Recently, you’ve probably come across a picture of a “French Girl” online. Typically, she’s posing in front of a gorgeous Parisian building, wearing some sort of pastel knit sweater, a croissant in one hand and a cigarette in the other. More importantly the “French Girl” is skinny, white and has very straight hair. She’s rich, lives in a beautiful apartment in the historic centre of Paris and has a rich French boyfriend.
Parisian “French Girl” influencers have become more and more popular over the past few years with people like Jeanne Damas, Sabina Socol, Anne Laure Mais and Camille Charrière amassing a major following online. That said, the perception of French women that these influencers embody is not new; from Brigitte Bardot to Jane Birkin, a certain type of French woman has fascinated people and has added to the mysticism that surrounds French – or more specifically, Parisian – culture. People over the years have continuously admired how seemingly effortlessly chic they are, how simple yet elegant their outfits are, and how they appear to never ever try too hard. Their hair is messy but not too messy, they don’t bother with makeup but always have a dash of red lipstick on their lips and just a little touch of mascara to complement their eyes. They embody the French Je ne sais quoi and people love it. They’ve idealised it for decades now.
As a French person myself, I grew up idealising these women. After all, if Françoise Hardy and Brigitte Bardot represented everything a “French Girl” should be, then I had to emulate them to be valued and recognised as a “proper” “French Girl”. The problem with this is that I quickly realised I could and would never be them and that came as a huge disappointment. How was I to fit in and assert my identity as a French girl when I knew I didn’t look like any of them? That’s when I started to notice that most of the French women I knew in real life and looked up to didn’t look like them either. The French women I know come in all shapes and sizes, come from so many cultural and racial backgrounds; some are poor, some are middle-class, some are rich, and each and every one of these “real life” women are all dripping with class and elegance. So why is everyone so fixated on an idealised and extremely limited version of the “French woman” and why is she so popular?
In 2004, Mireille Guiliano published her diet book, French Women Don’t Get Fat, which sold more than three million copies within ten years. The popularity of this book essentially promoted this stereotype of the skinny, rich, white Parisienne on a global scale. Since its publication, many other books about the Parisian woman’s lifestyle have come out and have known great success like How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits and Parisian Chic: A Style Guide. The books all claim to provide some sort of insight into the lives of Parisian women and how all you non-effortlessly-chic-and-rich-and-natively-Parisian women out there can attain this level of glamour. Inherently, all these books promote and capitalise on this now very popular and lucrative stereotype of the “French (Parisian) Girl”. The exploitation of this stereotype to extremely profitable ends has taken its form into, among other things, global clothing brands like Rouje, Musier Paris, Sézane or Parisienne et alors, that all capitalise on this romanticisation of French women, essentially creating a multi-million dollar business out of the idealised “French Girl” stereotype.
But clothing brands or books aren’t necessarily the problem here; it’s the actual stereotype they’re built on. By perpetrating this ideal of the “French Girl”, they are essentially excluding most of the French female population. If you’re not from Paris then you don’t fit in, if you’re not rich then you don’t fit in, if you’re not straight or cisgender then you don’t fit in, if you’re not super skinny then you don’t fit in, if your hair isn’t straight then you don’t fit in and if you’re not white then you don’t fit in. It’s harmful because if you don’t meet the criteria of the idealised “French Girl”, then does that mean that you’re not allowed to be one, even if you are in fact French and identify as a woman?
France is a very diverse country and Paris in particular is one of the most diverse and multicultural cities in the world. To exclude women of colour, fat women, queer women and poor women from your conceptualisation of what makes a woman French, is profoundly wrong, and reinforces racist, classist, homophobic and fatphobic ideals of beauty. It also makes it really hard for any French girl who doesn’t fit the criteria to feel like she belongs and that she is beautiful. This is why I reject this “French Girl” myth, because it is precisely that: a myth. We need to start celebrating all French women, not just the rich, white, straight, cis and skinny ones. Our portrayal and understanding of French women needs to be more inclusive and representative of what French women actually look like in the real world. So go ahead and do yourself a favour and go follow some French girls who actually represent a majority of the French female population.
Here are a few recommendations: Kenza Sadoun-el Glaoui (@kenzasmg); Crystal Murray (@crystalmrr); Anaïs Pénélope (@anaispenelope), Lina Ose (@linaose); Juny Breeze (@junybreeze); Lalaa Misaki (@lalaamisaki); Lamia Lagha (@lamialand) and Fatou N’Diaye (@blackbeautybag).