Mooching through Instagram the other day, I was delighted to see Jane Birkin described as a “kind of shambolic person”.
This was a post by Back Row, trailing some quotes from their recent podcast interview with Marisa Meltzer about her book ‘It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin’.
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet – I’ll save that for making Sunday dinner later – and I’ve just downloaded the audiobook which should see me through some hard gardening over the next couple of weeks.
I don’t know much about Jane Birkin. What I do know, like most people, I expect, has been sanitised and stylised to death by heavily curated social media feeds.
Today, in my world at least, ‘cool’ is clean, carefully cultivated and minimal in every sense. It’s reductive, a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of an original.
We – the aspiring cool – seek out voices of authority to tell us how to style our clothes, how to achieve the perfect cat-eye flick, how to lean just casually enough, how to recreate these line art sketches of people we don’t really know anything about.
I’m watching the social media cycle go full-tilt on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy right now. It’s fascinating to see the machine churning out style hooks to recreate the looks of someone so notoriously private, someone who was, in fact, extremely bothered about being so publicly consumed.
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Seeking inspiration from others is nothing new by the way; we have always looked to the leaders, movers and shakers of our various communities to understand how to fit in and to show off that we know how to fit in – this is one of the cornerstones of fashion.
And fashion, as we know, is everything.
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It’s absolutely joyful to be reminded of original references from time to time: real people, whose ‘cool’ was defined firstly by who they were, which then influenced what they wore and how they styled it.
I like playing with references, putting together a look or a style that draws from something specific even if, sometimes, it’s only obvious to me: silhouettes, colour palettes, eras and concepts.
When it comes to real peoples’ style, I like to dig deeper. I want to know why their style is what it is. But as much as I want to understand their own references – who or where they are getting their inspiration from – I also want to know about the practicalities of their lives.
What’s the full picture behind the line art?
Discovering that one of Jane Birkin’s legacies exists because of her tendency to chuck everything plus the kitchen sink into a basket and take it everywhere, ‘just in case’, has been brilliant.
May we all be more shambolic.