UNSPECIFIED - JANUARY 01: Portrait of Jane Birkin in 1970. (Photo by REPORTERS ASSOCIES/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
To reach world fame for ‘designing’ a legendary handbag and breathily singing Je T’Aime... Moi Non Plus, might be to the chagrin of some. Not so Jane Birkin, who predicted that tune would be played at her funeral (when that time came, in 2023, it wasn’t). But it is the capacious Birkin bag – inspired by the actress as she sat next to Hermès’ Jean-Louis Dumas on a 1984 flight – that will carry the Birkin legacy well into the century ahead. The original design, complete with sticker marks and scuffs, sold for $10.1m to a Japanese collector earlier this year at Sotheby’s, jump-starting a posthumous appreciation and exploration of Jane Birkin’s life and work.
In It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, biographer Marisa Meltzer shines a light on the enigma that is Jane Birkin. Meltzer never met the actress or her family, but she excavates her diaries and memoirs to paint a portrait of Birkin from her early years, raised by her mother, actress Judy Campbell, and her much-adored Royal Navy lieutenant father David, to her first forays into acting, her Paris heyday, through to her death. The blue-eyed beauty – all legs, brunette bangs, gappy front teeth and whimsical demeanour – worked wonders at auditions, winning roles in Slogan and Antonioni’s Blow-Up. As Birkin learnt to navigate the business she found her first husband in composer John Barry aged just 18. On her breakout role in La Piscine, Meltzer quotes from Birkin’s diaries: ‘I felt like a child who had been given permission to play with the adults.’ The film led to Serge Gainsbourg, to her relocation to Paris and to her becoming one of France’s most successful ‘imports’.
A little scant regarding the early decades, Meltzer finds her rhythm during the Gainsbourg years, when the French singer apparently exercised a Svengali-like control over his protégée. Their bubble of fame inflated beyond all proportion with the release of breathy duet Je T’Aime... in 1969, a sexual vote against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, student riots and looming recession. They walked the talk with Birkin wearing sheer minidresses and Gainsbourg low-buttoned shirts to their favourite Paris nightlife haunts and even on the school run.
Over time, Birkin perfected her own imperfection: white vests, men’s jackets, jeans, sneakers, tiny crochet dresses and a wicker basket flew in the face of chic. Her willingness to pose (often semi-naked) for titles including Lui and Jours de France further stirred controversy. ‘The English Woman who was conquered by Paris but who conquered Serge Gainsbourg,’ was one headline on La Vie Parisienne.
Meltzer highlights her role as an attentive mother, homemaker and girlfriend/wife. She was usurped by a younger woman in all her relationships (with Barry, Gainsbourg and Jacques Doillon) and that threat must have hurt. But Birkin remained outwardly sanguine. In a surreal docu film, Jane B. par Agnès V., made with director Agnès Varda, Birkin reveals some of those many faces – actress, pin-up, mum, muse. She says to camera that she has ‘no distinguishing marks. No exceptional talents but I’m here. You are watching me as time passes’.
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In her book, Marisa Meltzer grapples with Birkin’s attitude to ageing (natural make-up/no big procedures); to death (those of her daughter Kate Barry, her father and Gainsbourg) and to her own ill health. She points out that Birkin remained an ardent activist and prolific performer even while sick with leukaemia. Material gain was not top of her agenda (she received a modest royalty check from Hermès) and often donated her own bags to raise money for charity.