Marisa Meltzer’s new book, It Girl (Atria, 2025), traces the life of Jane Birkin: her privileged London upbringing, her rise as style icon and trendsetter, her romantic partnerships with famous men, and her role in creating the Hermés Birkin Bag. Of course Birkin, who died in 2023 at age 76, was more than the men and the objects she inspired. She was an actor and singer in her own right. She was a daughter and mother of three. And as her journals—from which Meltzer drew heavily for her research—reveal, she lived a rich interior life that didn’t always square with her public persona.
Meltzer is practiced at the art of bringing cultural phenomena to life; her previous books cover Sassy magazine, Weight Watchers, and the beauty brand Glossier. And her biography of Birkin has all the ingredients of a juicy Vanity Fair longread (which Meltzer herself has written): beautiful people and an engrossing plot, brought to life in an elevated yet accessible writing style. But above all, the book is kind to a woman who—mistreated by her partners and the media alike—received less than her fair share of kindness in life.
Meltzer’s writing shines in her descriptions of the clothing and style in the book. Take, for example, this sentence about Birkin’s own Birkin bag, a designer purse that sells for tens of thousands of dollars: “She let the bag get completely beat up—not merely some scratches and patina from wear, but covered in stickers and keychains and with a nail clipper hanging off the handle.” I can think of no better way to illustrate Birkin’s distinctive nonchalance.
Meltzer’s detailing of Birkin’s life quickly exposes the artifice of the it girl and its many contradictions: Birkin was known for epitomizing the “French girl” look, but she was English. The big eyes and boyish figure that made her a sex symbol were the same features that made her seem childlike. And the hallmark of her style was seeming to have no style at all. (Her signature perfume is called L’Air de Rien, translation: “the air of nothing.”) Perhaps, then, the it girl is the canvas onto which a culture projects its own opposing desires and pathologies.
At 18, Birkin married 32-year-old composer John Barry, an abusive and absent partner. Birkin, lonely, miserable, and aspiring to act, caught a big break, which Meltzer captures in one devastating sentence: “At a party in early 1966, she met Warren Beatty, who flirted with her.” Beatty came to a play she was in and cast her in one of his movies. She and Beatty were never romantic, but from that point on her desirability in the eyes of men would become the primary force propelling her career.
Birkin soon left Barry and took up with the famous French songwriter and pop star Serge Gainsbourg. 17 years her senior, Gainsbourg had a lifelong obsession with Lolita. A poster from the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation hung on a wall of his home, alongside portraits of ex-lovers and a bronze cast of Birkin’s bust. Even the French considered him a provocateur. Meltzer writes that Gainsbourg “was very clear about his desire to mold young female artists.” He once told a teen magazine, “I’d like to discover a 12 or 13 year old girl—no older—and find a style for her.” Later, he did just that with his and Birkin’s daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, writing a duet for the 13-year-old and himself called “Lemon Incest” that launched her singing career. The music video shows the father and underage daughter partly undressed and in bed together.
Gainsbourg wrote breathy, falsetto songs for Birkin, inspired by Lolita—who else!—that fueled her rise to fame. Meltzer doesn’t shy away from the more unflattering characteristics of Gainsbourg—after whom Paris recently named a metro station—but I found her pronouncement of the relationship as “imbalanced” to be strangely euphemistic. By age 27, Birkin wondered if “she was aging out of his interest,” since “he didn’t hesitate to check out seventeen-year-old girls in front of her.” When Birkin performed Gainsbourg’s songs later in life, she said, “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. Because that was the person he had known before. Such a Lolita. I didn’t want to do that anymore.” Meltzer fails to point out that while Birkin uses “Lolita” as a slur meaning something akin to seductress, the character Vladimir Nabokov originally created was a child groomed and molested by a sexual predator.
