Jane Addiction

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1:14Hello and welcome to Fashion People. I'm Mary Sherman, writer of Puck's Fashion and Beauty memo line sheet. And today with me on the show is the one and only Marissa Meltzer, author of It Girl, The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin. We discuss the book, The Business of Being a Style Icon, and so much more. Before we get going, I wanted to remind you that if you like this podcast, you'll definitely love Puck, where I send an email called Line Sheet. If you're a fashion person, you get that reference. it's an original look at what's really going on inside the fashion and beauty industries line sheet is scoopy analytical and above all fun along with me a subscription to puck gains you access to an unmatched roster of experts reporting on powerful people and companies in entertainment media sports politics finance the art world and much more if you're interested listeners of fashion people get a discount.

2:10Just go to puck.news slash fashion people to join puck or start a free trial. Happy Friday, everyone. Hope you're having a great week. I am in Paris. I'm a little sick. I'm getting extremely funny texts from someone who listens to this podcast at the moment. Don't hug me. I'm sick. Oh my God. Just getting so many funny texts. I love all of you. But I hope you're having a good time in Paris. I'm having a pretty good time. As always, lots of weird stuff going on, lots of drama, lots of intrigue, lots of meeting you all on the street, which is fun. Shout out to the people who helped me the other night.

2:47In Thursday's line sheet, you'll find my Dior take with some additional reporting and info you won't get anywhere else. Really, really complex. Lots to unpack there, as they say. I also have reports from Tom Ford and Courreges and a uh, lots of good shows and, and on Friday and Monday, there will be more, more from the shows. It's a really packed weekend. Um, lots of debuts still to come. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with Marissa on Thursday. I went to Sotheby's for a lunch that was, uh, that she hosted and we got to, we got to see a lot of cool stuff. I think it's embargoed of what exactly I got to see.

3:30Not that I signed anything, don't worry, but I'm going to honor an embargo about this thing. I'm not going to be rude. But I also got to see many friends. Becky Malinsky, Nomi Fry, also Lauren Collins, Lindsay Trimuda, my two friends from Paris, Carla from Vogue. It was just a really great crew. Taylor from Interview, Laura Riley. It was just a really good group of people. Marissa's very chic. She looked great in her Aliyah. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with her. You know, we are obviously friends and have a lot to say, but it was fun to discuss the sort of business of being a person who's closed other people copy.

4:17So enjoy and have a great weekend. I hope to see you around this week.

4:24Marissa Meltzer, welcome back to Fashion People. Hi, I'm so happy to be here. I'm so happy to be here. Today, you're here for a very special episode. But before we get started, what did you have for breakfast? Okay, so I don't usually eat breakfast, but I knew I was coming on. So I ate something so we could talk about it, which is, have you heard of Burley Bakery? No. It's kind of the talk of the Upper East Side. It's a British bakery that's owned by the Maximes people and the Burley family. And it opened up just steps away from Central Park, steps away from the Kate and Totem standoff. And it's very good.

5:10It's extremely expensive. They make their own ice cream. And I think a pint is$36. and they make their own chocolates which are delicious that i'm in the pastry for anything that's 36 dollars and that is ice cream um they also have like a very good they have a seated area upstairs and they have this power bowl that's like coconut yogurt and like a bunch of fruit and nuts it's very keto anyway not that i am because what i ordered was a croissant and their baked goods and coffee are like, you know, the normal price of like a bougie bakery. But, you know, it's like if you want to know what the moms and the denizens of Upper East Side are wearing, you just have to go to Burley on a weekday or a weekend and pick up some iced coffee.

5:59I am going to be in New York the first week in November for a family trip. We're staying on the East Side. Oh, you are. but further downtown. But I want to do a day where I come up really early and spend like most of the day up there and go shopping and go. We should go to the Frick. I'm a member. I'm obsessed with the Frick and also the Frick restaurant is great people watching and also very delicious. Great. Okay. Maybe I'll just work. I'll start at Burley for breakfast. I'll do a breakfast meeting there and then work and then we can have lunch at the Frick and go to the Frick. Because I have been wanting to go very badly.

