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At Sotheby’s Paris last month, a battered secondhand Hermès Birkin bag sold for a record-setting $10 million. The sale marked the highest price ever paid for a handbag—albeit a prototype owned by late fashion icon Jane Birkin—but compared to the wider luxury goods market, which consulting firm McKinsey estimates at more than $330 billion annually, it’s a drop in the bucket.
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But, as high-end art sales continue to stagnate, auction houses are increasingly leaning on luxury categories. According to market research firm ArtTactic, fine art sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips fell 44 percent in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2022. That’s a roughly $3 billion hole that needs plugging, which auction houses appear to be doing with proceeds from high-end handbags, jewelry, wine, whiskey, and collectible cars. According to another ArtTactic report, luxury goods sales reached a decade-high market share of 18.8 percent by value for auction houses in the first half of 2024—and climbed to 20.2 percent so far in 2025.
“These gains are particularly notable against the backdrop of broader declines in overall sales value, underscoring the enduring appeal of rare, high-quality objects and the continued confidence of collectors in the luxury space,” the report said.
Those gains have been readily apparent in the auction houses’ balance sheets. Christie’s announced last month that its first-half results for 2025 were flat year-over-year—a relative win, given the broader market’s downward slide. That total, however, was bolstered by a 30 percent surge in luxury sales, which brought in $468 million, or about 22 percent of the house’s $2.1 billion total. That’s a 6 percent rise from the same period last year.
The uptick was driven in part by the house’s sale of nine of the 10 most expensive jewels at auction so far this year, as well as the contents of billionaire Bill Koch’s wine cellar, which fetched nearly $30 million. Christie’s sold-out “Magnificent Jewels” sale in Geneva this May brought in $72 million, led by a 6.24-carat deep blue internally flawless diamond that achieved $12.7 million. The sale of Koch’s stash, meanwhile, became the most successful wine auction of a single collection in North American history. The showstopper was a “Methuselah” bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Romanée-Conti Grand Cru (1999) that sold for $275,000.
While Sotheby’s hasn’t publicly released its first-half numbers, a spokesperson told ARTnews that consolidated luxury sales topped $2 billion in 2024—a figure it has hit for three consecutive years—which accounted for roughly a third of the house’s $6 billion total last year. According to the house, that result is triple its 2019 luxury total and remains the highest such figure in the industry. Private luxury sales, the spokesperson added, also grew by 350 percent over the previous year. That number will likely climb higher in 2025, thanks in part to the record-setting Birkin sale.
Sotheby’s also enjoyed a record intake last year for the luxury sector in France, recording the highest-ever sales totals for jewelry and watches ($16.3 million and $8.3 million, respectively). Those results coincided with the house opening its new Paris headquarters last October.
The auction houses’ pivot to luxury appears closely tied to their growing presence in the Middle East. The region’s luxury market surged 6 percent last year, reaching nearly $13 billion, according to a recent report from Dubai-based retailer and distributor Chalhoub Group. The plan appears to be working: Christie’s reported a 14 percent increase in buyers from the Middle East in 2024, while Sotheby’s cited a record number of buyers from the region over the same period.
Both houses are investing accordingly. Last September, Christie’s announced it would establish a permanent post in Saudi Arabia. In February, Sotheby’s staged its first auction in the Kingdom, a sale heavy on high-end jewelry and watches, accompanied by “masterclasses” intended to cultivate a new base of luxury collectors.
“We met a huge number of people in the kingdom who are passionate about luxury who we hadn’t encountered before,” Jessica Wyndham, head of Sotheby’s jewelry department in Geneva, told ARTnews at the time. “When it came to the offering of the sale, we brought a range of what the broad definition of luxury can encompass.”
Morgane Halimi, Sotheby’s global head of handbags and fashion, meanwhile framed the record-breaking Birkin sale as part of a broader trend. The auction house has seen a 40 percent increase in online handbag auction sales so far this year, compared to the same period in 2024, with similar growth recorded through its e-commerce platform, Buy Now.
“Interest in this category is global, with clients from Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East among the most active,” Halimi told ARTnews. “The sale of a handbag of the historical significance of Jane Birkin’s original Birkin is unlikely to occur every year, but if the category continues to grow as it has—over 200 percent in the past three years—it is likely to retain its appeal for collectors for many years to come.”
At Phillips, the luxury category centers on watches and jewels, with the house’s watches department holding a 41 percent share of the global market. In 2024, timepiece auctions at the house brought in more than $212 million—a total Phillips said made it the first auction house to surpass $200 million in watch sales for four consecutive years. Phillips is on course to make it five years in a row: in the first half of 2025, Phillips reported $114.8 million in watch sales, along with $19.2 million in jewels.
When I asked Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s international head of jewelry, where the growth in luxury goods sales is directly correlated to sticky art sales, he pushed back.
“I would suggest that both the luxury and art markets work very well together and have done for the last 260 years,” Kadakia told ARTnews via email. Christie’s, he noted, has long sold jewelry and luxury objects, citing the 1795 sale of the Comtesse du Barry’s collection—the first standalone jewelry auction in history.
Representatives from both Christie’s and Sotheby’s told ARTnews that the art and luxury markets are not siloed but instead complement one another. Cultivating crossover buyers may be the point. According to Kadakia, more than 40 percent of the house’s new buyers so far in 2025 have come through its luxury sales, with a large share bidding online from Asia.
“Online is a great strength for the luxury categories, which regularly see sell-through rates above 90 percent,” Kadakia said. “We’re seeing intense bidding, with five or more bidders on average per lot.”
More than 30 percent of Christie’s newly recruited buyers in the first half of 2025 were Gen Zers and millennials, the auction house said during a Zoom call with journalists last month. Sotheby’s is witnessing the same trend: in 2024, 20 percent of bidders across its luxury and fine art sales were in their 20s and 30s, an increase from the year prior. Perhaps most notably, the number of buyers under 20 has increased their spending 22-fold over the past five years.
Both figures further highlight luxury’s vital role in growing the base of auction house buyers.
“Luxury categories, alongside 20th- and 21st-century art, have consistently been our best recruiter,” Kadakia said, adding that roughly half of those new clients return to bid again.
Luxury goods have long been big business in Asia, with the market totaling $135 billion last year and annual growth projected to top 4 percent through 2033, according to recent industry reports.
Christie’s and Sotheby’s have placed luxury at the heart of their new Hong Kong headquarters. (Sotheby’s new Maison is even located inside Landmark Chater, a high-end shopping mall in the city center.) For the grand opening of its new offices at the Henderson last year, Christie’s staged its first dedicated luxury marquee sales week, which brought in $108 million. Sotheby’s, meanwhile, said it will have hosted nine dedicated luxury sales at its two-story, 24,000-square-foot Maison by the end of this year.
Kadakia, the Christie’s jewelry head, remained coy when asked if luxury sales might soon eclipse fine art sales. “Our job is to source the most exceptional art and objects for our clients, and the pipeline for the 2nd half of 2025 looks very promising,” he said. “We are ambitious for all of the luxury categories and are working hard to bring in new buyers and source the most exceptional examples across all categories.
But as Josh Pullan, head of Sotheby’s global luxury division, told ARTnews last year, the house has its eyes squarely set on that sector for growth.
“We’re still at the early stages of unlocking that potential, not to compete with but rather to complement the art and the legacy of the business,” he said.
