Jane Birkin wore clothes like no one else. Why her style inspired multiple generations — including the current crop of influencers

Jane Birkin was the prototype for the modern fashion influencer. The embodiment of French je ne sais quoi, the British-born Parisienne’s style still has vast multi-generational appeal, judging by the flow of poignant tribute images that overwhelmed social feeds when she died on Sunday aged just 76. She was the inspiration for many people’s personal style narratives, including a huge number who were nowhere-near-born-yet at the height of her fame in the late 1960s and through the ’70s.

Actor, singer and activist were her occupations, but it is Birkin’s insouciant fashion sense that transcends time and space. The camera adored her, and the images of her dressed to do everyday things on the streets of France — carrying giant straw baskets, smoking cigarettes, gazing lovingly at her most famous paramour Serge Gainsbourg — remain in constant rotation.

So what is the secret to her enduring influence? Despite being born in England, with imperfect French verb conjugation skills, Birkin became the very essence of Gallic chic. French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron described her on the weekend as “a French icon” who “embodied freedom.”

There are few parallels in modern life of women who capture that something ineffable that everyone covets. Marilyn Monroe was the bombshell; Audrey Hepburn was the gamine. These were her peers, in terms of longevity and broad adulation of their image. But Birkin instinctively calibrated that headiest of style brews, the cool girl pushing boundaries. Her big 1969 song with Gainsbourg was banned by the Vatican for its sexual content and her sultry moans, though its raciness was offset by her fresh-faced hippie innocence.

She’s perhaps most famous today for lending her name to the Hermès Birkin, but the sacred way people look at that bag today is quite at odds with how Birkin herself used her namesake satchel. On a plane in 1984, Birkin’s worldly goods fell messily out of the overhead compartment; her seatmate happened to be Jean-Louis Dumas, then chairman of Hermès. He designed a large bag to hold all her stuff, and she agreed that they could put her name on it; a marketing match made in heaven, capitalizing on her otherworldly glamour. Hilariously, Birkin jammed the bags full to the brim, hung various bits and bobs off them, and sold them for charity on the regular. By contrast, modern Birkin collectors now build hermetically sealed and temperature-controlled wardrobes for their $10,000-plus handbags.

Birkin was not so precious about “stuff,” which is the reason she carried around a large straw basket in the first place. (It’s said her original straw bag, the star of so many current Instagram posts, was intentionally run over by director Jacques Doillon, her partner after Gainsbourg.)

What gives me the most pleasure about the revisiting of all things Birkin is that it will silence the brief and enervating trend of hating on big bags — the “capacious” bags so derided by the stealth-wealth denizens of “Succession.” If Jane Birkin could carry a giant bag and make it chic, we can all do so with impunity forevermore.

Birkin pioneered many fashion trends. There were her famous bangs, which often looked as if she cut them herself and which I’m certain are presented to hairdressers the world over as “French girl hair” inspiration photos. In her youth, she wore white crocheted crop tops and see-through knit dresses, both of which are really hot this summer. Her parade of Breton-striped shirts, bell-bottoms and espadrilles all look incredibly modern, too.

Birkin had three daughters. The photographer Kate Barry, from her first and only marriage to film music composer John Barry, died by suicide at the age of 46 in 2013. Her surviving daughters, actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, now 52, and singer, actress and model Lou Doillon, 40, are both public-facing style icons in their own right, older than a large portion of their mother’s fans.

But it is actually Birkin’s later years that interest me most. She refocused her energy on activism, working to support Amnesty International, AIDS causes and Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement. She put away the more revealing pieces of her youth and transitioned to a wardrobe of blue jeans with white T-shirts and white button-downs, sometimes fine white tuxedo shirts for special occasions. She adopted oversized men’s blazers as her hallmark, not just because they looked chic but because they had big pockets.

You have to love a woman so concerned with the practicality of how to carry her stuff around. This is why so many people, of all ages, had such a strong reaction to the loss of Jane Birkin. She was beautiful, yes, but more importantly she spent her whole life doing things her way, against the stream.

That is true style.

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