In 2022, Charlotte Gainsbourg brought her mother, Jane Birkin, to her deceased father’s apartment in Paris’s 7th arrondissement and recorded the visit in her documentary, Jane by Charlotte. She was preparing to transform the residence into a museum—which is now open to the public, a walk-through memorial to the legendary pop singer Serge Gainsbourg. The scene does not serve as particularly glowing publicity. As mother and daughter reminisce over where the piano used to be and their memories of the first nine years of Charlotte’s life, one is struck by the darkness of the space, how it lacks light and air. Gainsbourg surrounded himself with expensive art objects, liquor bottles, and nudes of his female collaborators, including an enormous picture of Brigitte Bardot’s and Birkin’s headless busts. As Marisa Meltzer aptly notes in It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, the place is “like a version of Bluebeard’s castle,” full of trophies commemorating his prowess. It doesn’t need to be transformed into a museum. Everything is already dead and under glass.
I try to imagine the two women there as they would have been in 1971, a 24-year-old mother with her newborn, trying to comfort or feed or carry her daughter while tiptoeing around Gainsbourg’s drinking. Nine years later, shortly before she left him, Birkin would confess in her journals, which she maintained throughout her life, that she wanted a house full of sunlight and a garden for her girls to play in—the opposite of the material conditions dictated by her partner.
Birkin, of course, contributed to Gainsbourg’s music too. She was his most famous collaborator, her breathy, girlish voice contrasting with his raspy innuendo. In the 1970s, they were a cultural lodestar, heralding artistic and sexual freedom, which Gainsbourg proclaimed in his lyrics and Birkin showed with her barely there miniskirts and transparent tops. Yet the glamor covered up the fact that Birkin was constantly on the back foot in the relationship, as would become known with their increasingly volatile fights in public. Gainsbourg told her what to wear, wrote and produced the songs, and pitted her against fellow starlets in order to get her to sing for him. He profited from her youth (there was an 18-year age gap), her looks, her hipness, her love of rock and roll (he had been educated on the piano), while pocketing the money and receiving all the credit.
When Birkin passed on July 16, 2023, so closely was her name associated with the role of muse—she is also known for inspiring her Hermès namesake bag, and had children with two other influential male artists, composer John Barry and director Jacques Doillon—that a flurry of articles surfaced lamenting the title, calling it unfair and out of touch. Yet in these interventions, Birkin is rarely if ever cited on what she thought about her work and life. There is a vague call to move past the alluring images of her in her twenties, the ones constantly recycled on Instagram capturing her trademark style: high-waisted jeans; white T-shirts; Mary Janes; the famous, pre-Hermès basket bag containing her signature clutter. I still didn’t see much engagement with the movies she wrote and directed, even if they weren’t blockbusters, or her collaborations with French female director Agnès Varda, or her quips revealing painful self-awareness.
As the muse of muses, Birkin was still being used to make a point, even in this reconsideration of the gendered power dynamics of art-making. It is easy to say she was voiceless, powerless, and left no trace; it means you don’t have to do your homework and try to look for her and what she wrote and thought about the subject.
In It Girl, Meltzer went ahead and did this. Birkin is typically described as a creative eccentric, given opportunities via powerful men. The most repeated actions on her Wikipedia page are she met, she appeared in, she performed in, she had a role. She sang like she talked, and acted naturally in front of the camera, as if playing herself. “What exactly Birkin is doing so well comes across so effortlessly, it’s like she’s not performing at all,” Meltzer writes about her appearance in the 1972 cult hit The Swimming Pool, pointing out that it would be all too easy to attribute her fame to the preternatural beauty of her youth, her gap tooth, awkward physicality, and distanced reverie giving her the air of a fawn or a colt, long legs awry.
Her performances, taken separately, as they often are, seem to be the haphazard result of good timing and talented collaborators. But in Meltzer’s telling, a portrait emerges of an artist with a vision, a distinctive way of seeing the world. Birkin’s genius was in her life and in her actions just as much as in her look. It’s the reason why her cool translates across time; why we continue to exclaim over the way she wore her T-shirts and always looked a little messy, a little undone. Her daughter Lou Doillon described it as “total freedom, and a freedom that does not care about the judgments of others.” The fact that Doillon was talking about her mother’s decisions with her family rather than her wardrobe goes to show that Birkin insisted on such liberty on many fronts.
I thus disagree with Meltzer’s pronouncement that “we can dress like her,” or even the idea that Birkin makes Frenchness accessible to the outsider, given her transplant status from Britain and her penchant for ready-to-wear. Copy her clothes as you will, you cannot replicate her style. She does not inspire an exact following of her outfits, but rather the identification of the structures that let you live, just as she found them for herself.
“It” is a notoriously difficult quality to pinpoint, especially in an age of niche internet celebrities and nepo babies who lack “it,” who fail to launch into the collective imaginary with an aura transcending the commonplace. I like Joseph Roach’s definition in the book by the same name, “the power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities.” Birkin was so good at walking these paradoxical lines of innocence and experience, glamor and humility, courage and vulnerability, feminine and masculine. Every time someone tried to typecast her talent, she went out of her way to contradict them—as when Gainsbourg suggested she wear her hair in curls in 1987 for her first concert and she responded by asking to borrow his nail scissors so she could give herself a choppy bob.
