Charles de Gaulle called her ‘the French export as important as Renault cars’.
Brigitte Bardot, who has died at the age of 91, challenged post-war fashion’s stiff formality when she emerged in 1950s France, ushering in a uniquely raw sex appeal.
Her wardrobe – a compelling mix of gingham dresses, ballet flats, Breton stripes and necklines – was magnetic.
Suddenly, style was about loosened buttons, bare shoulders and artfully dishevelled hair that women ached to emulate.
Every revival of ‘effortless French cool’ leads back to Brigitte. Here are some of her most enduring looks…
Making the trench coat a classic
Before Kate Moss and Alexa Chung adopted the trench coat as a modern wardrobe staple, Bardot was making it her own.
Photographed in London in 1963, she styled it with black knee socks, adding a bow to her hair.
For the quintessence of French girl chic, she’d wear it belted at the waist with a bouffant, black knee boots and a quilted Chanel bag.
The blonde bouffant
Born a brunette in 1934, she dyed her hair blonde in 1956 for the Italian film Mio Figlio Nerone.
And so it remained – a warm, golden, ‘dirty’ blonde that conjured carefree summers spent on the French Riviera.
Hairdressers still try to recreate its natural, radiant hue, with many regarding it as the ‘ultimate blonde’.
Of all her hairstyles, none is more famous than her bouffant.
The artfully dishevelled, half-up, half-down style was her signature look, endlessly emulated but rarely equalled.
The beatnik look
With typical panache, she distilled the movement’s rebellious spirit into something unmistakably her own.
Drawing on the Left Bank aesthetic of late-1950s Paris, her black turtlenecks, cropped cigarette pants, striped tops, black headbands and ballet flats rejected high glamour in favour of understatement, aligning Bardot with a youth culture that prized freedom, creativity and nonconformity.
The smoky eye
Long before Victoria Beckham was giving tutorials on TikTok, Bardot was providing the world with her own masterclass.
Her trademark look – the smoky eye – was an arresting blend of three main components: a black ‘cat’s eye’ flick of liquid eyeliner; heavy black kohl-rimmed eyes and lashings of thick black mascara. It’s still many a woman’s go-to beauty regime for sultry evening glamour.
The wasp waist
Aged 22, her breakout role in the 1956 film And God Created Woman saw her play the ultimate femme fatale, stealing every scene in a series of wasp-waisted looks that came to define 1950s sexuality.
Her own wardrobe mirrored this, accentuating her waist in figure-hugging shift dresses and sensuous tailoring.
A sex kitten in leopard
Before renouncing fur, she was frequently seen wearing animal-print coats, with leopard, tiger, zebra and ocelot vying as favourites.
In the 1960s, this was her go-to travelling look. She arrived in London in 1967 wearing a belted animal-print fur, black knee-high boots and her trademark beret.
Boho glamour
By the 1970s, Bardot had fully embraced the kaftan, wearing a canary yellow chiffon iteration embellished with jewels in 1972.
The kaftan’s loose, fluid style was perfectly in keeping with the decade – but Bardot being Bardot, the actress often opted for sheer or semi-transparent fabric that added a soupcon of sex appeal to her outfit.
The bikini
In 1953, an 18-year-old Bardot posed for photos on the beach at Cannes – a cunning move that stopped traffic, raised blood pressure and shamelessly promoted her 1952 film Manina, The Girl In The Bikini.
She went on to have her photo taken on every beach in the South of France, and the bikini changed the face of modern fashion.
Fabulously off-duty
The 1970s and early 1980s saw Bardot embrace a more casual aesthetic, of which denim was a key component.
Bell-bottom jeans were de rigueur, nor did she shy away from ‘double denim’.
Jeans also formed the basis of her everyday uniform, worn with a simple T-shirt or a denim chambray shirt thrown over a vest.
