I recently rewatched Amelie with Caleb in preparation for our upcoming trip to Paris. In thinking about and making my own packing list, I noticed how Audrey Tatou only wears about 10 pieces of clothing throughout the movie. Her red, green, and black wardrobe is intentionally calibrated to fit a very specific and surreal production design, but as one of the few French films that Americans know, it also inadvertently feeds into our idea of how French women dress. I remember first hearing about capsule wardrobes when Minimalism was in the cultural zeitgeist, but I think the idea of having a capsule wardrobe is rooted in and often connected to this aspirational French style — what if the clothes in my wardrobe were so chic, so high-quality, so timeless, that any combination of a very limited number of pieces would instantly be an outfit? Think of the freedom in my schedule, the confidence and renewed headspace I could achieve if every outfit I put on was sexy without even trying to be! Think of the elaborately executed good deeds and pranks I would have time to concoct (if you’re Amelie Poulain, that is).
One of the first aesthetic archetypes I was aware of as a tween using the internet was The French Girl. With the influx of post-pandemic microaesthetics, the French girl continues to be the matriarch, the final boss, the one aesthetic to rule them all. According to various internet fashion publications and blogs, there’s a lot of things that “French girls” supposedly do or don’t do. French girls take the stairs, don’t snack between meals (side note: the fact that the French slang word for junk food is “cochonnerie”, “cochon” meaning pig, is just out of pocket and rude). French girls behave like a mistress to keep their husband interested. French girls celebrate their natural beauty and wear minimal makeup, don’t blow dry their hair but it looks effortlessly wispy and smooth anyway. Effortlessness is the objective.
Our American obsession with the aesthetics of France go back to when Jackie O was wearing Chanel, Audrey Hepburn was the face of Givenchy, and Julia Child’s The French Chef premiered in 1963 on WGBH Boston. In the time that I’ve been alive, the discourse around and attraction to a “French” lifestyle, and the mystery of French women in particular, has been steadily percolating for those interested. French Women Don’t Get Fat was published in 2004; its ideas were still circulating the Internet on blogs largely unmodified when I started using Pinterest at around 12 years old. Though it seems remarkably reductive in 2024, these articles prescribing how French women get their hair done and what timeless outfits they are wearing are still published in Vogue, The Cut, and others every year — the Kendall Jenner video above appeared in my YouTube feed as I was writing this post. Unsurprisingly, especially given the number of articles telling us how to do it, achieving this look is not as “effortless” as we are lead to believe.
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But me? OH! I was OBSESSED, an absorbent sponge soaking up this content when I was still a girl. Many people my age were finding their corners of the internet at the time, and while I narrowly skirted a Lana Tumblr phase, my middle school Pinterest board reveals outfit after outfit with espadrilles, straw bags, big sunglasses, silk scarves, and linen. I thought, if I’m hearing reports from people who have been to France, specifically Paris, that an entire population of beautiful women are supposedly participating in these food and hygiene behaviors, then how can they be disordered? They must be the cultural norm. And so I moved through my teenage years and into college with these clichés informing my life choices: thrifting my best guess at “classic” silhouettes, including a pair of wedge espadrilles, parking my car far away from storefronts, and trying my best to eat everything I wanted but only at mealtimes and only until I was just satisfied…
I first visited France and last traveled abroad in summer 2019, which feels like a long time ago now. I was a French minor in college, despite my mom’s disgust at the idea — French was her first language, growing up in Québec, but as a nurse she thought my learning French was a waste of time and that I should have learned something useful, like Spanish. And so I went to France, all of my four semesters of French and years of absorbing French culture from Americans on the internet in a backpack, carryon suitcase, and small duffel bag. I will say this about Paris: it is one of the few places that actually lives up to the hype — the food, the romance, and beauty of it all. But when people think about Paris, they are usually only thinking about the area contained in the arrondissements, i.e. central Paris and not everything that you see taking the train into Paris from CDG. Our narrow “Emily in Paris” view of France does not include the HLMs, or “habitations à loyer modèré”, which make up much of Paris where the Haussman buildings end. For the majority of my summer semester, though, I was in Aix-en-Provence, an old Roman city in the South of France. There are many of aspects of French life that are too charming to seem real, even with pedestrian apartment buildings. There are the grandmas with their buggies going to do their shopping at the market, the bookstores with spines of uniform white and black, the additions of “bah ouai”, “du coup”, and very sincere usage of “oh, là là!”
