00:02:29.680I mean, talk to me a little bit about that.
00:02:31.320And then we'll back up and go through Jane's whole story and the history.
00:02:36.580But tell me a little bit about her power of influence over so many different aspects of culture.0.90
00:02:44.480yeah I mean I think that she's best known as a muse depend in different sort of roads into her
00:02:54.700I discovered her when I was in college um listening to her 60s music that she made with
00:03:03.380Serge Gainsbourg um who was like her lover of many years um but then she's also of course
00:03:10.820the namesake for the Birkin bag, which is totally dwarfed her. I mean, I was at the auction in Paris
00:03:17.460this summer when it got $10.1 million for the original bag. And then she was also amused to
00:03:27.100directors and even to her brother, who is a photographer to a certain extent, and to her
00:03:33.400daughter who is a photographer. And, you know, so it's this kind of interesting legacy of being
00:03:42.020known as a source of inspiration, but kind of being on the side to someone else who's considered
00:03:50.440a great artistic genius. And, you know, I had a hunch, just like so many women who are credited
00:03:56.960as being sort of the source for someone, that there is probably a lot more there, both in terms
00:04:03.360of what her life, you know, what was going on in her life and how she viewed herself
00:04:11.720and then maybe how she wanted to be remembered.
00:04:16.200And so, you know, whether you're seeing photos of her from 1969 wearing a mini dress and,
00:04:24.500you know, Rapeto ballet flats in a basket as a bag and just thinking this woman looks
00:04:29.980cool or hearing her music or seeing her in the movie La Piscine or thinking about how great a
00:04:36.100Birkenberg, this is kind of the story behind and how this woman became this kind of ultimate
00:04:43.96020th century figure. I want to dissect that idea of a muse for a minute because for me,
00:04:53.260and I could be totally wrong. It feels like such a word that we ascribe to women. It's that she
00:05:01.420was a muse, not necessarily a collaborator, not necessarily someone who genuinely contributed
00:05:08.140to creative pursuits, but just this like ephemeral thing almost that then sparked the creativity of
00:05:16.180a genius man. I don't love it. I don't love the word. What do you think of it?
00:05:20.300yeah I don't love it either and I think I came into I wanted to write about her and I was
00:05:27.140interested in her but part of that was kind of my own cynicism because I have never identified
00:05:34.560as a muse I think it's a kind of a certain type of soft like encouraging woman at least that's
00:05:41.280how I kind of think of it that I am very not I was always yeah no so I am I am also not yeah
00:05:48.460And I'm I'm kind of blunt and brash. And I think most importantly, I always wanted to be like the artistic genius or something like I wanted to be the mercurial person with a reputation.
00:06:04.880and you know that's my own sort of thing to analyze but I wanted to put myself at the center
00:06:14.560and so I was fascinated by someone who seemed kind of okay with not being seen that way or at least
00:06:22.780by all public appearances and yeah I mean I think one of the sort of most obvious differences that
00:06:30.340you could point to in terms of how women and men are viewed differently is that, you know,
00:06:38.300when the Birkin bag was named after her, it was basically the same year that Michael Jordan got
00:06:44.620his huge deal with Nike for Air Jordan. And he's made hundreds of millions, billions out of that,
00:06:53.360you know, true business partnership. And it's different because he went into it as a business
00:07:00.120partnership and marketed it as such. But she became the namesake of the most famous bag of
00:07:09.020all time and was happy to just, you know, get one for free now and then. She had like five over the
00:07:19.380course of her life. She never made money off of it. Eventually, Hermes started donating about,
00:07:25.980I think, reportedly like 40,000 euros a year to charity. But considering that the cheapest
00:07:34.460Hermes bag that one could buy at retail is around $15,000, that's nothing. You know,
00:07:43.500some of their higher end bags sell well into the six figures. So, but also there's this history
00:07:49.940and fashion of being a muse you know Hermes named another bag that had already existed but after
00:07:56.740Grace Kelly and it's an honor and I don't mean to say that she was duped or anything it just wasn't
00:08:05.920how her kind of class and social circle viewed these things but I think that is one big change
00:08:14.960in influence between then and now which is now first you had it girls and influencers with
00:08:24.440collaborations like you know alexa chung for h&m i actually don't know if that was specifically
00:08:31.240one that she did but you know what i mean and um and you can you could kind of quantify their
00:08:37.240influence because the Kardashians who are, you know, once just sort of LA wannabe it girls could
00:08:44.960say, I have 3 million followers on Instagram and you could sell directly to these people. And that
00:08:52.420I think has completely changed the marketplace. And then you get into people like Emily Weiss
00:08:58.620from Glossier, who was the subject of my last book, who was kind of a New York influencer who
00:09:03.260became a full-on businesswoman girl boss with Glossier or Haley B. Bird, once just kind of0.82
00:09:13.740an influencer and a model, now selling Road Beauty, her brand, for over a billion dollars.
