Alexa Chung: what Jane Birkin and her style meant to me

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Jane Birkin was It for me. Late Sunday night I was ambushed by tears as I processed the news of her passing. It felt in that moment as though I had lost a friend. She was of course unaware of our connection, but let me tell you — it was deep.

Birkin first exploded into my consciousness as a teenage model frolicking on the colorama in Blow-Up, a movie recommended by a photographer boyfriend when I myself was a teenage model. Her tomboyish beauty, her nothing-but-tights-on bravado, her vibe. She possessed a low-key glamour and exuded a confidence that convinced me gangly brunettes could be sexy too. I think at a time when I was play-acting at being an adult, she offered me a self-assured example of how to be.

In the intervening years I have recklessly pilfered enough outfit ideas from Birkin for it to have become difficult to untangle where her style ends and mine begins. A casually buttoned shirt loosely tucked into men’s slacks, perilously short smock dresses paired with knee socks, sharp navy pea coats over denim shorts with Mary Jane shoes — these are the masculine/feminine formulas that were pinched and folded into my own wardrobe so long ago I had almost forgotten where they came from.

She possessed a quality that suggested we are one fringe trim away from being her

Perhaps the secret to Birkin’s enduring appeal is the simplicity of her style. Nothing gaudy or fussy, mainly pretty lace teamed with tough denim, or classic white T-shirts with flares. All of course carried with an effortlessness only those who are truly comfortable with themselves and have an innate understanding of the power clothes can invoke. With her famous and practical Portuguese basket bag swinging from one arm and Gallic god Serge Gainsbourg from the other, Jane Birkin from Marylebone accidentally became the very embodiment of French Girl style.

Alongside her career as an actress, the legend surrounding their mercurial love affair and the music they created together is perhaps the core of her gravitational pull. That and her iconic fringe, which speaks to her magic trick — even though she was obviously otherworldly she also possessed a quality which suggested her beauty was attainable and that we are one fringe trim away from being her.

(As a side note it’s a major faux pas to trim your own fringe as she apparently did. It simply doesn’t work out well.)

But then again she always was one step ahead. Just when I thought I had outgrown my Birkin moodboard, a cursory google of “Jane Birkin 1980s” as an investigation into how to age gracefully threw up a slew of even more drool-worthy and relevant looks. This time the jeans were baggier and frequently paired with classic Converse and sweatshirts with slouchy necks, reportedly broken in by stretching them over one knee.

In fact as much as I love ’60s and ’70s Birkin in her white T-shirts and flares, it is 1980s lounge lizard Birkin in a tuxedo and bare feet that might be her at her very best. As she confided to French Vogue in an interview six years ago, “When I see photos of me from 1968, my big doll eyes underlined with eyeliner, exaggerated mouth, bangs, I find it horrible. I found myself the most interesting at 40. I started wearing Scottish cotton marcels [vests], Agnès b men’s shirts, oversized pants upgraded with a thin red leather belt and sneakers without laces. Oversized men’s clothes are good when you get older.”

Thankfully I had the opportunity to tell Birkin I adored her a few years ago on a big stage somewhere deep in the guts of the V&A museum. She was there to promote a book about her life; I was there to ask the questions. We were led to a staff changing room and it was there that I had the surreal experience of sitting knee to knee with Birkin while a volunteer at the museum slowly unwrapped a cheese and pickle sandwich next to us, inquiring who we were and what we were doing between mouthfuls.

Birkin had with her the namesake Hermès bag she had inspired, threatening to spill the very contents (scripts, books, the kitchen sink by the looks of things) it had been designed to contain. Questions I had about her style icon status were met with polite apathy. This made me love her even more. It also clarified for me the essence that makes her so compelling. While people are joining wait-lists and paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for Hermès Birkin bags at auction, the woman who sketched its design on an aeroplane sickbag only ever saw the bag for what it was: not a status symbol, but a practical solution for living well.

Owning only a handful of the bags in her lifetime, Birkin’s original Birkin went on display at the V&A last year as part of their exhibition Bags: Inside Out. In return for using her name on the bag the singer said she got Hermès to “fork out” a certain amount of money every year to go to her charity.

The trailblazers are dwindling. Many of the style icons of today have a bevy of stylists behind them orchestrating red-carpet and everyday looks ensuring they are always pap-ready to break the internet. Things are done differently now. I would like to doff my navy blue sailor cap to one of the authentic greats, who despite belonging to another generation was ever-relevant to mine and will be for decades to come. Au revoir, Jane, and in case there was ever any doubt: Je absolutely t’aime.

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