see why, when a Birkin knockoff appeared on Walmart’s website earlier this month, it caused a fracas. This was the American Dream: a disruption of some other hoity-toity country’s notion that you have to meet some confusing set of parameters to buy a Birkin - now available for just under $80 at your town’s Walmart and Walmart.com.

The upward mobility of the United States - the potential for moving from one class to another, and even the bold belief that our democracy means we have no social classes at all - has only made these types of symbols more important. If Venetians once drew up sumptuary laws to bar certain kinds of women from wearing certain kinds of clothes, the ready availability of goods in America for anyone with enough money has only intensified the sense that the right object or garment is always within reach - and with credit cards, Klarna and the recent advent of dupe culture, there is always a price point for the thing that will make one feel better than at least one other person.

“Class distinctions in America are so complicated and so subtle that foreign visitors often miss the nuances and sometimes even the existence of a class structure,” wrote Paul Fussell in his bitingly truthful 1983 book “Class.” In other parts of the world, money, breeding or even laws determined your place. But in America, Fussell said, everything including your favorite football team, your RV or your home, your vacation destinations and your favorite restaurants sorted you into a social sphere.

And while the Birkin is a global phenomenon - the sale and mystique of it turning Hermès into one of the few ironclad names in a declining luxury market - it has a particular hold in America. (Perhaps that is why Hermès chose to stage a show here in June.)

Again, Americans believe that it is their right to walk into any place, lay down the cash (or credit card or payment plan) and acquire something, and the complexity of Birkin acquisition - a belief that you have to buy Hermès goods across a wide range of categories, including clothing, flatware, jewelry and furniture - has driven a few people to something like madness.

Earlier this year, two Californians filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging the company illegally forces consumers to buy ancillary products to access the venerated it-bag. (Hermès has always denied the use of such a system, and the subreddit the Hermes Game, where fanatics track the acquisition of Birkins and other Hermès delights, is filled with stories about casually attired consumers who were unexpectedly offered Birkins, or handsome and bold husbands who naively waltzed into a flagship and were presented with a Birkin, thus slaying the dragon of self-doubt for his sacred wife.)

People even police how one is to use their Birkin. Should it be pristine, its handle wrapped protectively in a toile and its exterior covered by its own little raincoat in inclement weather? Or should it be worn down, ink-stained, treated like the durable keep-all that Birkin herself intended? If you cannot own it, and most of us cannot, you can at least participate in the discourse. And is anything more American than the discourse? (#godblessamerica!)

There are Birkin knockoffs aplenty - you can head to Canal Street in Manhattan, or use one of the high-end counterfeiters who traffic on the dark web, or find a decent look-alike on Amazon. But this one, from a mysterious Chinese entity named Kamugo, was different - it came with the Walmart imprimatur.

Walmart, of course, is that most American of stores, a community center and grocery store and shopping mall all in one, which has overtaken many local economies and small businesses and provides the surest physical manifestation to Barbara Kruger’s acid mantra that “I shop therefore I am.” (And in an act of terrifically American noblesse oblige, Walmart’s heiress, Alice Walton, has created the best art museum in the Southern states, Crystal Bridges.)

Those who have worshiped at the altar of penny-pinching were being richly rewarded with this bag that, as one shopper put it in their review on Walmart’s site, “smells like real leather.” “It’s real leather, and I paid $80 for it,” said one TikTok buyer. “It’s likely not, to be honest,” said another buyer in his enthusiastic review.

But the point for him wasn’t that it was real or not - it was that “you gotta buy the scarf, and the sushi plate, and this, and the cigarette roller and all this other crap that says the brand name on it, just to be able to possibly, in the future, like five years from now, have the opportunity to buy a bag like this,” and instead he logged onto a website, paid $80, received the bag - and best of all, didn’t have to let anyone look him up and down and say he deserved the bag.

The dupe, after all, is the feature, not a bug. Some people might attempt to pass off the luxe fugazi as the real deal, and TikToker Alexandra Hildreth has suggested in several videos this year that many influencers showing off their Birkins are likely sporting fakes. But the Walmart Birkin - the Wirkin, as its fans have crowned it - allows its carrier to mint the imitation of status as a status symbol unto itself.

Not long ago, the point of a knockoff was to pass it off as the real thing. Now, knockoffs have been spun by TikTok and influencers into “dupe culture,” in which the stigma of trying and failing dissipates.

No wonder TikTok was flooded with people bragging about their Wirkins, and others, including Bethenny Frankel, turning into yapping Thorstein Veblens to analyze the frenzy. The Wirkin celebrates the dupe as a triumphant American scam: You can’t believe that you broke the system, and of all places, it was Walmart, not even the upper-middle class-approved “Tar-jay,” that helped you do it.

By Wednesday morning, Walmart had removed the Wirkin from its site. Still for sale is a pretty decent knockoff of Hermès’s Picotin, a more low-key bag that in the past two years has become fashion insiders’ favorite bag among the overexposure of the Birkin and Kelly. Whether suburban consumers will glom onto a somewhat ordinary-looking bucket bag that is a status symbol among the small sliver of women who write shopping newsletters on Substack and the clutch of accessories editors at America’s tiny pool of luxury fashion magazines remains to be seen. But it isn’t hard to predict that people will begin celebrating the Wicotin as the IYKYK alternative, adding another layer in this endless quest to find yet another thing that enforces the status anxiety Americans insist we do not have.

And in taking the Wirkin down, Walmart has cemented the bag into its own kind of status symbol: not as hard to get as a real one, but nearly impossible. Just as fast as it appeared, Walmart has turned its proletariat purse into a Veblen good, a commodity that will soon inspire Shakespearean FOMO. It won’t be long before the Wirkin pops up on eBay at a thirsty markup that still feels like a deal.