00:09:19.840And I'm sure there are examples not in the world of beauty, but it is kind of this evolution of
00:09:26.320influence into an actual business instead of just being this kind of ephemeral thing.
00:09:33.260yeah i i totally agree i also think it's just maybe taken a little bit longer for women to
00:09:42.860get to the point of well pay me well yeah okay you're you you are using my name often my image
00:09:52.180and i we talked about this with influencers in the early episodes of under the influence
00:09:56.380that as you said in the beginning it was people just getting free stuff and posting stuff and
00:10:01.300doing things because they were getting free stuff. And finally, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs
00:10:06.260were like, no, I want money for this. Yeah. Yeah. You're making a lot of money off of me and I'm
00:10:13.480getting two free cashmere sweaters or something like that. Two free cashmere sweaters. Exactly.
00:10:19.200Exactly. I wasn't going to get into it this early, but now I feel like we have to. Can you tell us
00:10:24.480the story of how the Birkin bag came to be? Because I think that is how a lot of people
00:10:28.380come to Jane Birkin, especially these days. They're like, well, what is the history of
00:10:35.500this Birkin bag? I actually think that might have been how I came to her through the Birkin bag
00:10:40.880and also through Serge Gainsbourg, who one day I went down a weird rabbit hole about.
00:10:48.400So I think some people, you know, just assume the Birkin bag is just a name and they don't know
00:10:56.440there's a person let alone actually a pretty compelling story behind it so it's almost like
00:11:02.620a meet cute in a rom-com Jane Birkin was upgraded to first class on a flight sometime in the like
00:11:11.820around 1983 1984 from London to Paris and she had been carrying a literal basket as a bag since she
00:11:21.480was a teenager and you know all the stuff is falling out of it because she was the kind of
00:11:27.600person who carried like a dostoevsky novel and tylenol and you know her like notebook and you
00:11:35.340know loose change and all that kind of stuff shambolic and her seatmate was sort of saying
00:11:43.940you know you should you should get a bag with zippers or something and she said well
00:11:49.700that bag isn't working for you my friend yeah exactly and um I think also her boyfriend had
00:11:57.180run over that basket or somehow it was extra damaged like in the night before in a fight
00:12:02.400so she kind of laughed and said joke that when Hermes makes a bag like that then she'll do it
00:12:12.680And he said, well, I am Hermes. And it turns out he was Jean-Louis Dumas, who was the basically CEO of Hermes and the Dumas family has owned the brand. You know, it's basically the family that owned and started the brand. And so these are not the people that I sit next to on planes.
00:12:34.260Well, she said that she had been upgraded to first class for a one hour flight or even less. 45 minute flight. But it does ring true to me that she is someone who would be fine sitting in coach for a short flight. She always seemed pretty down to earth.
00:12:55.060And that's actually another thing about influence is that she didn't seem that motivated by money.
00:13:43.600And Hermes has never had like celebrity backed campaigns.
00:13:48.060It still doesn't. So the bag took a bit to catch on. But, you know, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy had one. And slowly it became, you know, a plot line on Sex and the City and Gilmore Girls and every kind of young star or rapper or, you know, Melania Trump carried them. And it became this kind of signal in our society, as I'm sure everyone knows, of kind of just making it.
00:14:16.080I think that I came across it from Sex and the City for the first time, which I had been about 17 years old. Yeah, that makes sense.
