My Birkin Blog

Article | Courtney Love on Birkins and Sex | WWD | 2010.07.21

It’s with abject horror that Courtney Love looks back on what she did to pieces from Marc Jacobs’ infamous grunge collection for Perry Ellis in 1992. “Marc sent me and Kurt [Cobain] his Perry Ellis grunge collection. Do you know what we did with it?” she asks, enunciating what came next. “We burned it. We were punkers — we didn’t like that kind of thing.”

But remnants still exist. Love recently stumbled on a lone bonnet and a pair of electric blue shoes that managed to escape the torching. “I was so relieved. These pieces were part of me and Kurt living in a trench and surviving the war. We just didn’t deal with life.”

Sartorially speaking, Love has evolved from her days of setting designer clothing ablaze and now defines her fashion evolution in terms of “pre-Birkin” and “post-Birkin,” referring to the iconic Hermès Birkin bag she received as a gift six months ago. (“There’s no way you’re getting that information,” she says when probed about the identity of the generous benefactor.)

And it’s because of her fashions that Love’s found herself in the news as of late. “It’s not just me,” she says of the Web Site Whatcourtneyworetoday.com, which launched July 13. “I’m participating in it.” Her role is as follows: Love sends daily pictures of her outfits and wardrobe changes (she’s currently on tour) to her co-bloggers, who go by the initials T, L and X.

The catch: Love has no idea who X is, although T and L do. “X is supposed to be male, and I keep picturing Stephen Gan in my mind, but he doesn’t have the time for this. He’s the one who writes in italics. It’s a social experiment.” The three are responsible for updating the blog by way of posting photos and including captions and the obligatory snarky commentary, and they also have full access to the arsenal of photographs that Love’s uploaded onto her computer for their use.

The concept behind What courtney woretoday.com stemmed from the selection of unflattering photos she stumbled upon while Google Imaging herself. “With the Internet, I think the crap rises to the top,” Love says, peeved that while searching for a picture of herself “with some good hair she had done at Bergdorf’s” that most of what she found was just really bad. “There were, like, nine pages on Google that were f-----g me at my worst, and it took me until page 12 — well, page nine had an Avedon one — to find a decent one.”

According to her, the first picture was one of the biggest fashion faux pas she’d ever made. Love’s wearing really low slung jeans with a nice blouse, which is all well and good in the singer’s book, but it was the Marilyn Manson contact lenses, coupled with her lips being chapped after going out during a cold night in London that did her in. “It’s not even, like, my actual Google search is that bad. It’s the pictures like this. It looked like I had a herpes breakout or something,” she continues. “And the second picture is half Britney Spears’ face and half my face. The third picture is from when I was unwell.”