French Girl unpacks the French Girl aesthetic

what is a french girl for you alice the french girl nana superclass and in english please uh well um i would say that it's a mix of being spontaneous and mischievous i know it sounds super cliche but it's more or less what it is i think that despite that french girl stereotype we are very much different [Music] from um artus my name is alice and welcome back to my channel so yes i'm finally tackling the french girl aesthetic in case you didn't know i'm french and i really like the french girl aesthetic for those of you who struggle to conceptualize what the french girl aesthetic is and actually i realized that most of my french friends actually don't really understand what it is which already tells a lot about the aesthetic but we'll go back to that later so yeah the french girl aesthetic is mostly based on 60s and 19's fashion and it's this combination of looking refined elegant but also very laid back and casual she likes high quality timeless pieces she likes vintage she knows how to dress for her body type we'll come back to that later as well she's confident sexy she puts lipstick with her fingers adjust the skirt to give her like some sunshine while antares at the cafe wears a dress on a bicycle and jeans for a night out surround herself with beautiful souls and witty friends and missing the metro star because that book was just so good these things only happen to french girls actually the french girl has been an object of fascination for a very long time the first editions of vogue in the us featured articles that you could totally find in today's magazines for example on how french women make and preserve beauty that fascination grew in the 1920s when the french economy was going down and the american industrial elite was rising progressively paris understood its potential as a city of choice among american tourists and thus focused on standing out and making itself very different from other european cities paris cultivated that difference since then it emphasized on its vibrant culture there's any fall with josephine baker but also became a place of exile for writers like fitzgerald or hemingway paris sounded super cool at that time at that time it was even called the navel of the world yet the result of that international fame and all the attention paris got from newspapers really turned this city into some sort of an ideal something that became constructed by people who only had a very limited experience of what paris and by extension france was that constructed ideal extended to its inhabitants and what we now call the french girl at that time coco chanel style embodied what was considered as the new cool avant-garde parisian style in 1926 she published a picture of a short simple black dress in american vogue the little black dress was born now we're progressively moving on to the second world war and france is very much losing its influence now it's the us who are setting international trends and especially with the growing popularity of its cinema hollywood and all the movie stars that emerged from it including marilyn monroe curvier bodies extravagant outfits cool makeup and hair became the norm and it kinda reflected in france with our local marie monroe bb brigitte baldo oh sorry brigitte bardot bardo gained a lot of popularity after she appeared as the leading role in the movie education and god created women no comment in the movie she appeared as this cute and sensual young woman bold and feminine she pretty much embodied what many of us would now consider as the personality of the french girl a bit naive but witty and whimsical another very important element as well is that brigitte bardot dissented the french girl aesthetic from paris and brought it to thousands to saint hobi and what you see in all those sassafras movies are influences that are still used by the french girl today the long midi dress with the wicker basket and espederia as a ballerina brigitte bardo was way slimmer than marie monroe but she was still quite curvy thanks to her very tiny waist and her prominent breasts and of course she went for that blonde look personal take but i feel like brigitte balder epitomized this transition from marion monroe in the 1950s to audrey hepburn in the 1960s hepburn and european symbolized that return to paris to paris fashion which meant elegance over american extravagance meaning longer silhouettes slimmer silhouette minimal makeup and many minimal accessories and rather simple outfit so a more casual look overall so you see that constant interaction between the us and france really is what shaped the french girl aesthetic i won't say the french girl was entirely constructed by the us because i'm i'm just too patriotic for that but as with every aesthetic stereotype there is a good amount of romanticization and to be honest that french girl idea has always been for us french women very exclusive first in terms of class paris fashion quickly became associated with luxury and luxury is not accessible for everybody therefore when brigitte bardo came along with her t-shirt jeans simple skirts and dresses french women quickly identified to her and idealized her because she made the french woman more down to earth more like the majority of us working-class or middle-class women the way she danced talked back to men who used her sensuality to get what she wanted was quite inspiring yet the simplicity of her closing was counterbalanced by a specific lifestyle that was quite unattainable for the majority of people in fact paid vacation in france was still rather limited and not everybody could afford traveling to the house or even have a secondary home there so when you see bruce bardo dressed up like that and the replication of her style by modern french girls influences well for most of us french women this dreams privilege now when you look at rouge for example now when you look at rouge for example rouge has become the french girl aesthetic brown by excellence you'll first notice that prices are super high and second that the style is mostly based on vintage pieces and it's not really about going to a thrift shop and just digging into the boxes of clothes no no no it's not that type of vintage it's more a generational inheritance type of vintage you see more like i got this lovely dress from my mom oh i got this leather bag from my aunt oh i got this jewelry set from my grandmother for me that's the essence of rouge and its honor zhendermas a style that is timeless because it looks like he's been passed from generation to generation so now you're gonna ask what about this and what about that this is how i see a french girl well glad you asked i'm now moving to the second reason why i think the french coast static is very exclusive thinness as we mentioned before paris popularized a long slim silhouette and there are tons of books and articles on why french women are so slim and how they maintain such a silhouette which tells a lot about how this aspect in particular is a big part of the french girl aesthetic to go back to that picture the word t-shirt a white blouse and a pair of jeans well you'll have to admit that it wouldn't be perceived as trendy if the girl was a plus-sized model or if she didn't look as effortlessly pretty some call that thin privilege or pretty privilege i'm not a huge fan of these terms but you cannot deny the fact that there is nothing particularly french about wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of jeans but apparently there is something french in being thin and effortlessly pretty i actually did a youtube poll about a week ago and most of you said that the french girl was effortlessly pretty or refined and it's true there are plenty of tutorials and videos on how to get that look pretty much the same thing as what we saw in those american vogue magazines um in early 20th century which brings me to my last point the french calisthenic is a nostalgic aesthetic which means that it romanticizes a specific era and lifestyle that did exist some point in history for a specific group of people but that now influencers try to capitalize on most of the exclusiveness of the french guy static actually comes from the fact that it is nostalgic the french girl is now facing a big dilemma because most of the icons she gets her inspiration from are very very problematic coco chanel was profoundly anti-semites and british bardo she's super racist and she was also part of the big backlash against french metoo she was part of all those women including katrina who signed and wrote a declaration called the right to bother basically and so in that declaration they said that it's fine for a man to grab your butt in the streets to hit a woman to call her all sorts of names in public to keep on making sexy jokes in front of her come on it's just human nature just to make clear it's not because you want to dress the french way that it automatically tags you with all those problematic aspects of the french aesthetic not at all it's my third video on nostalgic aesthetics and it always comes down to the same thing nostalgic style we nostalgic values so when i put the outdated option in the poll i'm mostly talking about those french icons and it really frustrates me that when you think about the french girl you think about those people we french women are so much more than that with a homeland of feminist and socialist writer georges sand but also marion kotia was very much involved into environmentalism but nothing compares nothing compares to adeline a true role model who endangered her career as an actress by revealing that she was sexually harassed and probably sexually assaulted by a director when she was just 15 years old she literally left the caesar's ceremony awards after roman polinsky won the best director honor award just saying a big to that weird industry she's just brilliant in everything she does and i highly recommend you check her out if you don't know how already who are you i'll put her socials in the description box stephanie bourjoji i hope you liked the video feel free to comment any ideas suggestions advice um don't forget to like and subscribe but also share this video with a friend it really helps me grow this little channel and yeah merci is bye

Channel: Alice Cappelle

Views: 205,386

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Id: 123Y2nUqOZA

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021