Jane Birkin on style
As her namesake Hermès bag goes on display at the V&A, Jane Birkin looks back over a lifetime as a fashion icon
‘It’s rather wonderful to be known creatively in the world,’ muses Jane Birkin, her distinctive, slightly husky voice reaching me over the phone from Paris. ‘When I touched down on French soil all those years ago – just a silly, pretty girl – I’d never have imagined I’d go on to a career like this.’ Birkin is in a particularly reflective mood when we speak, busy juggling projects spanning literature, music and fashion in the run-up to her 74th birthday this month. In August, she published the first, enchanting volume of her diaries in English, dating from 1957 to 1982; November saw the release of a French-language album for which she wrote all the lyrics; and her cult status in the fashion world has recently been reconfirmed by the V&A’s inclusion of her eponymous Hermès design – the Birkin – in its new exhibition dedicated to bags.
Being labelled a style icon has always somewhat bemused Birkin, who maintains that when she first moved to Paris in 1968, her look was far from original. Raised in Chelsea, she had been a fixture on the Swinging London scene, and brought its risqué fashions – high hemlines, geometric patterns and relaxed shapes – to the French capital. ‘What I was wearing was just what all the Chelsea girls were wearing at the time,’ she says. ‘In France, they have a tendency towards good taste, which we didn’t bother with – it was great fun to go down the King’s Road in just a T-shirt, and it didn’t matter if you were thin or fat. It was all ours and we were setting the style… too bad for the chic Parisians!’
Birkin remembers with especial fondness the wicker basket that she carried everywhere and that went on to become her signature accessory. ‘It was a Portuguese design that I’d bought in a West End market, and I had that English arrogance of saying, well, I’ve got a basket instead of a bag,’ she tells me, laughing. On one occasion, she and her then partner Serge Gainsbourg – the legendary French singer with whom she collaborated on the erotically charged 1969 single ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ – went to the Parisian restaurant Maxim’s together, Birkin bringing along the basket as usual. ‘They told me I couldn’t go in unless I put it in the changing-room, so Serge said, well, in that case, we’ll leave. He was a very amusing companion.’
It was that same basket whose demise ultimately led to the creation of the Birkin bag. The film director Jacques Doillon, Birkin’s partner throughout the 1980s, developed a particular vendetta against the much-fêted wicker holdall. ‘He hated gimmicks, so he spitefully ran over it in his car, and the contents went everywhere,’ says Birkin. Not long afterwards, in 1984, she found herself chatting to the gentleman sitting next to her on a flight from Paris to London, rueing the fact that her belongings – including a diary stuffed with letters, press cuttings and photographs of her children – would no longer fit in her bag. As luck would have it, that neighbour turned out to be Jean-Louis Dumas, the executive chairman of Hermès at the time, who not only offered to add pockets to her bulging diary, but also proceeded to sketch out her dream accessory (‘a handbag like the Kelly, but four times larger’) on an air-sickness bag. ‘A few weeks later, I went to the Hermès atelier, and there it was waiting for me,’ says Birkin of the beautifully crafted piece, now on display at the V&A, complete with her initials and even
the residue from the stickers she attached to it.
She was unaware of the Birkin’s extraordinary following – models of the sought-after design have fetched up to £300,000 at auction and outperformed gold on the FTSE 100 index – until her daughter Lou Doillon alerted her to its popularity in the 1990s. ‘I looked up my name on the internet, and blow me, the bag was the first thing I saw!’ she recalls, incredulously. ‘I said to myself, gosh, if Jacques thought the basket was a gimmick, he’ll have a laugh about this. But I think in the end, it’s done me rather a good turn, being so grand in the fashion world.’
In her seventies, Birkin remains a trend-setter, though she has long since replaced the miniskirts of her youth with practical alternatives such as wide-legged trousers, oversize jerseys, men’s coats and comfortable shoes. ‘For someone who has had quite so many articles written about what I wear, I wish I could design something for women my age – maybe a capsule collection?’ she says, meditatively. Singer, model, actress, writer, muse: it would hardly be a bold stretch of the imagination to add ‘designer’ to the list of Jane Birkin’s achievements. Join the waiting-list now…
‘Bags: Inside Out’ is at the V&A (www.vam. ac.uk) until 12 September 2021.