All the wonderful style flaws of Jane Birkin, the woman who gave her name to the most desired bag

It wasn’t a delay, it was a socio-media experiment. Before writing in death of Jane Birkin at seventy-six years old which isn’t much anymore, for unknown reasons but among which I believe that heartbreak has something to do with everything that follows – the daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg who dedicated a biographical documentary to her two years ago told that getting her to overcome her distrust had been a feat – I waited the necessary time to understand how many, among colleagues, influencers, social commentators for pleasure and for vanity, would have titled/compared/given more space for the bag dedicated to her by the late Jean Louis Hermès compared to the excellent actress and not bad singer that she was.

Borsa beats movie sets ten to oneexcept for a tweet about “frog eyes in the electric chair, but I can’t live without you”, an apocryphal but in any case effective observation that he seems to have launched Serge Gainsbourg after one of the epic fights (he drank like a sponge, she was fabulous).

If you still needed proof of the power of the consumer society and so-called “icons”, this is it. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat the world that mistook an actress for the bag of wishes. Someone couldn’t resist and remembered how old the average waiting list is, evidently without knowing that someone is allowed to skip it; someone else reminded us for the tenth time that he got them by taking out a mortgage.

Who knows what went through her head, she who was certainly not an “upstart” or one of those social climbers who consider owning a Birkin to be the first step of the ascent, but a member of the English upper class from birth, the day when told a magazine how that bag was born: the meeting on the plane with Hermès, the straw basket that spills, spreading all its contents among the seats, the apprehensions of a young mother (she had recently had her third daughter, Lou, with director Jacques Doillon), the desire for an elegant container, etc. Those involved in fashion, but just about anyone, know this story by heart.

On the legend of the Birkin bag, which includes a specific branch of the vintage market on which small, somewhat perilous art houses have re-established their fortunes, essays and short stories have been written (“The Birkin Hunter”, a barely fictionalized story of that small platoon of skilled brokers of handbags which, between Asia and the USA, allows some other lucky ones to avoid the dreaded waiting list with the additions and annexes, for example buying small objects and accessories for years, acquiring benevolence and points of merit); about the woman who inspired her the least. Excluding the film critics, but even then I wouldn’t put my hand on the fire, hardly anyone would be able to list two of the films where he played the lead role (I’ll help you: “blow up”, Antonioni, a great film that everyone mentions and that almost no one has seen by now, “The pirate”, by Doillon, but she was fantastic with those wide eyes of hers also in “Murder on the Nile“).

There still remains, but just among the boomers of the first phase, i.e. those born in the early Fifties, a very distant echo of the scandal-song “Je t’aime moi non plus”, the Italian translation of which was published by L’Osservatore Romano in August 1969 (the times of Savoy when half of Italy spoke French were over) so that the reasons for the censorship by Radio Rai could be clearly understood.

Among millennials, there is a serious risk that few know that behind the bag there is, or rather there was, a face or a name. And yet, it is precisely the fashion that has appropriated it. Hedi Slimane still models his own style on her, still owes a lot to that eternal girl who possessed the “nonsoche”, the “chic”, and who with very few peers, all English, like Twiggy or Penelope Tree, revolutionized the female image of the timebypassing Brigitte Bardot’s certainly sparkling but slightly gross seduction on the right with that “choucroute” hairstyle, cabbage-like, high on the head, which not by chance is still imitated in the provinces.

Come on mini-dresses that Paco Rabanne made them – that never made more sense than when they exposed Birkin’s bare legs – to men’s suits, to men’s tank tops combined with jeans, up to hair left free and slopingBirkin was the symbol of the style we still know as “boho-chic” and which is absolutely inimitable because it presupposes that physique there, that culture there, those bones there. And no, she doesn’t need designer bags because a basket is enough for her.