2023-07-16 18:59:58
It must have been the 1960s when the expression “it girl” emerged in England: a younger woman, sometimes really a girl, who has that certain something and knows how to use it in such a way that she can successfully navigate the glittering world floats on film, fashion and stardom; a distant icon and at the same time proof that life other than normal is possible.
In any case, at that time there were a few women who were referred to as It girls who moved in this intermediate world and their spirit of optimism, such as Marianne Faithfull, Twiggy, Anita Pallenberg. But the It girl with the biggest something was Jane Birkin – because she didn’t stay English but became Parisian. Birkin was born in 1946, the mother was an actress, the father a Royal Navy commander, and met the older film composer John Barry at 17, married him at 19 and got her first film role as a naked blonde in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow Up”.
Maybe this shows a certain cool, bold fearlessness that Jane Birkin displayed throughout her life – at least according to legend, she only acted the nude scene because Barry told her that she wouldn’t dare film herself naked to permit. In any case, playing with one’s own body, men’s expectations and how to stubbornly break them has defined Birkin’s persona ever since.
Jane Birkin and her then partner Serge Gainsbourg
Source: dpa
In 1969, while shooting the film “Slogan”, she met Serge Gainsbourg, the son of Jewish-Russian emigrants and a notorious player in the Yé-Yé movement, also much older than she. A turbulent love affair begins, which one critic would later describe as a clash of two bombastic personalities and a model of the rebellious couple: bohemian, hedonistic, sexy in a dirty way. An essential part of this pair iconization was the song with which Birkin in particular is associated to this day (years ago she complained in an interview that it was perfectly clear which song would be played in her honor when she was dead): “Je t’aime … moi non plus”. Birkin sings, or rather: sighs and groans loudly, an octave higher than Brigitte Bardot, with whom Gainsbourg originally recorded the song. But Birkin’s jangly voice suits Gainsbourg’s dark, gitanes-smoked murmur all the better. Even if the song is one of the most played in the world today and has a greasy soft porn patina: In 1969 it was a lightning hit and a scandal: in England it was the first No. 1 hit that was not allowed to be played on the radio.
In any case, when Birkin and Gainsbourg met, Birkin developed an artist relationship with a man with whom, despite all the problems and other relationships, she was to remain connected until after his early death in 1991. It’s often said that Birkin’s fawn-like beauty seemed all the more radiant next to Gainsbourg’s puffy rudeness, but that doesn’t describe the imagery, the couple aesthetic that shaped both.
There’s an illustrated book that features private, self-taken photographs of the two – and most notably, Birkin’s quirky blend of natural energy and half-girlish, half-androgynous beauty. While Brigitte Bardot, around ten years older, still looked like a woman who, with a narrow waist and lush décolleté, pouted and let herself be driven to the Croisette, Birkin seemed more likely to promise to drive himself – with a mini dress quickly thrown on, of course without a bra over it slim body (she came to the premiere of the film with Gainsbourg in a transparent dress).
Jane Birkin at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival
What: AP
Among the pictures, however, there are above all pictures of the family: a family that no longer seems like the stereotypical nuclear family, but rather like a widely ramified network, a web and result of the passions, loves, errors and tribulations of a woman from which three daughters emerged: the photographer Kate Barry, who died in 2013, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lou Doillon, both dazzling figures between filmmaking, acting, fashion, artists of the art of living, icons of a way of life that perhaps can only exist in Paris.
In any case, Jane Birkin only regained consciousness in Paris. She played with all the great filmmakers: Rivette, Godard, Varda, Resnais, Jacques Doillon. The fashion house Hermès named a handbag after her.
When Jane Birkin died in Paris on Sunday, aged 76, Emmanuel Macron said goodbye to a “French icon”. A critic of “Le Monde” wrote, as if to expand on this, that Birkin was an icon, but above all one thing: a woman who did not get older, but always rediscovered life for herself.
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