Jane Birkin, singer, European movie star, and style muse, has died at 76. A doe-eyed fixture of film and fashion in the sixties and seventies, Birkin’s chic, seductive demeanor epitomized women’s increased emancipation during those decades. Her life, though not without its ups and downs, was ultimately a series of right turns that led her down a fascinating path.
Birkin’s first marriage, early career, and relationship with Serge Gainsbourg
Birkin moved from Britain to France in the sixties, after the collapse of her marriage to the composer John Barry. Barry, 13 years Birkin’s senior, is best known for arranging the James Bond Theme for 1962’s Dr No, as well as composing the scores for eleven of the subsequent Bond films. The couple married in 1965 when Birkin was just 18, had a daughter two years later, and divorced the following year.
Birkin appeared in a handful of films in the mid-late sixties, including Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup 1966. The movie caught notice for Birkin’s nude scene, which she performed after Barry dismissively claimed she wouldn’t have the guts to appear naked on set. In 1969, she secured a lead role in the French movie Slogan, despite not speaking a word of the language.
She starred alongside French actor and singer Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she performed the movie’s theme song, La Chanson de Slogan. The couple’s relationship swiftly became romantic, and Birkin moved to France in 1969. Thankfully, audiences there found her accent charming, and her film career took off. “Without my accent, I would have had a different career,” she later told French Vogue.
The public’s fascination with Birkin and Gainsbourg was fanned by their artistic collaborations — most notably on the steamy duet Je t’aime… moi non plus (I Love You… Me Neither). Birkin said she was motivated to perform by “jealousy,” as the song was originally written for Brigitte Bardot. The couple had a daughter, Charlotte, in 1971. They eventually separated in 1980, due to Gainsbourg’s tendencies toward control and cruelty.
“He could be very cruel in sessions,” Birkin told the BBC in 2017. “He simply couldn’t understand how I couldn’t sing Ex-Fan Des Sixties, and then the more he screamed and the more he hit me with a ruler and the more everybody tried…”
Birkin began a romantic relationship with the film director Jacques Doillon, with whom she had a third daughter, Lou, in 1982. The pair separated in the 1990s, following Gainsbourg’s death. According to The Observer in 2007, Doillon “couldn’t compete” with Birkin’s grief for Gainsbourg — though Birkin also admitted that she was jealous of the girls who starred in Doillon’s films. Covetousness was clearly a theme among the trio, as Birkin told the BBC of Gainsbourg: “I think he never really got over the fact that I left him, really.”
Inspiring the iconic Birkin bag
Birkin unwittingly inspired the creation of the iconic Hermès Birkin bag, after complaining about a plastic bag of her belongings breaking on a flight in 1984. Birkin was sitting next to Jean-Louis Dumas, then the head designer of Hermès (and later its CEO).
Per The New York Times, Birkin moaned that Hermès didn’t make a bag big enough for her, and later that year, the company released the capacious Birkin bag. The design remains one of the most exclusive in the world, with standard pieces selling for an incredible $10,000.
