Shaping Serge Gainsbourg: Jane Birkin’s vital fashion advice for every man
“Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts.” – Serge Gainsbourg (1928 – 1991)
At a time when finding her feet in the public eye, Jane Birkin appeared nude in the controversial but brilliant Michelangelo Antonioni film, Blow-Up. While some may say she was looking for fame, instead, she found infamy. Clearly, the times in little old England were not quite as liberal as she had supposed. The daughter of an actor and spy, living in artistic circles after she married the famed James Bond composer John Barry, such a liberal presupposition was understandable. As was a degree of naivety, after all, Barry was 30 when he swooned for the 17-year-old star in the making, and a whirlwind romance followed.
However, this marriage was ill-fated. By 1968, she was divorced with a daughter in tow. Her career was in turmoil, and her life was in tatters. Thankfully, the next chapters happen quickly in Birkin’s life, as she told French Vogue: “Everything around me collapsed. I didn’t want to stay at home waiting for something to happen. I was in a restaurant on King’s Road with my friend Gabrielle and we heard about an audition for a French film, Slogan, which the prettiest girls in London were flocking to.”
With her fate in England uncertain and emotional distress pervading over her personal life, France offered Birkin a fresh start as the French New Wave blossomed. She had the perfect face, attitude, and artistic desire to fit it. She was cast in her French cinema debut, and soon enough, Birkin was at a party where the part-troubadour, part-human-smoke-machine Serge Gainsbourg was in attendance. When he schmoozed over to Birkin, the controversial undertones from her first chapter of life would bleed through onto the next pages.
“We must have represented a form of freedom,” Birkin said of the image that the power couple presented to the awestruck Republique. “The twenty-year age gap, our lifestyle, we went out at night and came home to wake up Kate and Charlotte before school, and then slept in the daytime. That was my fantasy, our lack of taboos [ … ]. Serge used to say: ‘We are not an immoral couple, we are an amoral couple’.”
While Gainsbourg may have been the star and Birkin the struggling actor when they met, it was the new femme fatale of the French new wave who had the biggest influence on the other. Gainsbourg might have had a few hits and a string of successful albums under his belt when they met, but he was a cult hero more so than a mainstream trailblazer. With a few tweaks, Birkin helped to establish a new image that hundreds of menthol shallow-smoking hipsters in Mayfair are still trying and failing to mimic.
Her instructions, however, are simple. First things first, if you get fashion advice from Birkin, then you ought to follow it, “It’s all about me, he listened to me a lot,” she told French Vogue. “To start with, it took him some time before he grew a beard; he looked younger than he was, and it gave him a complex. I thought he was very handsome with an eight-day beard, so he bought himself a trimmer and kept it like that. It looked like natural makeup, created shadows and sculpted his face.” It became his iconic look. In fact, now, you can’t picture him without one.
According to Birkin, there was a psychological appeal beyond the aesthetic perk of the beard to boot. “You want to look after men with beards because you have the feeling that they’d been sleeping rough,” Birkin mused. “And yet, I found that having no hair on his chest or his arms looked very distinguished. I bought him dowager-duchess-style bracelets that he wore on his wrist and a diamond to wear around his neck. It was stolen on one New Year’s Eve in Pigalle and I replaced it with a sapphire.”
However, her next piece of advice is her most important of all. “I’m allergic to socks,” she says. “You immediately imagine a guy naked with just his socks on, which is ghastly. One day, I was in the Repetto store and, in a basket full of sale items, I found a pair of men’s pumps in soft white glove leather. I bought them for Serge. He had flat feet and shoes hurt him. He wore those white pumps without socks his whole life. The same goes for underwear. I find it much more erotic to be naked under jeans. And I told him so.”
In response to this life-changing fashion advice that became a central tenet of his art as a whole (in typical French style), he penned her reams of poetry. “[It was] very flattering to have the most beautiful songs, probably, in the French language written for [you],” she happily reflected.
They were, in their own way, the most iconic-looking team around.