Gainsbourg was a possessive partner. But Birkin found autonomy through her personal style and acting. Meltzer notes that clothing was one area where Birkin could exert complete control. Acting, too, allowed her to perform agency if not exert it. Male directors frequently saw and cast Birkin as a nymphette. As Meltzer writes, “By the time she was twenty-two, Birkin had played pouty, sexually charged free spirits in Blow-Up, Slogan, and La piscine, solidifying her status as a go-to for the role of a wide-eyed ingénue.”
Birkin eventually left Gainsbourg and took up with the French director Jacques Doillon. Throughout her career, she earned three nominations for the César—the national film award of France—and wrote and directed the autobiographical film Boxes. But everyone from the public to the media considered Birkin not a true artist (like her romantic partners), but rather, a muse. Birkin claimed, “I was delighted to be Serge’s object of desire, the person who inspired him. … I was a kind of object and that’s what I wanted to be.” Meltzer adds, “Birkin was in control of her own objectification, in other words, and she wanted the world to know it.” Birkin’s claim of being in control of her own objectification sounds vaguely feminist but in reality highlights just how much misogyny limited her creative career. Meltzer often takes Birkin’s words at face value like this, when the book would be better served by a dab of skepticism. As another example, she relays the origin myth of the Birkin bag so credulously that it reads like marketing copy for Hermés:
As [Birkin] boarded the plane, all her life’s affairs were falling out of [her bag]: wallet, keys, pens, business cards, diapers for Lou, cigarettes, glasses.
The man seated next to her eyed the scenario and suggested she should consider owning a bag with pockets. She sighed and told him that the day Hermés made one with pockets, that would be lovely, and she would buy it. He responded that he was Hermés, so he could do exactly that.
Reading passages like this one, I craved a deeper layer of analysis from the book, one that was a little less fawning of the celebrities at the story’s core. Meltzer has a gift for storytelling, but when she probes her story for meaning, she emerges with platitudes such as, “Jane Birkin deserved, at long last, to be at the center of her own narrative.”
I often Google image-searched Birkin as I read this book. While celebrities known for their beauty typically bore me, I’ve always found Birkin hard to look away from. Maybe it’s her big eyes looking right at the camera. Or her casually chic style begging me to emulate it. As I scrolled, I noticed that around the time she turned 40, she started smiling in photos. Per Meltzer’s account, this was also when she escaped the gaze of male auteurs, teaming up with French New Wave director Agnès Varda for the 1988 film Jane B. par Agnès V. Varda saw Birkin as more than a nymphette. In fact, she “thought forty was when a woman came into her own personally and artistically.” (As I turn forty, I’m happy to believe her.)
In middle age and beyond, Birkin continued to both star in films and make her own. She even went on tour performing the songs she’d created with Gainsbourg. Meltzer recounts a day when a stranger approached Birkin and her adult songwriter daughter, Lou Doillon. The stranger said to Lou, “Oh God, I just love what you write.” Then they turned to Birkin and added, “And you’re as pretty as ever.” Birkin later said, “I wish they had complimented me on my work.”
It Girl will no doubt bring Birkin closer to achieving this wish, albeit posthumously. Meltzer reveals the fully fleshed-out human being beneath the face, clothing, and male partners that made Birkin famous. And Birkin’s je-ne-sais-quoi that captured the public’s attention during her lifetime is still at work—on me, on Meltzer, and on the many readers who will buy this book. But Meltzer’s account raises more questions than she attempts to answer. Namely: what is it? And can it explain why Birkin’s life is the one we are currently examining, when there are so many others out there who likewise deserve to be “at the center of [their] own narrative”?
To be an it girl is to enjoy proximity to power without the actual power. But it also works the other way around: The it girl possesses it—beauty, attention, aliveness. And the thinking that if you can possess her, you can possess it too, unfortunately still endures. The it girl moniker reveals itself in who it objectifies: There’s no “it boy” or “it man” or even “it woman.” There is, however, an “it bag”—also named Birkin. Like the girl, even at its most iconic, it remains a product to be consumed.
