Why Jane Birkin Had the Right Idea About Getting Older

Jane Birkin lounges on the stone steps in front of the Eiffel Tower as she unceremoniously dumps the contents of her beat-up black handbag onto the ground. An avalanche of personal items cascades out: crumpled-up papers, scrawled-upon notebooks, pens, a tube of pink and green Maybelline mascara, a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Gamblers. As her signature bangs blow breezily in the wind, she says to the camera with a knowing smile, “Find anything out after seeing what’s in the bag? When you show it all, you reveal very little.”

This famous scene is from the 1988 documentary Jane B. par Agnès V, in which the Belgian-born French New Wave director Agnès Varda trained her lens on Birkin as she contemplated her past loves, life as an artistic muse, motherhood, and turning 40. While fashion fans may be drawn to that moment for its depiction of Birkin’s original namesake bag—which recently sold at Sotheby’s at auction for just over ten million dollars—the film marked a turning point for Birkin for more personal reasons (even as the bag grew to become a stratospherically expensive status symbol, Birkin herself never saw a profit from, nor was terribly attached to, the prestige associated with it.)

Rather, the documentary served as Birkin’s reintroduction to audiences as a complex, actualized adult, one who had finally grown beyond her years spent in the cultural spotlight as the ultimate “woman-child” of the sixties and seventies, as author Marisa Meltzer writes in the new biography, It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, out October 7 via Simon & Schuster.

“That was a big turning point, when her life really shifted,” Marisa tells W of Jane B par Agnès V. “Varda was maybe at least a decade older than Birkin, and was like, ‘Oh, 40? No problem. You’re going to love 40.’” The film, Meltzer writes, “is an exploration of the female gaze, which Birkin had never put herself under—perhaps, something she may even have avoided up until that point.”

Around the same time, Vardas filmed Birkin’s solo concert at The Bataclan in Paris, which marked the first time she had ever sung live, rather than lip-syncing the pop hits written for her by her ex, Serge Gainsbourg. For the big night, Birkin eschewed her trademark French ingenue look, impulsively shearing her hair into a pixie cut and dabbing on just a tiny bit of makeup—a touch of red lipstick— as “an act of abandoning her girlhood,” Meltzer writes. “By doing it, she also looked less classically pretty.” For her outfit, she tucked an oversized men’s shirt into matching white trousers, accessorizing with a thin red belt and sneakers. “It was kind of a strange outfit for someone who had routinely shown up to things in Paco Rabanne and was friends with YSL,” Meltzer adds. “It was another big moment of, ‘I’m not the Jane you think you know.’”

“I wasn’t going to swing my hair around like Serge wanted me to or lick my lips, which is what he thought I should do,” Birkin said of the performance in 2016. “Because that was the person he had known before. Such a Lolita, I didn’t want to do that anymore.”

Moments like these capture the spirit of Birkin for It Girl, which charts her journey from a gawky young woman growing up in London to becoming one of Paris’s favorite adopted daughters. To write the book, Meltzer immersed herself in Birkin’s life, decamping with her dog, Joan, to Birkin’s old neighborhood in the 16th Arrondissement and poring over diaries, photographs, and fashion archives. The result is a biography that captures the rawness of Birkin’s life and the contradictions of a woman who was making things up as she went along.

A true fashion icon regularly referenced on designer moodboards, Birkin had a lesser-known but extremely prolific cinema career, acting in at least 19 films, in addition to her success as a singer. She also became a mother to three daughters, Kate, Charlotte, and Lou, at 20, 23, and 36. Meltzer explores Birkin’s relationships with the volatile men she became most closely associated with—Gainsbourg, director Jacques Doillon—and her repeated efforts to break free from the constraints of possessive partnerships and become her own muse, all the way up until her death at the age of 76 in 2023.

One of the most interesting threads through It Girl is how Birkin handled her transition from being a sex symbol and emblem of Baby Boomer youth culture to the enduring style icon she remained all through her years: walking the runway for Martin Margiela for Hermès in her 50s, creating a perfume for Miller Harris in her 60s, designing a capsule collection for APC in her 70s. She first made her name rejecting the rigid style of her parents’ generation, trading heels, bullet bras, corsetry, and crinolines for miniskirts, boots, and slips worn as dresses. But as she aged, Birkin continued to redefine the boundaries of gender and style.

“Around her mid-thirties into her forties, she’d always had a casual day-to-day style, but it was still pretty sexy,” Meltzer says. “A lot of tight jeans, super short shorts, and a Mary Jane.” That began to change, as Birkin “stopped feeling like herself in a gown,” Meltzer says. “The part I love is that she wasn’t like, ‘I don’t care about fashion.’ It was just that she wore the custom YSL suits with an open-neck silk blouse under.” Much of the way Birkin dressed in the ’90s and 2000s—Levi’s and big cashmere sweaters, for instance—looks very current now. “I hate to use the phrase quiet luxury, but it has that look,” Meltzer says. “It looks a bit like The Row.”

Birkin took a similarly low-key approach to beauty, favoring the concept of aging gracefully in the traditional sense. Meltzer writes that while Birkin may have gotten “a little bit of Botox” for her forehead lines, she forewent further cosmetic surgery, though she sometimes wondered if she should get more done. “She had the connections and means to get a good facelift or eyelift, and plenty of her cohort, I’m sure, did,” Meltzer says. “She chose not to.”

In our current era of facelift fever, Birkin’s cosmetic minimalism is appealing. As Meltzer suggests, if you have that kind of extra money lying around, why not take your friends on an incredible trip or buy a small cottage in Greece instead? “I’d like to think that Jane Birkin might have felt kind of the same way that I do, at 48,” Meltzer says. “Which is: Is this really what I want to be doing with my time and money?”

When she was in her mid-70s, Birkin’s middle daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, asked her when she would stop caring about her looks. Birkin answered that “she thought she personally had already reached that point,” Meltzer writes. “She wanted to remove mirrors from her home, stop thinking about what she looked like, and do other things. To be in the world, unfettered by expectation.”

But while Birkin remained steadfast in her decision not to touch her face, she wasn’t totally immune to societal pressure. “She was going through the debates that we all go through,” Meltzer says. “Should I try to chase youth and beauty, or am I fine how I am?” Birkin was ahead of her time by “being public about how raw and confusing aging is, and what a mind fuck it is on everyone.”

“I wish we had more women like her, talking about aging in a really candid way,” Meltzer adds. “People certainly have the right to get a deep plane facelift, but I also want to see people on film and in the public eye who haven’t. Non-facelift representation is important. I really feel like she was a great example of how to stay vibrant and current and also not take a scalpel to your face.”