If you scroll the internet for more than a few minutes, there’s a good chance you’ll see a particular phrase parried about in almost every cultural pathway: It girl. Popularized by British writer and director Elinor Glyn in the 1920s, the term it girl describes a woman whose charm is hard to characterize but impossible to ignore. While it girls are wildly unique — model Grace Jones, actress Audrey Hepburn, or singer Aaliyah are a few examples — one of the things It girls have in common is the response they invoke on the culture around them. People don’t want to just watch them. They want to be them.
That possessive, wide eyed desire is just one of the aspects that took Jane Birkin from a young British ingenue to a beloved — and extremely famous — fixture of French culture. After starring in smaller roles as a young woman she met famed French singer Serge Gainsbourg when they co-starred in the 1969 film Slogan. Her career in both film and music exploded with their partnership, which included the scandalous hit song “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus.” Even after her relationship with Gainsbourg ended, Birkin was known for her contributions to fashion and culture. She died in 2023 at her home in Paris, France.
When journalist and author Marisa Meltzer first started studying Birkin, she already knew a few basic things about her life and cultural presence. Birkin is best known for the bag that Hermes designer Jean-Louis Dumas created with her in mind, which she famously decorated with trinkets. But there’s been a resurgence of interest in her fashion and aesthetic choices online in the past few years. (It’s unclear what is driving this fascination.) A quick search on social app TikTok will bring up hundreds of viral videos showing how creators Jane-Birkin-ify their purses or bags, giving them the same wear and tear seen on Birkin’s signature accessory. There’s the French fashion she loved in her twenties, now re-imagined into a 2020s version with shift dresses and long, wide-legged jeans and plain T-shirts. Even the Labubu craze, a plush monster keychain from Chinese toy company PopMart, is reminiscent of the trinkets Birkin herself used to hang off her purse. But Meltzer tells Rolling Stone that as her research went on, she became incredibly interested in how being an it girl, and Birkin’s highly publicized career and relationships, affected Birkin herself.
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“Birkin is kind of the two-dimensional mood board staple online for her outfits, but you can easily see pictures of that and have no idea who she is,” Meltzer says. “Even some of her roles are forgotten or overlooked. So I thought this was a real opportunity to tell the story of someone’s life who was at the nexus of so many different kinds of fame and scenes, but who was fully human and had a story. She was more than just a hot girlfriend and a stylish dresser.”
In Meltzer’s new book It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, out Oct. 7, the author charts Birkin’s path from her precocious London childhood to her successful French film career, famous partners, late-in-life activism, and the bag that threatened to overshadow it all. Meltzer spoke with Rolling Stone about exploring Birkin’s unknown history and the internet culture directly inspired by this icon.
What was your relationship to Birkin’s work and life like prior to starting this book?
I knew the broad sketches of her life, and so I had a familiarity with her probably more through music than fashion. Then I was interested in her as a film star, through her work in [the films] Blow-up (1966) and La Piscine (1970). And then just in my adult lifetime, the Birkin bag has taken on a wild life of its own. It’s one of the most famous bags ever, kind of usurping her in some ways. She was at the nexus of a lot of my own personal obsessions, and I had a feeling there was just a lot more there.
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What kind of research did you do to build out this look at Jane Birkin? How do you think readers are going to get a new or deeper look at Jane through this book?
I did a lot of my research in Paris. I put all of my stuff in storage, brought my dog and we moved to Paris with two suitcases. I lived there for a few months and being on the ground really helped inform it. There was a certain amount of just living in her world and going to restaurants that she went to, and sadly, visiting her grave. I was also there right around the same time that the Serge Gainsbourg House Museum opened and I got to tour it, which was really spectacular and put a lot of things into focus. Nothing makes you understand how someone lived more than being in their home — especially one that’s been meticulously preserved. And then, of course, going to archives of magazines, libraries. It was a blend of deep archival research that many people wouldn’t really have ever seen, especially because so much of it was in French, and then also just doing my own research of interviewing people and putting myself in her world.
Walk me through some of the biases or assumptions about Birkin you had to combat.
I think the main one was her carefree naiveté. It’s very different from my own personality and my own deep cynicism towards the world. I admittedly find those kinds of traits annoying and repelling in women. It’s my own bias, but it’s like, “You’re in your thirties. Don’t you want to act like an adult? Don’t you want the world to treat you like a grown woman? So I was kind of confronting my own prejudices against that baby doll, feminine side that she wasn’t afraid to wield. Also, a lot of her life, and therefore the book, is about some of her famous relationships. That was something for me to get over. These are not necessarily men that I personally would have chosen. She certainly would not have chosen some of my exes. Those relationships were truly complicated, especially because they could involve violence. Especially in the time we live in, it would have been easy to portray her as a victim, purely. I’m not in the business of moralizing or psychoanalyzing someone. I wanted to kind of present the facts as I had researched them, and also how Birkin saw it for herself.
