An Autre Mode

Another Way of Being

I didn’t live Jane Birkin’s life.
But I walked close—
through the same arrondissements,
with a camera in one hand, and dreams too fragile to speak aloud in the other.
Paris in the aftermath—after May ’68, after Gainsbourg, after glory.

But the echoes were everywhere:
in the awkward songs,
the shutter click,
the silences between Depeche Mode lyrics in a dim French apartment,
right after Kiki left.
“It’s a question of lust. It’s a question of trust. It’s a question of not letting
What we’ve built up
Crumble to dust” Martin Gore said it best.

So did Sartre, in a different key:
existence precedes essence—
but what if existence also wore kohl eyeliner and carried a basket?
Jane didn’t theorize her way through life like Simone de Beauvoir.
She just was—
vulnerable, unscripted, draped in linen,
barefoot through the corridors of cool.
A kind of existential femininity
not unlike what Roland Barthes might call a myth—
but one performed with disarming sincerity.
I didn’t smoke, but I admired the way cigarettes filled a Lindbergh frame.
Back then, cigarettes weren’t vices,
they were visual punctuation.
Like Jane—
a comma in the sentence, never the full stop.
This site isn’t nostalgia.
It’s recognition.
Of a time, a tone, a woman.
Of the bag that bears her name,
and the world she never tried to change—but somehow did.
BIRKIN & BIRKIN is a return,
to what we once loved, or maybe just almost touched.