6:43And you can do shopping. There's a new the newish Kalmeier store. Susan Alexandra, I don't know what's opening, but she's opening a store right near there. Upper East Side. Great. It is the new Uptown is the new downtown. town. Okay, Marissa. So you are here today to talk about your new book, It Girl, The Life and Legacy of Jane Bergen. Well, it's interesting because I actually, I wanted to chat with you about the fact that like, this is a real proper biography. It is not a book about how to get French girl style, which you could have done and could have pitched, but this is a proper biography about a really interesting woman.

7:27So I think to start, why her for the next subject of a book? And then also, why did you decide to do like a straight up biography and not you? You could have formatted this in many different ways. Well, I think the book was, you know, not to sound like an ambulance chaser, but the idea did come after her death and, you know, as sometimes these things happen in book publishing. And someone actually, my editor at their time, suggested it, but I don't think she really understood how much she was at kind of the nexus of all these nerdy interests of mine. I love fashion, of course, but also, you know, have always been really into film and really discovered her through music in college.

8:24And then I also, you know, I speak French, I'm a crazy Francophile. I, you know, so that sort of aspect was really interesting to me. So she was kind of in the middle of all of these nerdy interests. And I do think that you've written a book, like it's the fun of it is you get, you know, sort of like a blank page in order to go as deep as you want to in a subject. But if you don't really, if you're not really interested in it, that could be drudgery. So this book was just a complete pleasure, at least in like the research phase and stuff. Writing is always its own unique hell. But yeah, there were moments when I thought, when I had a little more about kind of the selling of the French girl and sort of French girl style and its origins and the kind of, like at one point I listed every sort of French girl style book that I could find on Amazon and there were like 30.

9:26But it just felt like there's, for me, for a book, there's always a certain point where I have to get out of my own way. And for this book, it was focusing on her life, which also meant there were, you know, long digressions about Serge Gainsbourg or some of her kids that I cut out because my issue with a lot of books is that there's two, you know, just because you have the information as a writer doesn't mean you need to share it. You know, maybe that's what your sub stack is for. Maybe that's what interviews are for. But, you know, there's a lot of things people do to kind of impede the narrative.

10:07And I think, you know, smart writers understand how to take that kind of like surgical precision in editors and keep the focus where it needs to be. I, you know, I think the book has a lot of cultural context, but I also think that it doesn't kind of you're not ODing on it. You're not like, wait, what were we talking about? No. And it gave me here. Here's the thing. I think you're 100 % right. And that whole sort of like, you don't have to put everything in it and kill your darlings is a common phrase in journalism. It's true. Like you really do need to get out of your own way and keep it moving.

10:49And that is one of the reasons I think your books have been so successful because they do that. And also her, it's not, I mean, obviously you talk a lot about her, the way she is and that is a, and style. And I want to talk about the idea of a style icon and, and her and how, how she fits into all of that. And in a minute, but, um, her way of being was what people were attracted to. And what you did was you showed instead of telling. So a lot of it is about like her, the way her life unfolded and why that made her intriguing as a human, like the stuff about her mom, who is a famous actress or sort of famous actress, working actress, Noel Coward sort of muse.

11:44Yeah. Was it Judy Campbell? Judy Campbell. So it's interesting, like seeing the photos of the two of them I was googling to me Jane Birkin is is like the fit like the physical ideal of what what I really look like but for her yeah yeah I think she's beautiful like I don't oh I think she's beautiful too it's just I'm surprised I'm sort of surprised she's still gamin you know like this or you want to be super skinny and flat-chested and yeah I I mean, I'm already flat chested, but not. Oh, are you? I've never thought of that. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God, Marissa. I'll show you someday. Okay. Well, you can.

12:24I sadly wear a D cup and I've always hated it. But that's a story for another time. Yeah. We can do a boobs episode. We can do a body dysmorphia episode. Oh, yes. Yes. I mean, every episode. Every episode of Fashion People is a body dysmorphia episode. Yes. But, you know, to bring it back to Jane Birkin, actually, is there is a lot about her body. And I think it's really easy to look at her. She's so beautiful. And she had the sort of perfect body to wear clothes and of that kind of 60s and 70s era. And she felt super insecure about it. And then you see pictures of her mom and her mom doesn't really look that much like her.