00:14:25.000Yeah, I think this was about, I think, 2001 or so is when the Sex and the City episode aired.
00:14:32.500And so that was about maybe 15 years or so after the bag was introduced.
00:14:38.300But again, it was a long, you know, sort of path.
00:14:42.880Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, you know, would have worn hers in 98 or so, 97.
00:14:49.220so yeah that was you know it took some time to become coveted and now it's the most coveted
00:14:57.920literally the most coveted okay let's take a quick break and when we get back i want to go
00:15:03.580a little bit through jane's early life and how she became the kind of prototypical it girl
00:15:11.380chew on this bold question from dentine gum is it ever okay to compliment a millennial
00:15:21.400on their skinny jeans in 2026 dentine chew bold0.62
00:15:30.100okay we are back talk to me about where jane came from i mean she she did she did come from
00:15:42.800a privileged background right but how how did she get to the point where all of a sudden she was this
00:15:49.180early icon of street style yeah so she was born into a kind of creative family from london
00:15:59.360Her dad had been in the military, but her mother was a very well-known stage actress, was also a muse, actually, to Noel Coward, the great playwright.
00:16:11.400And she had kind of a typical life of that sort of class, had been sent to boarding school very young and really didn't like it, and eventually convinced her parents to leave school probably around the time she was 16 years old.
00:16:28.460and she ended up going to kind of a finishing school in Paris something to sort of you know
00:16:36.140kill time before she could get married basically and she kind of fell in love with style and
00:16:46.440started to kind of come to know herself and moved back to England and decided to start
00:16:54.180auditioning and got some small but significant roles in The Knack or How to Get It, which was a
00:17:02.420kind of a con-winning big movie at the time. She was in a Cadbury commercial. She was in this big
00:17:10.640Daily Mail spread on kind of up-and-comers for 1965, along with Nico and, you know, some other
00:17:20.320kind of soon to be famous 60s characters. And she lived in Chelsea with her parents. And that
00:17:28.520was kind of, you know, ground zero for where a lot of the fashion and kind of things of the time
00:17:36.940in that youthquake swing 60s era was happening. On top of that, her brother, Andrew, became
00:17:47.040like a assistant director or something like that for the Beatles for some of their work. And so
00:17:55.760they were kind of part of her scene. She had grown up knowing Hayley Mills closely,
00:18:02.960the Parent Trap actress. My favorite Parent Trap is the Hayley Mills version.0.90
00:18:07.520Yeah, me too. In fact, I should admit, I shouldn't admit this, but I've never seen
00:18:11.560the Lindsay Lohan version I don't know if you need to if you already love the original I love
00:18:18.140the original yeah I love the original so much I wanted to be both Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills
00:18:22.800I know I know I think I grew up not far from where California Hayley Mills was supposed to live
00:18:31.060but was spiritually more like the British Hayley Mills yeah yeah I feel that I really
00:18:38.580I do. But yeah, this is the kind of book which is fun, I think, where there's a lot of tiny
00:18:45.820little famous people popping up here and there because that was her world. She, classic kind
00:18:52.500of girl about town, vaguely a multi-hyphenate, on the come up, beautiful, had enough money that,
00:19:01.720you know, she didn't have to like waitress in her spare time or do anything beyond just kind of
00:19:07.400be in little parts and audition and live with her parents. And she started dating
00:19:14.280John Barry, who had composed all the music for the James Bond movies when she was 17 and he was
00:19:22.52032 or something like that, already divorced with kids. And she married at 18 and they had a kid
00:19:32.020right away and it was a total disaster of a marriage but that added another layer of this0.78
00:19:38.420young rising beautiful star with this kind of famous husband they're a sexy couple and um
00:19:45.840you know it's this thing that magazines like to kind of nod to downtown or youth culture
00:19:54.360But something like Vogue was able to kind of do it by covering someone like Jane Birkin, who dressed in that way, but still had kind of a pedigree and was sort of rich and fancy and digestible and wasn't like a dirty, like hippie or anything too extreme in her style.
00:20:17.420And then she did what so few eight girls do, which is move to a different country and kind of embody a whole different country and era in the 70s in Paris.
