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Last year, Jane Birkin’s namesake Birkin bag sold at auction for a cool £7.4 million, a sum that speaks to the extraordinary cachet the style icon bestowed on an otherwise practical, lovingly overstuffed leather tote. But while her style remains endlessly influential, most of Birkin’s make-up-averse acolytes are more likely to be multi-hyphenate creatives than, say, investment bankers with seven figures to spare.
A Birkin bag of our own therefore remains a distant fantasy (unless, of course, you happen to have a covert arrangement with the sales team at Hermès). Thankfully, for the aesthetically rich and cash-poor, there’s now a far cheaper way to dress like the world’s most enviably fringed Francophile: the Jane Birkin Dress.
Essentially an elevated shift dress with cropped sleeves, the Jane Birkin Dress evokes blissful days on the Riviera, even if the closest you’re getting to a Euro summer is an off-brand Fanta Lemon from the corner shop. Search for one online, though, and you’ll quickly find yourself buried beneath the kind of figure-hugging bodycon creations best left in a New Look changing room circa 2012, rather than the breezy, insouciant staple Birkin made her own.
Indeed, there is much to be said for wearing nothing but dresses in the summer months. After all, who can be bothered with coordinating multiple items of clothing when you’ve already got a packed schedule of complaining about the heat and reapplying the same concealer that keeps sliding off?
Better still – although perhaps less urgently than those early-aughts women’s magazines would have had us believe – the Jane Birkin Dress transitions from day to night with ease. Whether worn with sensible ballet flats or vertiginous heels, it works just as well for a morning coffee run as it does for an impromptu dinner.
Of course, the eternal It-girl left no shortage of looks to obsess over. But if you’re ready to move beyond her more familiar crochet dresses, vintage jeans and Petit Bateau T-shirts, the ’60s smock is a good place to start. The key, I think, is finding something loose enough to avoid resembling a Made in Chelsea cast member stumbling out of Mahiki in the 2010s, but not so billowing that you take on the qualities of a bin bag caught in a particularly aggressive gust of wind.