During the day, the French girl wears white jeans, leather loafers, windswept bangs and a bare face.
At night she wears a £35 Paco Rabanne steel dress, the metal plates gleaming against her tanned skin.
Today, she’s mythical: the subject of Vogue articles, Pinterest boards and TikTok compilations. But in the sixties and seventies it was very real.
Françoise Hardy, who died of cancer on Tuesday, first became known as a singer. She popularized the light-hearted French pop genre known as yé-yé. She also acted. In 1966, when she starred in the John Frankenheimer film “Grand Prix” — a Formula One drama in which Ms. Hardy wore minidresses from her own closet alongside racing suits — the New York Times described her as an avatar for her generation: “young, cool, uncommunicative but unpretentious.”
Mrs. Hardy was aware then, as she later wrote in her memoirs, that journalists were more often fascinated by her appearance than by her abilities. (The first words of that Times article mentioned her “long hair the color of lightly roasted chestnuts.”)
“The English-speaking press was much less interested in me as a singer than as an ambassador of French style,” she wrote ‘The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles’ published in the United States in 2018 by Feral House.
Her “slim, androgynous build,” as she described her body in her book, matched the modern, space-age aesthetic of French couturier André Courrèges, whose angular pieces she wore on stage. She loved the way his geometric designs gave her an “alien silhouette.”
But Mrs. Hardy was also self-critical. She wrote in her memoir that she had an “innate discomfort about appearance and lenses” and told Life magazine in 1964, when she was 20, that “I can’t bear to wear anything that will make people look at me .
Perhaps that explains her understated off-stage wardrobe, which in the mid-1970s consisted of jeans, simple tops and tailored jackets. She preferred pants, even if they attracted the attention she had wanted to avoid. ‘People were shouting and shouting’ designer Yves Saint Laurent told Women’s Wear Daily in 2005, describing the scene in which Ms. Hardy arrived at the Paris Opera in his famous Le Smoking tuxedo. “It was a shame.”
It was this effortless rebellion that inspired the public’s obsession. Half a century later, Mrs. Hardy is cemented as the ur-French girl – natural and casually chic – still a muse for fashion designers. A press release for the latest Tom Ford collection, shown in Milan in February, called catwalk models “strong and confident, with the edge of Françoise Hardy.”
Ms. Hardy embraced her role as an ambassador of French style. But the title brought some tension. As a symbol, she became more of an ideal than a real human woman. Men were openly obsessed with hair, including Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Bob Dylan.
Later in Ms. Hardy’s life, while promoting her memoir, she became “annoyed” by the way male journalists responded to her, according to Christina Ward of Feral House, who handled U.S. marketing and publicity for the book.
“They all had a strange fanboy approach, as if they had imagined being in love with Françoise as she was in 1963,” said Ms. Ward, who described Ms. Hardy as having a prickly appearance from decades of being objectified. “She had to bear the burden of what other people thought of her.”
But it was not difficult to understand why so many people were drawn to this ideal.
Erik Torstensson, co-founder and creative director of contemporary denim brand Frame, cited “the air of carelessness in her style.”
“Her wardrobe defined the style classics of our generation,” Torstensson wrote by email on Wednesday. “The ditch, the smoking tuxedo, the Breton and flares, she even made overalls and a motorcycle helmet look impossibly chic, for God’s sake.”
