“Oh gosh, on my obituary, it will say, ‘Like the bag,’ or something,” Jane Birkin once said to a reporter. And, yes, the Hermes bag inspired by her and named for her is the most famous thing about Birkin. It is the most famous bag in the world, with a price tag of some $40,000 (and, in one case, $2 million). But it was also arguably the least interesting of the reasons for her name recognition.
After the bag, the second thing synonymous with Birkin, who died on July 16 in her Paris home at 76, is the song “Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus (I Love You … Me Neither).” “It’s a rather extraordinary record,” she once said. “Perhaps more interesting than the bag.” She was right. “Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus,” with the lyrics sung over Birkin’s fervid breaths and groans, was so raunchy that it was banned by the pope and the BBC, and the head of the label that released it was given a two-month suspended prison sentence and a fine. The original song was recorded in 1967 by Serge Gainsbourg and his then-lover Brigitte Bardot in a Paris studio during a two-hour session in a glass booth during what was described by staff as “heavy petting.” But that song wouldn’t be heard in ‘67, as news of the recording reached Bardot’s (very angry) husband. Bardot pleaded with Gainsbourg not to release it, and one year later, it was rerecorded with Birkin due to what she described as “pure jealousy.”
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“I thought I’d better be the one to sing it, especially since other actresses were interested. I didn’t want him to end up in a telephone box with a beautiful girl as he’d done with Bardot,” Birkin later said, reflecting on the song.
Birkin’s relationship with Gainsbourg, the scandalous French singer-songwriter famous for chain-smoking Gitanes and having a face like cottage cheese, would change the course of the 22-year-old’s life. They met on the set of the 1969 movie Slogan. He was 40 years old with what Birkin described as “an exquisite, unusual face.” Her affinity for the brutish, borderline repugnant Gainsbourg has been best explained through Birkin’s childhood parrot. In an interview in 1969, she said of Gainsbourg, “It suits me fine that everyone finds him horrible. When I was little, I had a parrot who bit everyone but me. He loved me because I dared tickle him under his wings. He adored me. Everyone said, ‘How can you love that awful parrot?’ I thought, ‘He’s adorable, but I don’t want others to know.’ It was my secret.” This philosophy was present in every aspect of her life. The epitome of the Parisian libertine during the height of the sexual revolution, she wasn’t a conventional feminist. Birkin was a muse to a powerful man and once said, “I was a kind of object, and that’s what I wanted to be.”
As for the bag: Birkin, who was often kicked out of fancy venues for refusing to discard the Portuguese wicker basket that she used as a bag, ran into Jean-Louis Dumas, then the chief executive of Hermes, on a flight and complained about the need for a designer bag with space. She sketched out her dream weekender on the back of a paper bag, usually reserved for vomit, and soon after, the Birkin bag was born. During a performance in New York, after being asked if she was “Birkin the bag,” she replied, “Yeah, and the bag is going to sing now.” Lou Doillon, Birkin’s child with French film director Jacques Doillon, jokes that she is “the bag’s daughter.”
Birkin is survived by two daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg, an actress and singer born before Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg divorced in 1980, and Lou Doillon, born two years later. Kate Barry, her child with British composer John Barry, died in 2013 after falling from the window of her fourth-floor Paris flat. It was widely presumed to be suicide.
Aside from the capacious bag, Birkin’s style was simple. The key, she insisted, is being comfortable. “I could dine with anyone and eat my salad with my fingers,” she once said. Her style is so timeless that just two weeks ago, I took a photo of her to a hair salon in an attempt to get the famous Birkin bangs. The bangs are tolerable, fine, even. But nobody does it like Jane Birkin, and nobody ever will again.
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Kara Kennedy is a staff writer for the Spectator World.