00:20:31.540well and her life wasn't all idyllic and yes she came from this this privileged background
00:20:38.800but she i mean she had a lot of really terrible run-ins with fairly terrible men that that
00:20:46.300treated women very badly when she was still a child yeah actually i mean yeah so so young i
00:20:54.420I mean, even when she married Mary and had her first child, and he was a philanderer, right?
00:22:11.920And then she had this real predilection, I would say, for these kind of genius guys, most of whom were older, if not significantly older. First, it was John Barry, who was 15 or so years older than her, and then Serge Gainsbourg, who was almost 20 years older than her.
00:22:33.980and you know often with like a power differential because they had been famous much longer than her
00:22:42.480and she was kind of the muse and so at a certain point though you have to wonder
00:22:48.680you know she has plenty of agency and when you are 35 and still making decisions like that
00:22:57.100you know how much of it is just you go towards what's recognizable um and also I also tried to
00:23:07.500leave room in the book for understanding that it was a different era and that relationships
00:23:13.700are complicated and that I you know that if she doesn't call herself an abused woman
00:23:20.480I need to point that out even if there was violence in a relationship so it's something
00:23:26.280to really chew on i would say no it really is and also and it's frustrating the person it's really
00:23:36.660frustrating and i hate to be the person that's like it was a different time but it was also a
00:23:39.860different time and it really was there were not that many options for a young woman who really
00:23:46.840wanted who wanted to see the world who wanted a life that was bigger than than what she saw her
00:23:53.400peers having aside from marriage to a powerful and creative man like there just were not that many
00:24:01.620not that many paths you didn't see that many role models and so I do think these are things
00:24:07.320worth chewing on and there's one point where she talks about how she kept a stick of of eyeliner
00:24:13.200under her pillow right so that yeah when she woke up in the morning um Barry wouldn't see0.98
00:24:18.140her tiny piggy eyes yeah well he was a real kind of verbally abusive jerk yeah yeah I mean she got0.99
00:24:25.560out of that but then she went to another relationship I think again it is layered0.98
00:24:33.000and I think that's the most sort of responsible thing I can do as a writer is say yeah Serge
00:24:40.280Gainsbourg was a lot older than her but when they met she was still a divorcee with a child she you
00:24:47.520know she was someone with life experience and she had been in two movies that had won
00:24:54.720you know awards at the Cannes Film Festival she wasn't yes there was a power in differential but
00:25:02.820it wasn't sort of like a Priscilla Presley and Elvis Presley situation right right which and I
00:25:10.420do think that we are very quick to kind of put things in boxes absolutely that way and you know
00:25:16.060I've dated people much older than me I've dated people much younger than me and I I don't have a
00:25:24.160problem with it I think what's I think the problem is when there are huge gaps in power or if you've
00:25:34.040met someone in a way that is uh you know I think it's I'm sure someone has genuinely fallen in
00:25:42.440love with their father's best friend but that to me would be a strange dynamic but you know
00:25:48.360that's a little gross but I don't know to each again but again if you're just you know she and
00:25:54.040Serge Gainsbourg were co-stars and love played love interest in a film and it's very normal for
00:26:00.860co-stars who were both single at the time and both going like fresh off of breakups to have
00:26:07.380a rebound love affair. Theirs, you know, lasted 12 years. And so I, you know, I do think that
00:26:16.160people need to resist kind of knee-jerk judgments at what she does, but also realize that, you know,
00:26:29.540she wasn't always making the best decisions for herself or for her daughters, you know,
00:26:35.040or anyone else like she definitely had sort of issues with um being a little bit sort of like
00:26:45.020not thinking things through I want to say for example Serge Gansborg once she she had a daughter
00:26:52.220Charlotte Gansborg who's you know sort of an influence and an it girl and a you know famous
00:26:57.680actor and singer in her own right um Serge who's always kind of a provocateur type recorded a song
00:27:06.280called Lemon Incest with her when she was a sort of preteen and Jane Birkin didn't get in the way
00:27:15.400of it and I don't think that the song should be taken literally I think that's pretty um a kind
00:27:23.140of you know flat reading of it but at the same time reductive yeah it's reductive but at the same
00:27:30.540time Serge was an alcoholic and lived to kind of piss people off so Jane then and she she and he
00:27:40.980had been on good terms and it would have been her to be the adult in the room not to say this is
00:27:46.820you know, against your, you know, I'm going to censor you, but more say, you know, is this a
00:27:53.780great time for our daughter and her developmental life to be recording the song and have to deal
00:28:00.200with being teased about it or being asked about it for the rest of her life or appearing in a
00:28:06.180video where she's, you know, in your arms? Like, are these, you know, are these maybe going to be
00:28:12.900the best for her and jane was so committed to sort of artistic freedom which i love about her but
00:28:21.500in some ways some of her choices were at odds with maybe what have been best for her or later
00:28:29.880her kids or whatever else or her career yeah yeah all right let's take one more quick break
00:28:37.960And when we get back, I want to talk a little bit about Jane as she aged.
