So the good news is that you get to carry a Birkin bag this summer, although the bad news is that it’s not the Hermès version. Thirty-five years after going on sale, the designer It classic that Jane Birkin inspired is still out of the reach of most, what with the £6,750 price tag and a waiting list to boot. (To be fair, though, the resale value makes the bag a better investment than stocks or gold, but still.)

But there is another bag that is just as quintessentially Birkin as the Birkin, and this one is being piled high and sold cheap on the British high street this summer. The basket bag has been a key part of cool-French-girl summer style ever since Birkin was floating around the south of France barefoot in a pair of high-waisted jeans while dangling a basket over one arm – but it is having its most high-profile moment in ages right now. In a season where pastoral chic has trumped poolside glamour as summer’s key dress code, the basket bag brings your look instantly up to date.

And, yes, you probably have a straw basket already, but fashion being what it is, the look is a little bit more demanding than that. The sensible straw shopping basket, the kind that has been hanging from the hook on your back door for ever – a pliable half-moon with long, leather shoulder straps – has its own patron saint of hot Frenchness in Brigitte Bardot. But the Birkin basket is structured and miniaturised, making it cute and youthful, and alluringly impractical.

What you are looking for is the kind of basket in which a pouty French girlfriend would bring a bag of cherries and a pair of bikini bottoms to the beach, rather than the sort you take to the market to buy vegetables.

The Birkin-style basket, which may well come garnished with pompoms, as here (pompoms being the default fashion garnish of summer 2017), is, despite its impracticability, an easier fit for work than the tomato-shopping kind. A traditional basket looks inappropriately domestic and cosy in an office environment. By bringing fashion ambition into the equation, the styled-up Birkin gives the classic straw bag a little added dynamism. Dressing for a picnic is the new power move.

• Jess wears dress, £39.50, marksandspencer.com. Heels, £34.99, hm.com. Bag, £90 by Nannicay, from net-a-porter.com

Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Laurence Close at Carol Hayes Management

