The myth of The French Girl
The Paris Diaries - Part 2
The second and final part of my French adventures is all about women because I spent a lot of time in Paris looking at them. At the Crazy Horse (the temple of burlesque in Paris) they were naked, dancing elegantly in front of us like goddesses, more elastic than my range of excuses for ordering takeaway 3 nights in a row. On the streets of the city, in plain daylight, they were dressed but equally turning heads with every step on the scorching cobblestones.
I can’t exactly remember when did my fascination with French women begin, as I can’t tell you either how many times I’ve put a photo of Jane Birkin or Brigitte Bardot next to my bathroom mirror every time I’ve decided to give myself trauma bangs a fringe. So, as you can imagine, one of the things that got me really excited about going to Paris was to be able to observe them. As a writer, comedian, fashion connoisseur, HUMBLE PERSON and very judgemental lady, I am an observer by nature, and boy was I thrilled to finally be at the source of all it. That being, of course, The French Girl myth.
Just a quick Google search of the term French Girl will give you an introductory course about it. If you work in the fashion and beauty industry, you might be sick of the concept, and at the same time, still utterly fascinated by it. According to the imaginary, The French Girl (or woman) is mysterious. She eats baguettes and croissants without any guilt but never exercises, the city is her gym. She smokes cigarettes and drinks wine. She might be married and have kids, and they all are incredibly good-looking, and she roams the streets of Paris with them while wearing mule shoes and a ridiculous basket to carry the groceries. She can’t cook (can’t be bothered), but she hosts amazing casual dinner parties at her high-ceiling apartment, filled with candles and books. She might have a lover, but she doesn’t feel the slightest remorse about it. She is thin, usually tall, and usually white. She may not be very beautiful, but she is incredibly attractive and magnetic. Her hair remains her natural colour and it’s perfectly messy (or post-coitum) and she barely puts makeup on, just a dash of mascara and rouge that she dabs on her lips and cheeks. She has less facial expression than any character in a Wes Anderson movie, and it’s more unreadable than a doctor’s prescription note.
She…is not real.
Except for the fact that…she might be? At least from the outside, for what I saw during my week in Paris. I saw some of the most effortless stylish women I’ve ever seen, confident, and mysterious, all fitting perfectly into this cliché of la Parisienne, so I started to wonder if the myth was actually real. It must have come from somewhere, after all…
There is no doubt in my head that the French Girl was engineered by a man. Because to me, it is all very male-gazey. First of all, I take all that “be mysterious” as some sort of “Don’t you dare take any space, be seen or heard”. As for the nonchalance, the purpose of it is to look desirable at all times. “Always be fuckable: when standing in line at the bakery on a Sunday morning, buying champagne in the middle of the night, or even picking up the kids from school. You never know.” These are not my words but socialite’s Carole de Maigret in her 2014 book How to be Parisian Wherever You Are. French supermodel Ines de la Fressange, in her 2010 book La Parisienne, recommends buying an expensive leather jacket and stepping on it a few times, so it can look a bit worn out. Because God forbid you to look like you care about something. With this apparent image of not giving a flying turd about anything, The French Girl appears to me like the European cousin of the American Cool Girl. Another carefully constructed paradigm of the old “Women want to be her and men want to be with her” - and unsurprisingly, one that, despite being 2023, keeps bringing money in for brands like Rouje, Musier Paris, and the like.
But the way I see it, at the end of the day, The French Girl is just another concept telling us that we could do with a bit of being someone else, that we need improvements because we are just not sexy/mysterious/fit/nonchalant/stylish enough.
Writer Iris Goldsztajn illustrates it perfectly in this piece she wrote for Vogue:
When it comes down to it, the French Girl is my bully – real or imagined. This girl we’re all supposed to be, she’s judging me from her pedestal of nonchalance. She’s judging me for actually putting on weight when I eat what she eats. She’s judging me for caring so much about how I look, about whether people like me, about whether I’m embarrassing myself at any given moment. […] So, is that who we all want to be? A beautiful bully? Excuse me if I can’t quite get on board.
I saw a lot of thin women. Like, A LOT. I don’t remember seeing more than 5 women over a size 12 in days. How do you…? How…? It’s France! Could it be possible that the cliché was real? Could it be possible what they say that French women don’t get fat? If I lived in France, I would bathe in a different type of cheese every night and use tartelette aux framboise as my pillow. I saw a lot of black women too. They never come up when I type the words French Girl on Pinterest, which helps me to reinforce my point of how exclusive and unreal this myth, this aesthetic is. There is much more to the Parisian woman than what Instagram, Pinterest and Netflix are making you believe. I keep thinking about that time when we were crossing Pont d'Iéna around 7pm and this black girl passes us, she was wearing a brown leather co-ord suit of blazer and shorts, and caramel sandal heels tied all the way up her interminable shiny legs. Her hair was long and braided and floated around her in a ponytail. Everyone around her stopped for a second to just admire her walking past. Seemed like the streets were her catwalk and we had been graced with front-row seats. It was a fantastic moment.
So yeah, la Parisienne exists, but thank God she is not alone in Paris. Millions of other women populate the city of light, and I find it odd that in this day and age, we still hold so strongly to one specific stereotype. But this cry for diversity and inclusivity that I am making is nothing you haven’t heard before. The good thing is that some of the same brands I mentioned before are beginning to realise this, and (probably with marketing on their minds though) starting to be more diverse. So that’s a start.
Then…what was it that initially attracted me to French Girl aesthetic? I like how natural it looks. How confidence also seems to be key. Thanks to the French Girl concept I started to love my brunette natural hair colour, after years and years of thinking that only blondes are allowed to have fun. I am a fantastic brunette and I love how natural, shiny and healthy my hair looks now. Thanks to the French Girl I started using less make-up, feeling empowered to not hide my Mediterranean features. I stopped plucking my eyebrows like crazy and loving them a bit more. I refuse to spend hours of my precious time trying to tame them…for what? Thanks to the French Girl I am not scared to age, and I’m sure I’ll do it as gracefully as I can, embracing the journey. Some of the sexiest middle-aged French women I’ve seen (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche…) don’t try to fight against time to stay young forever, and they look incredible, so I’ll totally move there after my first divorce to experience a sexual renaissance. Thanks to the French Girl I also know that being a mother is just a part of who you are, not ALL you are. These are the things I take with me from the myth, the ones that inspire me and don’t make me feel bad. And I think that is the intelligent thing to do, not only with this concept but with all the others you will come across: make it yours and see how it speaks to you.
After some days in Paris being an observer, taking mental notes and writing essays in my head about such a fascinating concept to me, I started to feel the need for a break. I found myself reaching for baggy clothes in Uniqlo and Muji (well, the massive ingest of carbs and sugar in all its forms might have had to do with it, not gonna lie). I stopped wanting to look fuckable and started wanting to feel…myself. Comfortable. Not giving a flying turd about what others think I should look like. Soft colours and tailored cuts. Like the minimalist Japanese retired woman I am at heart.
Perhaps this is what I needed, to be at the source of my main style inspiration, to realise I am much more than just some bullet points easily replicable. And if you are worried about if your true self will be sexy enough, stylish enough, attractive enough…all I can say is this - the right people in your life will be like: Fuck yes.
The rest is just noise.
