The Birkin Bag is the ultimate status symbol: wildly expensive, ridiculously hard to get and immediately identifiable. Real Housewives collect it, hip-hop artists rap about it and “Sex and the City” once devoted an episode to it.
Yet, according to Marisa Meltzer’s new biography, “It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin” (Atria Books, out Tuesday), the woman who inspired the pricey Hermés purse was the ultimate bohemian — and a scandalous one at that.
She was condemned by the Vatican for her racy music, had three children with three different men and still managed to stay out all night partying in her signature mini dresses (sometimes with a baby in tow).
“The term ‘It Girl’ is a shorthand for her unique brand of fame,” Meltzer writes, “but it’s just the beginning of who Jane Birkin really was.”
Born to an artistic but respectable London family, Birkin was a wayward adolescent. Her classmates in boarding school made fun of her skinny body and flat chest, and she tried to run away a couple times.
Her parents sent her to Paris for six months when she was 16, and she came back changed. She got bangs, bought a bunch of mini skirts and dove headlong into London’s 1960s Youthquake movement
At 17, she landed her first acting gig, after walking into the wrong theater for an audition. By 18, she had a supporting role in the musical “Passion Flower Hotel,” and had married the play’s songwriter John Barry — despite the fact that he was 30 and had two kids from a previous marriage.
Birkin’s family did not approve. But she was in love: She wore a white crochet mini dress to the wedding.
Barry treated her with cruel indifference, and she worried that he didn’t find her attractive anymore.
“She slept with an eyeliner pencil under her pillow so she could apply some at any moment,” Meltzer writes. “She had fallen for the fairy-tale ideal of romance and marriage, and as a result closed off her own sense of self.”
By 21, she was divorced, and struggling to afford diapers for her infant daughter, Kate Barry, born in April of 1967. When she heard of an acting opportunity in Paris, she decided a change of scenery would do her good and returned to the City of Lights.
That’s where she met actor/musician Serge Gainsbourg.
A provocateur and playboy, he was 40-years-old, twice-divorced and had just ended a romance with the blonde bombshell Brigitte Bardot when he and Birkin began filming “Slogan.”
The two butted heads at first, but their chemistry in their scenes together was undeniable. The film’s director took them out to storied Parisian restaurant Maxime so the two stars could reconcile their differences. After dinner, Gainsbourg took Birkin to a nightclub, and she found his awkward, shy demeanor on the dancefloor endearing.
“I understood that all these things I had seen as aggression were really just defense mechanisms of someone infinitely too sensitive, terribly romantic, with a tenderness and sentimentality that no one could imagine existed,” she later wrote.
They stayed out all night. When filming wrapped in August 1968, Birkin nabbed another film role, in the French thriller “La piscine.” She decided not to go back to London and to stay in Paris with Gainsbourg.
Their whirlwind romance lasted 13 years. In 1969, they released their first song together, “Je t’aime … moi non plus” (“I love you … me neither”), which consisted mainly of Birkin cooing “I love you, I love you, Oh God I love you!” and moaning in orgasmic ecstasy.
Rumors swirled that the pair actually had sex while recording it. It went to No. 1 in France and England, and even charted in the US. The BBC banned it. The head of Birkin’s and Gainbourg’s Italian label went to jail for it. The Vatican denounced it, which only increased the record’s allure. (“The pope has been our best publicist,” Birkin commented at the time.)
Photos of Birkin and Gainsbourg flitting about town, she in her mini skirts and carrying a basket, he in his denim shirts unbuttoned to his navel and toting Birkin’s young daughter, were plastered all over newsstands. They rode the infamy to the Cannes premiere of “Slogan” that spring. Birkin wore a sheer black frock that stopped “about two inches below her crotch,” Meltzer writes, and no bra.
She had a child with him, future actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, in 1971. While pregnant, she posed topless for Gainsbourg’s 1971 album “Historie of Melody Nelson,” in jeans and holding her own childhood stuffed monkey over her growing belly.
They were true bohemians, taking their kids out to nightclubs, baby Charlotte sleeping in Birkin’s signature wicker basket. Sometimes, they would go out without the kids, putting them to bed and coming back in time to wake them up at 7 a.m. to take them to school. Then they slept till 2 p.m. Birkin once picked Charlotte up from school in a skin-tight blue sequin dress.
Birkin was crazy about Gainsbourg, but his relentless lifestyle (not to mention his alcoholism) began to take a toll on her. Plus, he was jealous and possessive. He carried a gun around one of her film sets, in case anyone should try to make a move on her. “You’re mine and I will kill anyone who tried to take you away,” he told her. Even he admitted himself to hitting her on at least one occasion.
She eventually left him for another man, film director Jacques Doillon, who gave her her first substantial film role (1981’s “The Prodigal Daughter”) and her third child, Lou Doillon. They lasted about a decade until he cheated on her with another actress.
In 1983, she found herself next to Hermés CEO Jean-Louis Dumas on a flight from Paris to London. For decades, Birkin had toted her belongings in her giant wicker basket: It was her signature item, establishing her as a fashion maverick in her adopted France.
But on that day, her wallet, keys, cigarettes and diapers kept spilling out. Her seatmate asked why she didn’t carry a bag with pockets, and when she said she couldn’t find one to her liking, he asked what that would look like.
Birkin quickly sketched a trapezoidal purse with two handles on the back of a barf bag, and Dumas said he would make it for her. A year later, the Birkin Bag was born and Birkin herself started carrying it with her everywhere.
She stuck stickers on its black-leather surface; hung keychains and beaded doo-dads from its fraying handles; and stuffed it to the gills.
As Birkin grew older, she sought to escape her ingenue identity. In 1988, as her 40s approached, Birkin was embarking on her first solo concert tour. She was still close with Gainsbourg and still performed his music, and he asked her what dress she would wear for the occasion. She said she did not want to wear a dress. He asked how she would wear her hair, then. She borrowed a pair of his nail scissors and gave herself a pixie cut. She ended up performing in men’s trousers, a white tank top and an oversized button-down — a look that would become iconic.
Meanwhile, she carried her namesake bag with her everywhere until 1994 when she donated the scuffed, stained accessory to an AIDs charity auction.
She died in 2023 at the age of 76, after years of health issues and the deaths of many loved ones, including her oldest daughter Kate in 2013, in an apparent suicide.
This past July, her battered original Birkin went back on the chopping block, selling for an eye-watering $10.1 million.
But Meltzer asserts that Birkin’s legacy is far more than a famous handbag.
“She was a tastemaker who changed the world around her, altered the cultural fabric of the times with her artistry and individuality.”
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