French women – women all over the world want to be them.
They were slender, cold, innocent, drinking red wine at lunch and reading Sartre at night. Anna Karina, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve... Their femininity is so light that it is almost cruel when they land on the screen.
Left: Brigitte Bardot / Right: Catherine Deneuve
They make people believe that beauty is a talent, a choice of the universe.
Godard's heroines are always smoking, reading, arguing. They don't seem to care what coat they wear, but they are naturally fashionable.
Left: Anna Karina / Right: Jane Sissy
And when the style came out of New Wave movies and became part of pop culture, all that was left were chansons, baguettes, and striped shirts. Therefore, every time I see the four words "French woman" on the Internet, I have to shout bad in my heart.
Perhaps because it is the recent e-commerce promotion season, and it is the autumn and winter of the year that is the best matching clothing, the four words "French woman" have once again swept social media. The pretty girls were painted with bright red lips, and their fluffy black hair was just rounded and curved from every angle. Berets, floral skirts, bag bags, tweed suits, background music is and can only be the famous La Vie En Rose.
Jeannes Damas
There's no blame for them — jeanne Damas, the textbook "French woman," recently joined Chinese social media. She shows a collage-style life. In most of the photos she is painted with the red lips of a typical Parisian woman, dressed simply, but at a glance she knows that it is worth a lot. Jeanne is the kind of French woman conceived by the Americans in Emily in Paris, and it's hard to imagine her eating anything other than a croissant for breakfast.
Lily Collins in Emily in Paris
As many people think, the image of the French woman may have been invented by Americans: in the nineteenth century, wealthy American merchants traveled around Europe, seeing the country as psychedelic, romantic, mysterious, sitting in cafes on the street, drinking tea and reading newspapers, and having a completely different way of life than the American continent.
French fashion magazine of 1920, left cover read: "Parisian (style) life"
By the beginning of the twentieth century, many artists began to live in France, including the famous Hemingway and Fitzgerald. In the golden age of a strong dollar, writers from foreign countries talked about socialism, literature, and love in parisians as if the sky would never end. The mobile feast in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris was not fictional until the Great Depression swept across North America.
Zelda and Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris
Since then, Paris has become the nostalgia of the upper middle class on the other side of the ocean: it seems to be nostalgic for the left bank of the Seine in France, but in fact it is nostalgic for the fact that I was once fortunate enough to live in the romantic bubble. Under the filter of nostalgia, the simplest cashmere sweaters, striped sleeves, and berets worn by Parisian women all carry the playfulness and lightness characteristic of Europeans in the eyes of Americans. Ten passes, ten passes a hundred, and by the time you react, people all over the world will have stereotypes about the French style.
But do French women have to be so sexy, laid-back, effortless chic?
At least, the French woman I like, she doesn't have to follow the rules of femininity. I like them because they are honest, passionate, angry, ambitious. They don't need to live in the lens of a man, they gaze at the world.
Adele Hahnel
I watched YouTube blogger Alice Cappelle deconstruct "French Girl Aesthetic" before. In her opinion, the French-style emotion is nostalgic, and people want to emulate the characters in the French films of the 60s. It is the image of the girls' striped shirts plated with retro gold edges. But in her opinion, "French girls" are far more than these women under the lens. French women are fighting, writing, expressing, and they care about social issues: feminism, climate, votes, not just the so-called "Chic".
Only women with opinions have strength.
At the forty-fifth Cesar Awards ceremony in France, Adele Hahnel left the audience after the Best Director Award was awarded to Polanski. As a survivor of sexual assault, Adele gave the middle finger to the french film's top award.
French women protesting outside the César Awards
The most feared thing in a man's world is the woman who dares to accuse the superior. And Adele, with her stark anger, told the world that actresses are not exquisite portraits in a golden cage, they can be burning revolutionaries. Adele's beauty is tough, she is a true Gryffindor, a brave person who tears off the king's new clothes.
In fact, the beauty of French women has always been so sharp and exuberant.
You can certainly enjoy crispy bread in a reformation in the southern French sun, but you also need to know that this is not the only "French beauty". If you want to understand French women, how can you ignore women in French literature? Those women who hide behind the thin "French" symbols are the true soul of French beauty.
Think of Margaret Duras, a typical "French woman". She once said, "I write women to write about me, to write about myself throughout the centuries." A book of "Lover" has made literary girls all over the world have a wet Saigon summer dream.
Duras was always associated with the writing of female lust. She is romantic, a kind of self-burning romance that ends in vain. But this romance is actually a very wild thing, like her thriving desire.
Love was her experiment, a way for her to experience the order of power. Using the flesh as a method, Duras's life is writing, and she works ten hours a day. In the long midnight, she recorded all the stormy nights, spirits, travelers from the East and young lovers.
Film Lover, 1992
She has been loving with all her might. From her teenage years in the French colony of Vietnam to her late years in Paris, she changed lovers, and all of this was integrated into her writing. She has never had a stable and traditional family relationship, but she has undoubtedly experienced a flood of love, just like her love stories, which are often chaotic, ambiguous, and crazy.
In the photo, her eyes are cold and her round face is slightly blunt. She looked like a teenage girl who had stumbled into an adult's body, and her expressionless face seemed like a cunning disguise. Duras's dress is also very simple, shirts, coats, black, white, gray. Perhaps only simple lines could stabilize her rich soul.
A French woman like Duras is an unpopular beauty, a beauty other than skin. There is an undercurrent between her eyebrows, which makes people believe that she is a lover deep in the Mekong rainforest. What's more, duras would be said to be a juicy metaphor in the palm of Eros' hand.
Speaking of French women, in addition to Duras, I also think of the genius girl Sagan. If Duras is the pharmacist of desire, then Sagan is the player in this chaotic world.
Sagan is beautiful, a light beauty. She looked like a cat, her eyes were dexterous, and she provoked from the black and white photographs all those who had been staring at her for half a century. At the age of eighteen, she published Hello, Sorrow, and from a young age, she had wealth and fame. But she seemed to be mockingly recoiling it all. For her, talent, money, and time are all things that can be squandered, and her life is indeed spent in endless parties.
"Life is a drag race and I have the right to self-destruct." The young Sagan said so. Writers are often unusually sharp, and in order to achieve abundant perception, writers are often more likely to dwell on marginal experiences, such as Sagan. She raced and drank like a juvenile beast that was difficult to tame.
One of Guerlain's incense sticks, La Chamade, was inspired by Sagan's novel "Ecstasy". It's a spicy but sweet old fragrance that is said to have been cleansed with the scent of oak moss and vanilla, paired with a juicy sweet and sour blackcurrant that sounds like Sagan. Sagan was said to have been the muse of Jean-Paul Guerlain himself, and her fascination hung over France like a mist.
In 1978, Sagan, who was in his forties, published a love letter to Sartre in the newspaper, and the words were boiling and decade-long admiration. French women, never afraid of love, but raw love to catch. Sagan is honest about love, and so is Duras, who are sharp and fierce, like the chivalrous people of the East.
Compared with them, the red-lipped French girl wearing a beret in front of the Eiffel Tower is beautiful, but less energetic.
But the beauty of a French woman is not a brittle symbol of paper.
From Beauvoir's famous sentence "Women are not born women, but are shaped into women", to Sienma's use of images in "Portraits of Burning Women" to record the history and hidden experience of women being gazed, the beauty of French women is not only in Instagram or the Little Red Book, but also in their opinions and art of living.
So, the next time we think of "French style," maybe we can think about something other than a croissant.
(Content Editor: Yuzu)