00:29:14.440I'm always curious about what happens when a so-called it girl ages.1.00
00:29:19.300I'm going to throw out a wild example that is completely different from Jane.0.91
00:29:23.920But, you know, I used to be a gossip columnist.
00:29:27.240I covered the rise and subsequent many falls of Paris Hilton as an it girl.
00:29:32.180I think it's very interesting now to watch her as a as a middle-aged woman what was Jane's life like
00:29:41.420as as she grew up I I think you know there's there are probably similarities similarities
00:29:50.180and differences to Paris Hilton but I would say Jane Birkin did last um you know she was sort of
00:30:01.040in the news and culturally relevant, especially in France, where she lived from the time she was
00:30:07.42021 until she died almost, you know, 55 years later, that around probably her mid-30s,
00:30:19.160she ends up leaving Serge Gainsbourg for another guy, a famous kind of director and becomes the
00:30:26.180Muse and is in many of his films. Jacques Doyon has a daughter with him. But it was this kind of
00:30:33.900moment of steering her life and, you know, wanting to get out of the thumb of this man and wanting to
00:30:42.640kind of have her acting career be taken a bit more seriously. I think that after, you know, 15 years
00:30:51.140of playing kind of the ditzy English girl in movies she wanted to do something else and for
00:30:56.960the public to see her differently um but I think the real difference and what was kind of complicated
00:31:07.340is that it's not this kind of Hollywood ending it's not like and then she got cast in the role
00:31:13.680of a lifetime and you know she won an Oscar and she became hugely rich and famous in America and
00:31:20.800like the end good night like it wasn't like that she was in some well-regarded movies but she kind
00:31:28.120of dealt with this ditzy carefree kind of um stereotype caricature of herself for the rest of
00:31:36.880her life and again I think it went back to she wasn't motivated wholly by money she didn't seem
00:31:47.280to be motivated so wholly by ambition as opposed to a lot of other celebrities I think that she
00:31:54.040liked being kind of just successful enough she could tour her songs and was okay with being kind
00:32:03.000of a nostalgia act and she could act here and there but also she could live a nice life you
00:32:09.140know she lived in apartments in Paris with her dogs and her kids and her grandkids and
00:32:16.300went to the cafe and had a big rambling country house out you know a few hours away and I think
00:32:26.060those were her priorities which is admirable but you know very different I think from someone like
00:32:34.180Paris Hilton who still very much wants to be in the public eye and also wants to evolve a little
00:32:43.500bit like she wrote that memoir but I don't know that you know Paris Hilton is still DJing
00:32:48.280she's still wearing the same kind of clothes whereas Jane Birkin at a certain point
00:32:54.720thought that she didn't feel like herself and dresses and started wearing kind of
00:33:01.560trousers and men's button-up shirts and you know converse Chuck Taylors and tuxedos when she
00:33:11.220dressed up and she never, you know, now it sounds shocking. It shouldn't be, but she never got a
00:33:17.160facelift. I think she got like a tiny bit of Botox, but really her face was untouched. And then
00:33:22.840she dealt with cancer for many, many, many years, over a decade. And I think a lot of the treatments
00:33:29.980from that, you know, steroids and chemo and all of that have also changed her body. So she,
00:33:37.560you know you see a lot of her joking about how fat she had become and how much her face had
00:33:44.400changed and i think that was probably a lot harder on her than maybe even she realized
00:33:52.260i do love that she chose not to get a lot of extreme plastic surgery i mean i have to say
00:33:58.700i truly believe we are living in the age of extreme plastic surgery everyone looks the same
00:34:03.460That's what I always think. And then it just keeps getting more extreme. So I don't. Yeah, I don't know. And also, we don't even live in California or Miami or Texas or anywhere, Utah, where there's a lot of extreme plastic surgery, you know.
