A French Girl On The Problem With The French Girl Aesthetic
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Loading... - Antonio Cruz
- 20 Feb 2023
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Growing up in Paris, there was something not quite right about me: I was too full-figured, too careful, too earnest. The archetypal French Girl, as we’ve all been told over and over very possibly for our entire lives, is naturally thin despite subsisting on baguette and wine. She wakes up at a leisurely hour, sighs dramatically, smokes a cigarette, and on a good day she might swipe on a little red lipstick; yet she looks “effortlessly” elegant and artfully messy at all times. We’ve been told she does it all better than us and we should all try to emulate her if we want to be desirable, and worthy. For better or worse, I was – and am – markedly not her.
Real women are not archetypes (just ask Meghan Markle), but the French Girl aesthetic also wasn’t conjured up out of thin air. In certain pockets of central Paris, a living, breathing version of this woman really is speed-walking in her Bensimons, on her way to gossip with a friend over a single glass of red, so it’s not like we’re trying to emulate a fantasy. She exists, but she’s exclusionary by nature: white, skinny, affluent, city-dwelling, hyper-educated, and frankly a little snobby. For those of us who don’t fit her mould (and there are far more of us than there are of her), she is mostly a source of shame as we try and fail to be like her.
As a teen, I may not have been aware of the French Girl archetype that’s so often packaged up and sold to us, but I was living smack-bang in the middle of her real-life breeding ground: I went to a semi-private, majority white Catholic school in central Paris where everyone could afford the Repetto ballet flats and Moncler puffers they desperately needed in order to fit in. I had the ballet flats, but it turned out there was an inscrutable quality I was simply lacking – a certain je ne sais quoi, if you will. Lindsey Tramuta, a Paris-based journalist and author of The New Parisienne, has also felt shamed at times by the hegemonic perfection touted by the French Girl. Read More…