Birkin could have become the darling of auteur film in France, or played into boomer nostalgia with her Gainsbourg retrospective concerts, or shot campaigns for the innumerable companies who would have loved to use her as their face. This would have allowed her to turn herself into a brand, her image into a product with a predictable fanbase. But she did not, guided instead by a loyalty seemingly pledged to herself over any kind of capital. Some might call this naïve; others principled—the very reason why she is so loved.
Meltzer points out that Birkin, despite her eccentricities, was still “an ectomorph born from a family of thinness and wealth,” upholding the status quo. Her mother was an actress, her father a Royal Navy lieutenant commander. Winston Churchill’s daughter was Birkin’s godmother. Birkin’s own daughters, meanwhile, continue to promote a glamorous image of the Parisienne much like their mother’s.
Yet, however much of Birkin’s success depended on a cocktail of privilege and childhood wounds, she was refreshingly unique, in a way that’s difficult to approximate today. She did not formulate her image to maximize clicks and likes and engagement. She never shaped her persona to game an algorithm. Yes, we see her through the eyes of the men who photographed and wrote for her, and this dynamic was unquestionably exploited behind the scenes. Yet when she looks at us, her gaze still feels relational, intimate, as if she is seeing, responding, engaging with someone, rather than an abstraction of what an audience might want. While the death of the muse and reciprocal rise of the influencer have made certain gains for feminism, there are nevertheless losses in this trade, ones less easily determined than the question of who holds the camera.
Meltzer appropriately captures Birkin’s breezy style, her self-avowed ignorance when it came to the stunts she pulled off as Gainsbourg’s accomplice, bemused by the exclamations over her taste for courting controversy. Of their infamous collaboration “Je t’aime … moi non plus,” in which she unequivocally implies sex through her moaning, Birkin said, “I don’t know what all the fuss was about.… I’m still not sure they know what it means.” When talking about a photo shoot for the men’s magazine Lui, in which she was cuffed to a bed at Gainsbourg’s request, she laughed. “I was very moral,” she said, in response to the backlash. “I didn’t ask for payment or to intervene in the choice of photos that were published. I don’t find naked girls indecent, nor do the gentlemen.”
Of course the lack of self-awareness was necessary for the ploy, for the audience to read her as the ingenuous “woman-child,” as Meltzer puts it. Birkin was rewarded for showcasing her bodily freedom—which demanded genuine daring at the time, in revolt against Dior petticoats and bullet bras—yet could only do so by downplaying her own savvy and experience. Meltzer relates the time when director Jacques Deray (of The Swimming Pool) threw a tantrum when Birkin brought her daughter to the set, whereas, tellingly, the toddlers of her male co-stars were given free rein. She responded by locking herself in the bathroom with her child, refusing to come out until Deray apologized.
Yet, despite her grit, it’s also evident that there is a thread of hurt running through her life, especially when it comes to her romantic partners. While Birkin remained almost completely silent on the subject of physical abuse in her journals, Gainsbourg openly admitted to it: “When she gave me an earful, I didn’t like it: two seconds too much and bam! … she took it on the chin with me.” She became addicted to sleeping pills when her first husband started giving them to her because he didn’t want to listen to her talk.
In this light, her jokes and self-directed put-downs seem less endearing and more like a learned trauma response, after being told by the people she loved that she was better off staying quiet. Doillon was not much better. Birkin’s namesake Hermès bag came about when a company executive spotted her signature straw purse in pieces; Doillon had run it over with his car, yelling at her that she shouldn’t be known for her “object.” The Birkin legend reads almost like a Greek myth, in which the seed of her greatness is planted through repeated acts of violence.
Meltzer is skilled at both conjuring the heady ambiance of 1970s Paris and telling it straight, holding up Birkin’s highs and lows. She resists over-speculation, except perhaps when concluding a chapter. Too many end with affirmations: “She wanted to work,” “she was moving on,” “she was in on the joke all along,” she was “ready to focus back on her own self.” Some days Birkin lived up to such pronouncements, a modern-day Joan of Arc—her dream role, and one she self-avowedly never played because of her imperfect French. Like the saint, Birkin did what she did despite the disbelief of everyone around her, on the basis of a vision she alone could see, while the rest of culture breathlessly tried to keep up. This is how she became an icon; it is what is captured in the photos that continue to circulate; it is what we keep admiring and trying to imitate. Yet sometimes she failed to live up to her promise. She was afraid of speaking up, afraid of rejection, afraid of being alone. While Meltzer’s biography gives us so much, she leaves room for others to try to tease out Birkin’s internal monologue, one full of contradictions that both break her muse status and let us relate to her struggle.
At the time of her breakup with Doillon, Birkin finally realized her wish for an idyllic family home, buying a modest house in Britanny on France’s northwest coast. As seen in Charlotte Gainsbourg’s documentary, it is full of sunlight with an enormous garden in the back. A year before she passed, while struggling with cancer at the age of 75, Birkin shows her granddaughter how to plant morning glory seeds, still full of the same rapturous optimism of her early years. Her house feels both alive and lived in, full of food and dogs, collected mementos, bursting at its seams. This is the kind of museum I want to go to, as opposed to Gainsbourg’s lair. Then again, I don’t know how her home could be turned into a memorial dedicated to her person, since she wouldn’t be there. Hers was the art that can’t be staged or bought with a ticket, the kind that disappeared when she did.