00:34:20.100will um but yeah i think people are starting to look um a bit alien and also for me part of it
00:34:31.600comes down to if i had the money for a facelift it's just not what i want to spend that money on
00:34:38.720it's not what i'm gonna spend that money on i mean i get botox i talk about it all the time
00:34:43.420not and I allow myself the idea that I could change my mind but as I get it's kind of like
00:34:50.600for me as I got closer to I never really wanted kids and as other friends had kids and I got
00:34:57.100closer and closer age and then you know it became very clear to me that that's not what I wanted
00:35:03.080because I saw what it was and I think it's kind of the same thing with facelifts like
00:35:07.940Now that I'm in an age where people fully get them at my age, I'm like, A, I don't have the money. B, I'm not going to finance it. And C, even if I did have the money, I'd much rather, I don't know, take six months or a year off or go on a crazy vacation with all of my friends. Or I'd rather have a Birkenback more than a facelift.
00:35:29.920Oh, that's interesting. Oh, see, I think I'd have a facelift over a Birkenback, but I would travel around the world over a facelift.
00:35:37.300Absolutely. But I think, and this is different, even though it is our job to be in the public eye to a certain extent, my acclaim and my career has never been about me being pretty or looks at all.0.98
00:35:59.200And so it really doesn't matter. And it's not part of my narrative, really, whereas it was for Jane Birkin. And so I think it's even a more kind of radical or brave choice not to, quote unquote, keep up with them, even though, you know, she stayed, felt she had cool style.
00:36:21.920she went to cool parties you know she was dressed by great designers she didn't get a facelift she
00:36:31.240looked like someone who had smoked and drank and probably didn't use a lot of sunscreen and lived
00:36:38.720a life of a baby boomer for sure you know and who had dealt with death and heartbreak and you know
00:36:46.940a lot of things in cancer that, um, you know, come up, which is, I think, part of why her story
00:36:53.620is so interesting that it's on this kind of very glamorous stage, this international stage, but
00:37:02.120a lot of it is variations of what every woman deals with. Aging, children, addiction,
00:37:11.860death you know cheating husbands irrelevance career disappointment jealousy exactly and so
00:37:24.180you know i think that it's um fascinating to see how she dealt with those things some of which
00:37:33.800was more head-on and others were just sort of more like bumbling through
00:37:38.820i'm i would be so curious uh to know how she would have embraced social media
00:37:47.940if at all had she lived during this time well she only died two years ago so she definitely
00:37:56.600true no i think maybe maybe had she had she been at her peak during this time oh i see what you
00:38:03.920mean yeah I mean in some ways that was what fascinated me about her because she had been a
00:38:14.560person whose image is famous but a lot of people who see black and white photos of her in the 60s
00:38:23.700wearing a mini skirt you know next to like a hot guy or wearing you know knit shorts or whatever
00:38:29.900don't necessarily know who she is, if she's famous, what the backstory is. And also people
00:38:37.900are just seeing the highlight reels of her life, you know, on the red carpet, on the cover of a
00:38:44.760magazine, you know, posed with her daughters looking adorable and sexy at the same time.
00:38:50.720and a lot of us are learning how to navigate that in our own lives in the age of social media
00:39:00.400when all people might know or recognize of us might be just visual or our name or uh you know
00:39:09.600our vacation photos and so in a way she had to kind of uh deal with that before a lot of other
00:39:19.340people did. I think I imagine she would have, you know, if Instagram or there had been some
00:39:25.640equivalent in the 60s, I'm sure she would have been, you know, all over it. But who knows?
00:39:35.780Who knows? Who knows? I have one bone to pick with you about this fantastic book.