13:07Like her mom was sort of more of like a golden age of Hollywood 1930s kind of beauty. And so I think she always had this kind of insecurity that, you know, she was a late developer and, you know, that she was gangly, that she was so flat chested, that she was boyish. And, you know, and then those kind of translate into different things in her life, all the way down to aging and sort of, you know, not getting like her eyes done. which I think it's tempting to either say she didn't give a shit about those things, but she did. It's just more like she was sort of like, I could, maybe I'll just cover the mirrors or it was like a constant sort of conversation of should I?

13:53I don't know. And then she just never did. And I kind of think that's probably how many people age. It is for me. Like today, A, I'm not going to get my eyes done, although I constantly think maybe I should. And there might be a day when I book it, but I also might die having never done anything. Like, it's kind of, you know, I think a lot of people are, you know, there are people, there's a lot of people that, you know, are very public now that are very gung ho on all of that stuff. But I think most people are a little more like, can I afford it? Do I want a deal? Will I look better? You know, all that stuff.

14:36Yeah. And and there are these sort of parallel narratives and some of that to me, it kind of goes back. And I don't know how deep we can get on this or or how I can make it not convoluted. But it's this like Anglo-Saxon versus French and those two worlds and that way of being like the British sort of, it all is connected. And I think that the way of thinking of like how you address beauty, how you look. Your relationship to pleasure. And I think actually in this kind of post-Brexit era, it's even more pronounced. So I think that's a really interesting point. And I think it's very true. You know, she grew up in a kind of upper, upper middle class family in England.

15:32And, you know, it was they were tight, but it was also filled with like, a lot of unhappiness of like being sent to boarding school young and hating it and this kind of stiff upper lip and and the sort of tail end of rations in this very abstemious sort of dark time in British history that I think is part of what, you know, propelled that like swinging 60s. But then she moved to Paris in 1968 for work, for a film role, but then she just never left. She had, her family was still in England. she threw a sort of divorce settlement got a had an apartment there but i you know she was kind of back and forth and that she would visit but she never lived there again and you know died at 76 so she really went on the side of france and i also think one thing that's so interesting about her life is that she sort of fully embodied the swinging 60s youth quake but then she moved to france and then fully embodied for the louche nightclub uh you know 1970s east saint laurent you know paris which is i think it's rare for someone to kind of embody both times in different different countries well especially because she if you asked a random 22 year old on the on tick tock is Jane Birkin French or English, they would say she was French because she was she embodied capital French girl style.

17:13And if you think of someone like Francois Hardy, who was in kind of if you look when you are researching this stuff, when you're 15 years old, that she comes up a lot, too. Like Jane Birkin was way more famous. I want to get into that. But really quickly, the thing that came up for me was, interestingly, Christine Scott Thomas, because she's almost the opposite. I mean, obviously not a style icon, but is an actress who actually has really great style. But I always find her fascinating. She's very British to me, but she moves really well in French. She speaks perfect French. Yeah, she acts in French films.

17:59Charlotte Rampling is another really good example. Yeah, but the two cultures are so different. And why do you think Jane Birkin was able to make that transition, especially back then because it was pre-European Union. There wasn't as much mixing. Like you go to France now. Pre-Eurostar. Yeah. Exactly. You go to France now and everybody speaks English and there's people from all over Europe, at least, but really all over the world. And there's no, it's changed so much in the last 15 years in particular. But at that time, it was, they were worlds away. Yeah. Like, I don't think there was probably a McDonald's, for example, in France at that point or sort of this, you know, now you go to Europe, but, you know, really Paris in particular, there's, you know, Five Guys Burgers, there's, you know, there's just so much familiarity and kind of international chains.

19:02And yeah, it really wasn't the case then. It really was not the case when I was there in college in the late 90s either. So yeah, that's absolutely changed. I think, Like, you know, it's hard because France and Paris in particular, I think, is a hard culture to break into because people, because like Paris is so the center of the country so that it's not just, you know, you're not going to move away for different industries. They're all based there. All the great universities are there. So you can really be born there and make friends in grade school and just have those people in your life for the rest of your life.

