Plus, her favorite pants—and where to find them.
Jane Birkin on Her New Album and the Only Three Makeup Products She Uses at 74
When I speak with Jane Birkin via Zoom on a recent afternoon, she’s fifteen minutes late. “Mais pourquoi? Pourquoi?” she moans in front of her screen until she realizes that she has finally reached me and I can, in fact, both hear and see her. Of course, video chatting is a new frontier for the 74-year-old artist, who rose to international fame in the 1960s as the young English gamine who scandalized the world (not to mention the Pope) with her breathless, racy recording of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je t’aime… moi non plus”. (Her infamous basket bags and sheer mini dresses—“Had I known that with a flash you could go through the material like that, I would have taken my knickers off!” she now says, laughing—followed shortly thereafter.)
These days, at home in her Paris apartment with her bulldog puppy, Bella, she leads a very different existence. And yet, she’s nevertheless found a way to continue enthralling her legions of fans across the globe: Next month, her searingly intimate album, Oh! Pardon tu dormais…, will make its U.S. debut. In 13 songs, Birkin sings, in her signature reedy voice, about love, loss, and—for the first time—the death of her late daughter, Kate Barry. “I realized… that what made people not necessarily interesting but human were all their defects and their cowardliness and their guilt and their complexity,” she tells me. “So I thought if you’re writing a record, then you might as well be as personal as you can because that way you touch people.”
Here, she discusses the creative undertaking, as well as what it really means to be the face of “French girl beauty.”
Jane Birkin: Hello!
Zoe Ruffner: Hi Jane. How are you? What’s life like these days?
I remember [during] the first lockdown we weren’t allowed out anywhere and I was terribly serious. I stayed here in the little apartment with my dear bulldog, who then died. Apart from eight o'clock in the evening when we went and clapped on the balcony and saw other faces for the first time, there wasn’t anything that you were allowed to do, so I looked at [my daughter] Lou [Doillon] on Instagram from six o'clock to seven o'clock everyday. That was jolly because she was so inventive, singing her poetry and reading versions of different pieces of literature she admired. And on Sunday, I used to join her to do things for a children’s hour, which I did with great relish, because in fact to be able to do anything was so lucky. Then I put myself onto something with the Théâtre de la Colline, which was to ring people up anonymously for half an hour everyday and read poetry to them, so I used to read Serge’s lyrics. That was fun. I realized to what extent we were so touched by other people and contact with other people and how miserable it was just to be cut off.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Zoe Ruffner
