Jane Birkin on the Hermès Birkin: How Fashion’s Most Iconic Handbag Was First Sketched on a Sickbag

Jane Birkin, front row at the fall 2012 Hermès show, with her Birkin bag.

Vale Jane Birkin, “chanteuse, actrice, icon de style,” as the excellent French national radio station FIP described her during a tribute this afternoon. Birkin’s achievements were manifold, as well as her many accomplishments in music and drama, she was arguably the greatest embodiment of cultural entente cordiale there has ever been.

The woman herself, however, was wryly aware—and drily amused—about the reality of her name’s legacy. As she told me at the Hermès Fall 2012 show in March that year: “now when I go to America to sing they say Birkin? Like the bag? I say ‘Yes indeed: and the bag will now sing’.”

That day Birkin was unassumingly sitting at L’École des Beaux-Arts, waiting to see Christophe Lemaire’s collection for the house (Lemaire made some of the best-ever Hermès collections, it’s worth pointing out). To fill the time, she kindly shared her first-hand account of how the most famous, influential, and desired handbag in all the world was born, back in 1981.

“I remember it perfectly well! I’d been upgraded by Air France on a flight to London, and I found myself sitting next to a man [the visionary Jean-Louis Dumas of Hermès]. I’m not quite sure what type of bag I had with me—my husband Jacques Doillon had reversed his car over my basket, crushed it on purpose not too days before. [Dumas] thought I deserved more.”