- George Mickum, Gillian Hearst's former BFF, sold the heiress and his other rich friends fake Birkins.
- Things began to unravel when he sold someone a "obvious, slouching, laughably low-quality fake."
A social climber with fabulous hair has been booted from New York high society after selling socialites fake Hermès bags.
This week, Insider published a deep dive into George Mickum, Gillian Hearst's former best friend who sold the media heiress and his other wealthy friends knock-off Birkins. Mickum's downfall began in 2022 when he promised to buy a fashion executive a 40-centimeter version of Hermès' rare Haut à Courroies Birkin, or HAC, in khaki green. The executive, who was dating one of Mickum's close friends, knew it would be nearly impossible to find the recently-released bag in stores. He thought working with Mickum could save him significant time and money.
But Mickum made several missteps. First, in April 2022, he sent the executive a photo of what appeared to be a receipt from the Hermès store in Paris. According to the receipt, Mickum had bought the HAC for 19,200 euros, or about $21,000. It looked legitimate: the receipt featured the address of the brand's flagship on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a purchase date of March 12, and even a pale yellow Hermès watermark.
But when Alexis Clarbour, the vice president of sales at the luxury-bag reseller Madison Avenue Couture, saw the receipt months later she immediately knew it was fake. There were countless errors, Clarbour told Insider — even the font was wrong.
Mickum's next misstep came when he delivered the bag to the executive. Instead of a signature orange Hermès box, he stuffed it into a Bergdorf Goodman bag. It was as if Mickum had found "an old Nike gym bag" and dumped it into the shopping bag, the executive said. There wasn't even a dust bag; Mickum claimed his mom's assistant would drop it off later.
Finally, there was the bag itself. As soon as he saw the HAC, the executive knew Mickum was trying to sell him a fake bag — an "obvious, slouching, laughably low-quality fake" at that.
When the executive and his girlfriend brought the HAC to Clarbour, she immediately clocked several issues. It was floppy, like a bouncy castle that had lost half its air, instead of having the architectural stiffness of a real Hermès bag. There was no date stamp indicating when the bag was produced and no craft stamp denoting the artisan who'd produced it. Clarbour didn't even think the bag had been produced yet at the time when Mickum claimed to have had bought it.
The HAC was one of at least six fake Hermès bags Mickum had sold to friends, including Hearst. Mickum did not respond to Insider's request for comment. A lawyer for Hearst, his friend-turned-nemesis, said of our investigation: "I can assert that the majority of this information is not only erroneous but grossly misleading."