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The thing is, though, I can’t remember a single outfit I saw someone wearing on the street from those 7 weeks. I never had a moment of “There she is! Jeanne Damas incarnate, walking down the street!” I felt anxious leading up to the trip. After all, I felt I had studied the depths of the media on the French, and that there would be some universal entity of style and thinness that would judge me if I didn’t pass this test — showing up and blending in. I carefully chose my mostly thrifted and handmade clothes to create a “capsule wardrobe” to help me achieve this goal. As anyone could have probably told me had I expressed these anxieties out loud, though, it was immaterial once I got there. For one thing, a 20-something year old white women is just not the average person you’re seeing on the street, no matter where you are. The young people I did see were wearing Zara just like we do here in the US, and no one was stopping me in the street or interrogating me (except for when I paid the wrong train fare and was fined 120€ — then I wish I would have pretended that I was ignorant and American).
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French Women Don’t Get Fat was thoroughly debunked by the Maintenance Phase podcast (please go listen if you are interested, I cannot recommend it enough), so I won’t get deep into it here, but I only wish that it had been around for me in 2019. I guess I was restricted to my “capsule wardrobe” by virtue of having to wear what I packed. But rather than spending a lot of mental energy thinking about what I was eating (as I did in the US) and whether or not I was cosplaying as a “French girl” well enough, most of my energy HAD to go towards understanding and then stringing together sentences in my second language. And yes, I did walk a lot more, and ate meals that were technically French provided by my rapidly-speaking neighborhood gossip (positive) of a host, Véronique. But I wasn’t perseverating on those things like I was prior to the trip because I really didn’t have time! And what a gift that is, for an experience to be more than the small, one-dimensional idea you had in your head. A mental break from anxiety about the silly, superficial things that plagued me and a chance to really focus on learning French in a beautiful place.
It’s comical to me now how I not only bought these articles hook, line, and sinker prior to having visited France, but how they continue to be published! They really paint a picture of this thin, white doll with blurred lipstick and Repetto ballet flats set against a backdrop of Haussman architecture, when anyone who has a mild awareness of French political culture is also aware of the deeply entrenched xenophobia towards anyone who speaks French with a non-”Standard French”, aka Parisian French, accent. That image is not representative, to say the least, and yet most of us who would consider ourselves progressive consume it as fact anyway. French women are and have been much more diverse than the American fashion media has led us to believe. Has anyone even asked them if this is how they want to be represented?? Next time you see a Tik Tok about French girl aesthetic I encourage you to think of my voice saying “that’s stoopid with two O’s”, and go about living your life. And also to actually go to France because it’s just as cool as Italy… living the real thing is much better than the image we’ve been sold.
P.s.
So how am I approaching this upcoming trip to France? Well, anxiously if I’m being honest, but not for the same reasons I was five years ago. We are going with my in-laws and brother- and sister-in-law, which promises to be very fun but as the French speaker makes me feel a little bit like cruise director and responsible for everything going smoothly and everyone having a good time. As if the 30% French DNA Ancestry.com tells me I have makes me an ambassador for the whole damn country (it doesn’t). We are going to do all the touristy things that I was too poor to do last time when I was using money I had saved from my restaurant jobs to pay for my program! In such a large group, any illusion of French girl cosplaying is out the window, and honestly that is good for me and my humility. This time is also different because I am bringing my wheelchair, which I am coming to grips with as the way that I am going to be able to have the most fun and be the least exhausted and sick while I’m there. That is good for my humility too. Maybe I will write about it when I get back, but Caleb and I are also going to Amsterdam and Copenhagen where I have never been so who knows! Copenhagen girlies and your pajama pants, watch out (that was a joke).
xoxo, Lili