It all started with a Nigerian movie, the kind where the billionaire’s wife has a walk-in closet larger than my entire apartment. She was a serious bag collector, and for the first time, I heard names I had never paid attention to: Kellys, Picotins, Constances, even YSL pumps.

Until that day, Hermès was just “the Birkin people” to me.
Nothing more, nothing less.

But the movie awakened a new curiosity. I suddenly wanted to understand what made these bags so special, why people collected them, and why owning one was practically a personality trait. So, I became intentional about learning more, watching reviews, reading articles, and following luxury resale pages on Instagram.

That’s when things got interesting.

One of the pages I found had branches in Dubai and London. Their feed was a shimmering sushi-train of luxury bags, crocodile Birkins, limited-edition Kellys, rare Constances, pieces I had never even seen in my life. It was like entering a world that always existed, but one no one handed me the key to before.

Then one day, I stumbled on a family on Instagram who had ordered furniture, real furniture, from Hermès.

I froze.
Actual leather-wrapped chairs. Wooden tables with Hermès stitching.
A whole sofa that probably needed its own passport.

I stared at my screen like:
“Wait, excuse me… so Hermès makes furniture too?? Since when?!”

I was in genuine shock. The kind of shock that makes you doubt your entire socioeconomic background.

Because here’s the truth, many of us never say out loud:
Some of us don’t know these things simply because we did not grow up in the spaces where such information casually exists.

We grew up in worlds where:

• Furniture is something you buy at a local shop,

• Luxury bags are things you see in magazines or music videos,

• And Hermès is… a word you pronounce very carefully so nobody laughs.

And yet there is another world, parallel but distant, where people grow up knowing the difference between a Togo leather Birkin and a Swift leather Kelly; where ordering a chair from Hermès is as normal as buying curtains, where knowledge of luxury is inherited like language.

Seeing that family’s furniture delivery made something click in me, and not in a bitter way, just in a very honest way.

It reminded me that:
Not knowing these things isn’t ignorance.
It’s simply class exposure.

And class exposure is not distributed evenly in this world.

Some people learn luxury by living it.
Others learn luxury by watching a Nollywood movie on a random evening.

And that’s okay.

Because discovering things late is still discovering.
Curiosity is still a form of growth.
And learning about luxury doesn’t mean you’re trying to become “rich class.”
It simply means you’re expanding your awareness of how vast and layered the world really is.

In the end, my discovery about Hermès furniture wasn’t about the furniture at all.
It was about how the world is full of things we never know exist until something, a film, a friend, a random scroll, opens a door for us.

And honestly?
I think that’s beautiful.