What The Obsession with French Girls Actually Says About Society

It’s nothing new, just more monetized insecurity. But it IS a sign of conservative pushback, whether we realize it or not.

Throughout the Internet and yon, people will not stop going on about “French Girl Aesthetic”.

How to live, sleep, eat, and dress like a French girl.

Here’s some schlock you can buy to have perfect skin like a French girl.

How to be pretty and demure like a French girl yet command attention without too much of it.

It’s honestly something I didn’t really give much thought to until I read this fucking brilliant piece by Tamara Mitrofanova where she breaks down the origins of the French girl obsession and the nefarious impacts that it has.

As someone who’s always been on the outside socio-culturally speaking, I didn’t pay much attention to this trend and thus did not put any stock into it.

I mean, I’m a fat alternative woman from The Bronx. My Biohazard, Type O Negative, and local punk and metal band playlists are juxtaposed to Trevor Something and chiptune. I live in athleisure more than hardware-laden dresses these days, but am changing that upon moving to LA and you bet those gym pants are covered in skulls in the meantime. While petting toads and enjoying an entrepreneurial and childfree life that’s as healthy and happy as I can feasibly make it contribute to keeping me vampirically young, I’m now officially too old to be pandered to or really give a shit.

Read: I never have, and never will, fit into mainstream beauty standards and don’t really care to anyway.

But perhaps it’s my outsider status that actually makes me qualified to speak on this matter since I’m impartial. Alternative folk have our own trash to take out, and there’s plenty of social pressures and insecurity in our communities because it’s just part of being human.

Tamara’s essay made me think, then decide to brave the hostile waters of Instagram and all those neo-Victorian perfectionists who live on it along with articles I didn’t really want to read. Now I can finally articulate just why people are so obsessed with French girl aesthetic!

It’s just white supremacy, fatphobia, and wanting women to be quiet and demure. Read: a tale as old as time.

That’s really all there is to it.

Notice how it’s “French GIRL”, not “boy” or “people”.

There’s an explicit call for women to emulate style and behavior of a certain group of women — gotta love the patriarchy pitting us against one another, amirite?

This movement feels that French style is supposedly the apex of femininity we now have to live up to, in a world where women and femmes now wear 50,000 different types of Doc Marten boots and leather jackets without necessarily being in any subculture. Where you have the choice to eschew makeup completely, or wear 18,000 different pearlescent MAC shades that you can learn how to apply from countless beauty influencers’ videos.

While there’s plenty of fashion epicenters across the globe like New York, Milan, London, and Harajuku in Tokyo, Paris is considered the fashion capitol of the world. Most of the renowned fashion houses originated there, so it’s little wonder people still want to recreate what France — specifically, Paris — represents to them. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to emulate French styles! Some people don’t care about fashion, for many others, it’s an important form of self-expression.

But I have some interesting observations as someone who’s actually been to France, a country about the size of Texas that still has a stronghold on fashion and beauty influence that ripples across the planet.

French style encompasses so many different types of dressers, from runways to street fashion. And I saw plenty of spooky women and other punks when I was in Paris and Rennes-Cedex.

French people as a whole dress far less casually than Americans do: wearing your toad-covered athleisure outside the gym is generally considered a no-no, whereas no one blinks an eye in my neck of The Bronx if you do your midday Target run or quick stop at the bodega in pajama pants. But outside of alternative folk, I found that French women tended to stick to black like New Yorkers while casual dress was more soft and neutral colors, clean lines, and fairly minimalist as far as jewelry and accessories go.

You’ll see an occasional runway emulator or two like you would in Manhattan or Los Angeles. But for the most part, French style is pretty understated compared to the intense variety you see in America.

But what about the rest of it?

In its most basic form, promoting French Girl Aesthetic is a form of pushback. That as it’s become more socially acceptable for women to embrace tough or tomboyish accents in the way they dress, choosing boldness and visibility over hanging back in neutral colors and minimal jewelry, or perhaps giving more subversive aesthetics a try if not just giving the finger to gender altogether? Stalwarts fearing change want to push the hyper-feminine that they feel is more neutral.

Pretty, girly, soft, and quiet.

The push to emulate what some perceive as this ultimate form of femininity is coming up so much now that people of all races, religions, cultures, degrees of gender nonconformity, and body types are being shown in traditional media. People who wear their prejudices on their sleeves froth at the mouth about how DARE they have to look at a fat Latina model, or a Black woman being the main character in a hit Netflix series.

How dare they have to see a woman comfortable in her own skin with bright hair, a belt big enough to be mistaken for a WWE championship prize, printed tights, or anything else that’s not neutrals with a pop of color like the model in the cover image for this essay.

French girl aesthetic is about making women act and appear softer and not as loud or passionate.

In addition to being a blatant capitalist cash grab to buy berets and La Prairie skincare regimens, it’s just a reminder to women that we’re supposed to chase yet another impossibility.

I want to be clear, I’m not mocking actual French women who’ve actually lived their culture and aesthetic and choose to appear that way. Or if you want to don a beret and chow down on some baguette and brie like a monitor lizard, I am 100% for it and would like some of that bread with that super strong coffee I got in Place de Clichy and was never able to replicate at home.

Rather, I’m calling out what a certain subset of white America thinks a French girl is.

Living like a French girl means you’re that rich but not wealthy enough to emasculate most men. You’re thin, white, quiet and demure, exotic but not TOO exotic, and you have things like universal healthcare and paid time off but without necessarily being anywhere on the political left looking to upset the status quo.

Read: totally impossible for most women to attain. You’re automatically struck out from this if you’re a woman of color, fat, and/or disabled.

You’re supposed to enjoy that tiny cup of espresso with a fresh-baked croissant on a sunny cobblestone street with nary a peep the entire time. You’re not one of those LOUD bitches who always has something to say, you’re supposed to just look pretty and exist to sate a gaze that is not your own.

You can afford beautiful designer clothes, you don’t have to worry about being outpriced, outsized, or unable to get things specially tailored to you. But you don’t have a high-powered job or have your own business to the point that it’s intimidating. You just magically have enough money to live the good life but not enough to significantly out-earn most men. You might own something in the Paris Fantasy Economy, like a boutique for dog berets. [Note: I love Paris’ quirky small business culture, and hope it does not mercilessly get slaughtered like NYC’s did.]

You’re effortlessly beautiful with clear, dewy skin and makeup that took 3 hours to apply but supposedly looks like you’re not wearing any.

That unmistakable Parisian patois makes you sound interesting and exotic, you’re clearly a class above those American broads who are far removed from their ancestry. Sexy and mysterious, but coquettish. But you know…you’re not TOO exotic, like a different race, non-Christian, queer, or anything like that.

It’s just this impossible ideal to attain, and nothing like the day-to-day lives of actual women in France. Where they’re just as manifold as they are in other parts of the world, where this same westernized, conservative fascist beauty standard seems to hold up basically everywhere.

But if you REALLY want to know why French women age gracefully despite all the cigarettes accompanied by copious amounts of bread and cheese?

It’s because they get six weeks paid vacation, universal healthcare, and mother’s helpers when they have kids. Your skin would look amazing too if you got enough rest and didn’t have as much stress as the average American who is constantly up against a Navy destroyer made of debt and a government that is actively trying to kill its citizens for profit.

There, I just saved you god knows how many clicks.