You did a lot of in-depth and archival research for this book. Was there anything you learned about Birkin that surprised you?
In some ways, it was her relationship to ambition. It would be very easy to try and view her life as this type of reclamation Hollywood ending, where she’s in her thirties and leaves her longtime lover and goes on to work with auteur directors and finds her voice. And she certainly has an artistic reclamation of her own. But she was actually only sort of ambitious. It’s not like she then became famous in America or the U.K. and won an Oscar and is now a household name. She stayed in France. She stayed working in European films. Money and fame and ambition were not the largest or sole motivators of her decision making and writing about that sort of life is a little more complicated than a traditional three-act success story.
Author Marisa Meltzer
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How do you think the concept of what it means to be an It girl has changed with the rise of the internet? Especially considering there’s been a huge Birkin renaissance in the past few years.
The internet has given people the ability to be an It girl anyway, anywhere. Although I think part of this definition is that someone else crowns you. I don’t think it’s something that you can just proclaim for yourself, although that certainly doesn’t stop people. But [the internet] has democratized it a bit in that you can follow your own niche It girls. You can learn about the biggest It girls in China or Korea or India or Nigeria — places that have really strong homegrown pop culture that doesn’t necessarily always make it to the U.S. That’s sort of the good part of the internet It girl. The bad part is that it flattens so many people. And the cycle and pace of everything going in and out of style is so heightened. Jane Birkin got to be an It girl for a long time, partially because it was a different era when those things happened more slowly.
Has it surprised you to see such a resurgence of interest in Birkin’s work and aesthetics re-emerge online, especially surrounding her famous Hermes bag?
I have been on the front lines. I was at the auction for the original Birkin this summer, so I’ve seen it all. I think the Birkin has been a bit of a slow burn because Hermes introduced it in the Eighties in a different time. It took off gradually, but it’s like the avalanche that’s building and building and getting bigger and faster. At some point, maybe around the Sex in the City era, it became this kind of shorthand for insider access. Then you saw it being coveted in the world of reality TV stars. The Birkin became this ultimate signal of making it. It meant you could afford a Birkin, you could get one, and then you had a place to wear a Birkin. That’s just gotten more and more intense with the rise of the resale market. There are more of them available than when you had to game the Hermes system to try to buy one. I don’t know if it’s her death or it’s social media, but the idea of Birkin-ifying your phone or your bag with trinkets and Labubus really reached a peak this summer. And that’s the ultimate status symbol — having a $15,000 bag and then trashing it.
Do you think Jane Birkin would ever wear a Labubu?
I don’t know that she would. Maybe if someone gifted her one? But she tended to be more political with how she decorated her bag. It was often Free Tibet stickers or Doctors Without Borders, or various organizations that she was involved in. She would dangle things like mandalas but also always had a nail clipper with her. It was a little more political, slash, white girl who travels internationally, slash, weirdo who wants to have a nail clipper with her at all times, and for some reason, decides I’ll just hook it to my bag culture.
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Where else do you, as a Jane Birkin biographer, see her influence slyly popping up in culture nowadays?
Haircuts. Bangs are everywhere. My biggest accomplishment with this book is never even considering getting bangs [Laughs.] We have very different hair, but it’s tempting. She tempts people. A lot of her famous clothes from her young life, the macrame crochet dresses, the sheer T-shirts, the old Levi’s, the Mary Janes, you could wear all of those clothes now, and not even look particularly retro. You’d just look cool. But also, I think the way that she dressed when she was in middle age and beyond is kind of unsung. She wore oversized sweaters and big white men’s shirts and corduroys with Converse, which is how a lot of women dress now. She really adopted that look in the Eighties, and stuck with it. She let herself evolve in her style and in how she saw herself, which I think is probably key to her own happiness and also longevity.
Your books like focus on feminist revolutions in different key aspects of culture. But in the past few years, you’ve focused on how big “girl boss” figures built their fortunes, like with Glossy, which is a deep dive on the founding of Glossier, or This Is Big, which charts the history of Weight Watchers. Where do you see It Girl fitting in?
I love people that are intertwined with a certain time period, because, as a writer, I love the challenge and the color and the details of sort of bringing those times alive. Birkin was in the center of two of the most exciting [eras] for me, which is the Youthquake Swinging Sixties era of London, and then the loose nightclub allure of Paris in the Seventies. That was part of it, just getting into an era that fascinates me. But I mainly like to tell stories about women. And [Birkin] is the ultimate written off, two dimensional person where her name no longer belongs to her. I always joke, maybe someday I’ll write about a man. But it hasn’t happened yet.
