Not Just a Bag

Jane Birkin on the Best Part of Men’s Wear: The Pockets

The actress and fashion icon is currently being celebrated at Lincoln Center for her work, but loves talking about her equally accomplished kids, too.
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By Pascal Le Segretain/Getty

Like anyone who truly merits the title “style icon,” Jane Birkin shrugs it off. “I think it’s probably true to say that if you dress up in boys’ clothes that are a few sizes too big for you, you can make your own style without much effort,” says the woman who epitomizes the androgynous Parisian style both on-screen and off (and who also happened to create the world’s most famous “It bag,” the Hermès Birkin). “You can probably be as pretty as any boy, and somehow it has a sort of vagueness about it. . . . You’re in quite good camouflage.”

In an interview last week, Birkin was camouflaged in black cargo pants, Chuck Taylors, and a tweedy men’s blazer that was a nip and tuck too big—on purpose, of course, in that unstudied je ne sais pas un tailleur way that seems innately Parisian. (Birkin was actually born in London, though her accent has ripened into a kind of lemony mix of upper-crust English and purring French vowels. Her pronunciation of the word “panache” alone should be bottled and sold.) At 69, she’s rarely seen without her wire-framed oval-shaped glasses—rose-tinted—that sit low on her nose, so she juts up her chin and peers over them in a pose that seems defiant. She says “lovely” often, and with great meaning, the way it is supposed to sound when a woman in a beautiful department store is trying to sell you jasmine perfume.

Birkin was in New York to promote Jane and Charlotte Forever, a retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center of several of the films—Kung Fu Master!, Jane B. Par Agnès V., Charlotte Forever, Melancholia, among others—that form the notoriously provocative ouvres of mother Jane and daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg. The event, which wraps this weekend, includes an exhibition of fashion photographs by her late daughter, Kate Barry.

Charlotte had fallen ill that morning, so Birkin was on her own for the grand media parade. (Birkin, who has a tender ability to find loveliness in any moment, remarked, “Oh my God, this morning, [Charlotte] hadn’t slept at all. . . . So [her face] had that rather enviable over-pink because of fever. She looked so lovely.”) Perhaps it was Charlotte’s absence, but what becomes clear in conversation with Birkin is that she seems to glow in her children’s accomplishments and talents—even simply in their mere existence. When asked if they ever borrow from her closet, which must be an enviable trousseau if there ever was one, Birkin says, “They all used to pinch clothes from me,” but seeing them dressed in her clothing, at their age, she says, fills her with pride. “But I think it’s such a pretty age—40. So pretty. And so I saw Kate and Charlotte and Lou’s not there yet, but they’ll probably be at their most sumptuous, really, at 40, 50.”

It was just before that age, at 35, that Birkin made what might be her largest contribution to fashion--the Birkin bag, which she developed with Hermes when she struggled to find a carry-all large enough to stash all her belongings. Her characteristically bemused attitude about her style extends to the iconic creation that carries her name: “That’s the great thing with wearing men’s things, is you can stuff things into the pockets--you don’t have to have a bag. So it was only out of self-convenience, you know, of not finding what you wanted, and to find it a lot bigger.”

Birkin is well-regarded as an icon of style and sex, but the Lincoln Center retrospective highlights the role that’s most important to her: motherhood. Birkin wears motherhood as well as she wears clothing—which sounds flippant until you remember that she is celebrated for dressing with care and elegance and absolute grace, with joy and sensuality. These are the same qualities that make her innately maternal.

She is the antidote to the stage mommy dearest. When reflecting on Charlotte’s early entrée into acting, Birkin recalls the entire crew of a Jacques Doillon film coming to a standstill to watch a young Charlotte, on set to watch her mother, cross the street with a red umbrella to catch a taxi home. That undeniable allure made her realize that Charlotte, if she wanted to do movies, should put her talent to use as soon as possible. “And I also thought that if you’re going through your parents’ divorce. . . . I remember very well in trains, I used to go between the wagons . . . and there’s a terrible noise, and in that you could scream,” she says. (She and Charlotte’s father, Serge Gainsbourg, were never legally married; they separated in 1980.) “I remember screaming in those trains, between the wagons, and I thought, That’s what you can do in a film.”

Birkin made a career out of reaching for the unexpected, the challenging, and the esoterically demanding, so it is unsurprising that she appreciates Charlotte’s tendency to do the same, if not go further. (Charlotte’s particularly fruitful relationship as muse to Danish director Lars von Trier is the kind of stuff you cringe imagining your own mother seeing.) But Birkin seems less a proud torchbearer than electrified by her daughter’s feats as an actress. “I don’t think Lars would have made her not be proud of herself,” she says. “And she was right to have believed in him, and she was courageous in having stuck by him, and he obviously realized what he had. And he probably knew pushing her as far as she wanted to be pushed, more so, even, that that in a way would be compelling for her.

“And it’s still just a movie. You’re not really jumping over a cliff or. . . . It’s still just a movie. So you can go quite far. And most actresses I would think on looking back wish they had been pushed further.”

As Birkin reflects on her own trusting relationships with her storied collaborators, she draws somewhat unexpectedly back to Serge, who died in 1991. “Even with Serge, to a great degree, I mean, Je t’aime moi non plus, I didn’t think of not doing it for an instant because I knew that I’d inspired him,” she says of the ultra-erotic 1976 film written and directed by Gainsbourg, which starred Birkin as a boyish woman who captures the eye of a hunky gay garbage truck driver. “So it would have been very, very weird if he’d suddenly gone off to find another girl that looked like a boy—insulting. So it was no surprise.

“But in his songs, he made me sing higher and higher, and he made me sing his wounds of me having left him. So I felt, and I still do feel, that if I can go on singing his songs, he went on, um, loving me, and having confidence in me to sing his songs, right to the last album, which was called Love of the Dead. . . . You know, its always painful when you love people. . . . When you realize that they’ve given you themselves to produce. So I have to defend him. And so I will.”