saturday style icon: jane birkin

The beautiful Jane Birkin (maybe I should change "Style Inspiration Saturday" to "Beautiful Women I Wish I Could Be") is an English actress/singer who burst onto the London scene in the late sixties. Her career really took off when she landed the part opposite Serge Gainsbourg in the French film "Slogan," even though she didn't speak French. In 1969, she and Gainsbourg recorded the scandalous song "Je t'aime... moi non plus" (Gainsbourg originally wrote it for Brigitte Bardot, who pleaded with him not to release it), which was incredibly controversial at the time because of its sexually explicit content. Like Ali MacGraw, her personal life was marked by three significant relationships: she was married to composer John Barry from 1965 until 1968, when she left him for Gainsbourg. In 1980, she left an increasingly alcoholic Gainsbourg, and started dating film director Jacques Doillon. She has three daughters from each of these three relationships (the lovely Charlotte Gainsbourg is a product of her marriage to Serge).

As most people are aware, the popular Hermès Birkin bag is named after the iconic Jane.

As the story goes (according to Wikipedia, which we all know is absolutely factual), Jane was seated next to the Hermès chairman, Jean-Louis Dumas, on a flight from Paris to London. She happened to pull out her (Hermès) datebook and her papers went flying, prompting her to complain to Dumas that the datebook needed pockets. In 1984, the Birkin bag was on the market.