20

Twenty centimetres. In practice: a phone, two or three cards, a key and a lipstick, and genuinely nothing else.

The Mini Kelly II is the best known piece at this size and has become one of the most difficult things in the house to obtain, with a gap between retail price and resale price wider than anything else Hermès makes.

What you are buying

Not capacity. A 20 is an object and an accessory rather than a bag in the working sense, and anyone approaching it expecting utility will be disappointed within a week.

What it does offer is a shoulder strap on a piece small enough to be weightless, which makes it genuinely wearable for evenings and travel in a way a 25 carried by hand is not.

Leather at this size

Structure matters enormously when there is so little mass to hold a shape. Epsom is the natural choice and by far the most common — rigid, light, and it keeps the silhouette crisp. Chèvre appears and is exceptional here, giving lustre and rigidity together. Softer leathers exist at this size and lose their shape faster than most buyers expect.

A note on the premium

The 20 carries the largest premium over retail of any size, and that premium is almost entirely a function of current taste for very small bags.

That is not a reason to avoid it — it is a reason to understand what you are paying for. You are buying scarcity and fashion together, and fashion is the less durable of the two. Buy it because you want it, and treat the price as the cost of wanting it now rather than as an investment case.

Nothing here is investment advice.