19:49It's not, you know, people aren't moving around for jobs, for example, the same way they are in the U.S. because, you know, things are located in different places. And so I think it can be really hard to break into, you know, most of my French friends are either maybe half American or they're married to a foreigner or, you know, they're Americans who move there or, you know, or whatever. There's something about them that's sort of other and outsidery. And yeah, Birkin really got accepted in. I think that part of it was that she started dating Serge Gansborg right away. And he is kind of, you know, the one of the most famous people in the country.

20:31He was sort of like there. I always say he's like a combination of like Bruce Springsteen and Phil Spector and like Barbara Streisand like this kind of Bob Dylan, this sort of like troubadour that, you know, represents kind of the national identity. and so she was with him a long time that probably helped kind of make her accept but I also think she just had this kind of like willingness to just go full French and embrace it but also she wasn't trying hard because she still had this this heavy accent she wasn't pretending to be this kind of perfect French woman you see often in Paris these expats who are trying to be better at being Parisian than native Parisians.

21:21And it's kind of, I get it, but it's, it's kind of ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's both are all are difficult. I lived in the UK in college and for two years after in London, obviously. I imagine it's the same thing, right? Like it's really, it was really hard. And, and now again, it's different now because there There are more and let's see what happens post-Brexit. But everybody's friends from when they were five because they all went to school together. These are very provincial places in some ways and like proudly provincial. In a way that's kind of protective. Yes. And there is the aristocracy element of it and the class of it.

22:09Like you talking about her being like, it's not like they had a ton of money, but they were upper, upper middle class. Like it's not about how much money you have in England. It's about what family you're from. And so. Yeah, there was some aristocracy. Her mom was friends with Churchill's daughter and was a roommate with her. You know, there was she yeah, she grew up around all these kinds of rich people and then sort of seamlessly went into being friends with all these kind of famous people casually. Her brother did a lot of work with the Beatles. So she was just sort of casually friends with them.

22:48You know, that kind of classic like rich it girl character where, you know, she's just always been connected.

23:01So let's talk personal style and then let's talk about her as a style icon and what that means and all of that stuff. Where do you think the person do you think the personal style was just like I'm British? I know about thrifting before people actually did that and her just being like super confident. Do you think it was unique to her? Like, how is she buying this little basket and making that a thing that now all these girls have low of a I think that it's a combination. She definitely had that kind of British jumble thing where, you know, they were going to thrift stores and had this kind of like eccentric costume costuming element that, you know, the the the continent certainly didn't have.

23:52You know, there was France was behind in that, you know, young women kind of dress like their mothers, like, you know, they're wearing scarves and kind of, you know, smart shoes and smart outfits. And Britain, I think the rebellion kind of like in the U.S. came a little bit before it did to France. and um so yeah it's that kind of like long history of bohemians like you know the way that the sort of bloomsbury set was was you know dressing up and stuff so there was that element and she was also from a theatrical family so they were putting on shows all the time so you had this probably element of like costuming yourself and then you know as a teenager and into her early 20s i think she was first just kind of trying to look cool and fit in and and have be seen as attractive and interesting to guys and to cool girls and she always thought she just sort of dressed like jean shrimpton or something like that um but i think eventually she sort of you know she had that inimitable thing where you just make it yourself like that's why you can watch a hundred you know videos of how to dress like Jane Birkin but it's pretty hard to nail it I think that it was she was wearing stuff that was authentic to her things that she had picked up on you know her basket bag came from a market that was near the west end where she was you know in plays and the um you know espadrilles were things that she bought on vacation and you know she liked her white t-shirts a certain way with like the collar kind of like pulled and messed up and so I think she just stuck to things that felt like her um and then you know as she moved and and became French and and got older she also kind of picked and choose which designer she wore she was friends with Saint Laurent so she wore a lot of Saint Laurent she she was never a Chanel girl.

25:58She loved Paco Rabanne and wore that. She was kind of, you know, she kind of knew her look. Yeah. Okay. So I want to talk about the Birkin bag specifically also and what you unearthed because it's been covered so much. But let's talk about this idea of style icon specifically. and also so I was thinking about in my notes like a lot of the it's interesting Jean Seberg is also like someone who I think of in that era of and she was American obviously but became famous for the Godard film in particular but like there was also Catherine Deneuve, Bridget Bardot when I think of like style icon and I close my eyes, I see those women.

26:53I see Jackie Kennedy. I see Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. I was trying to think who are women of color who are not a lot put in that Baker a little bit, but that was more for her costumes. Yeah. Really whitewash. so whitewashed back then. I think now, like, I think Rihanna will be the person who sort of is from our generation. I think once you get into the later 70s, you get some of the, you know, amazing, like, black models that Saint Laurent used and some of the ones from Battle of Versailles and stuff like that. But it's also different when it's a model versus sort of a woman considered a style icon.

27:37Yeah, I think Rihanna. But yeah, it's it was, you know, if race, you know, is a fraught subject everywhere. But in France in particular, you know, it's very multicultural there. If you're there and you realize it. But then if you were to look at a lot of sort of the idea of Frenchness in the world and the way that it's marketed and sold to people, you would just think it's a bunch of sort of, you know, bourgeois women wearing hand-me-down Chanel and Hermes scarves and they're white and they're skinny and they, you know, live in Saint-Germain. Yeah. Yeah. So why do you think she became such a quantity outside of the country?

28:30And especially because most of the people who engage with her as an image are not very familiar with her work. And I think that this book, that's a part of what is interesting about it is that it is going to familiarize people with more than her running into the Hermes air on the plane and creating the Birkin or whatever. Yeah. I mean, I think that she's she was a bit odd in her fame. She sang, but she didn't have a particularly good voice. You know, she was very OK with kind of being this kind of quirky muse girl until I think she got older and she was sort of sick of being that person. But I think she was happy to kind of embody this carefree English girl in the continent, you know, oh, oops, I'm wearing this sheer dress.

29:29I had no idea you could see my underwear until the flashbulbs went off kind of thing. Like she was she was sort of savvy, I guess. Do you think she was able to capitalize on her fame in a way, in like the modern way we think about that? Like if she was, I mean, she wouldn't exist now. There's no one like that now, which is maybe something we can talk about. But do you think that she was able to like get the most out of what she became known for her her currency or what have you? No, I mean in a word. No, I think that you know, it's To start with the Birkin if you think about it I think it sort of came out the same year as Air Jordan and all of that and look how much money Michael Jordan has made but of course those were that was a broker deal and that you know fashion has this kind of history of You know, you're inspired by someone so I don't necessarily think she was robbed of that money, but she could have used the fame to try to do some other version of the Birkin that she, you know, designed herself and sold or something like that.

30:49And I part of the challenge, and I think what's interesting about her life and about writing this book was that there isn't this super typical narrative structure of like, okay, well, she, you know, found her artistic voice, and then she became a famous actress all over the world. And she won an Oscar. And, you know, she came out with her own clothing line. And, you know, that's, and she's, you know, blah, blah, blah. She kind of wanted things on her own very specific terms. And so she was happy to play somewhere like, you know, Carnegie Hall of her old music. She eventually did like a sort of a collaboration line with APC, a tiny one.

31:41She did a scent with Miller Harris, but, you know, kind of small and obscure. But I don't think she wanted to do those things. And I also don't think she was that interested in trying to be famous in America or even the UK. I mean, she acted in very, very, very few English language things and kind of, you know, the closest to like a big film would have been the Agatha Christie movies from late 70s. And, you know, those aren't that, they're not that big. You know, she, again, she wasn't Kristen Scott Thomas, Charlotte Rampling, Juliette Binoche, Marion Cotillard, these like, you know, sort of bilingual women that go between cultures.

32:25Was there anything? So while you were, I guess, after the book wrapped up, there was obviously the giant Birkin auction that you covered for The New York Times. But there has just been like, in the last year, and maybe this is also connected to the fact that she passed, but the Birkin and the, the, the secondhand market for the Birkin and, and Hermes bags in general, but obviously this is the most famous one. And I also feel like the Birkin for a while, there was like a narrative that the Kelly was the like cool bag. If you're going to buy a beat up Hermes, you might want to get a Kelly cause it's a little more structured.