Brigitte Bardot: the original sex kitten and 1960s icon is still an inspiration
She was an icon of the 1960s and yet Brigitte Bardot’s influence on fashion and beauty is still felt today, says Maggie Alderson.
It seems nothing short of astonishing that an actress who has been a virtual recluse for more than 40 years can still exert a powerful influence on the world – yet Brigitte Bardot does. Because at no time since her retirement in 1973 has the original Sex Kitten’s unique style ever looked dated, or anything less than fabulously cool.
Just ask Kate Moss, Sienna Miller and Debbie Harry. Or yourself, any time you sling on a stripy Breton top, slide into a ballet flat, or make your hair last another day with a wide headband. And showing just how relevant her style still is, catwalks at the most recent round of designer fashion shows were packed with gingham dresses like the one she made an international sensation at her second wedding in 1959.
Tellingly, when Madame Bardot was asked recently to define what we now call “Bardot Style”, she had a one-word answer, “Moi”. Me. And that word sums up not only the source of the timeless classics she has added to the modern woman’s wardrobe, but her attitude to her career, her men and her whole life. Me. As she puts it, “I was just myself, that’s all.” Whether it was deliberately wearing a jumper back to front, using her own clothes as film costumes, having multiple lovers, eschewing Paris and Hollywood to live in sunny Saint-Tropez, rescuing a goat on a film location and keeping it in her hotel room, she has always done it her way. Sometimes for good, sometimes not so much … Let’s get that aspect out of the way, shall we? There’s no nice way to say it: Brigitte Bardot has been fined five times in France for inciting racial hatred, for her vocal objections to immigration and the details of slaughtering sheep according to Koranic law.
This obsession with animal welfare – which she gave up her acting career to devote herself to – has also given her something of a loony reputation. Added to by her refusal to age with celebrity grace, that is, under the surgeon’s knife. Cruel paparazzi pictures show she now wears all her Riviera sunbaking very clearly on her 82-year-old face. Wrinkled, bigoted and loony. It’s not a great late life package, but let’s put that aside for now and consider the more positive elements of Bardot’s earlier years, now being celebrated in a new book, Brigitte Bardot: My Life In Fashion. It’s a visual feast. Page after page of pictures which make your jaw drop at her outrageous facial and physical perfection – those cheekbones, those lips, those eyes, those legs, that waist … on one person? How? It’s all fabulous, but there was one thing which really stood out to me: her hair.
Not the natural hair of her teenage years, modelling in Paris for ELLE, a magazine founded by a friend of her wealthy parents. That hair was a mid-brown, with warm tones, nice enough atop a very pretty kitten face and the poised limbs of a trainee ballerina, but forgettable. What still knocks you out, even though you’ve been seeing pictures of it all your life, is the later hair. The bad blonde dye job, straw dry and as messy as a haystack, hanging over black-rimmed eyes, which became her signature look. Like so many of her looks which have gone into the style canon, the Bardot hair came about randomly, when she was making what she describes as “a terrible film” called
Brigitte Bardot has always done it her way.”
Nero’s Mistress in 1956. Roman courtesans, apparently, dyed their hair blonde (with pigeon droppings), so the director decided Bardot should have a bleach job (with peroxide, not bird poop) for the role. The film is long forgotten, but Bardot was smart enough, aged 22, to see what the bleached hair did for her and kept it. Paradoxically, the moisture-stripping effect of repeat bleaching – just the kind of thing beauty writers are always warning us against – led in turn to the random creation another of her iconic looks, the messy bouffant up do, which the French christened the “Choucroute Beehive” – likening the frizzy dry texture of Bardot’s hair to the shredded cabbage of sauerkraut.
“I couldn’t get my bun right,” recalls Bardot, in the book. “There were lots of strands of hair dangling down and annoying me, so I thought it would be a good idea to tease them so they framed my face.” The sensation of Bardot’s undone do was that it also performed a kind of miracle on more ordinary mugs, transforming legions of averagelooking women into early 1960s sex bombs. And it’s never gone out of style.
What really surprises, reading the book, is that it seems all the fabulous looks we associate with Bardot came about in this serendipitous way. The ballet flat was born when the owners of Repetto, France’s premier maker of dance shoes, saw that she wore their soft ballet pumps as street shoes. They offered to make her some with a proper sole and she asked them to cut the vamp (the front edge) as low as possible. Thus the ballerina, still the chicest of flat shoes, was born. And toe cleavage.
The gingham thing came about because “I was walking past the Jacques Esterel store window when I saw the gingham dress that made the headlines. I thought it was pretty and new, and I caused a gingham tidal wave.” The neckline now named after her, sitting low off the shoulders, flatteringly to showcase clavicles (and breasticles), was created simply by pulling the neck of a V-neck sweater down as far as it would legally go. Because she felt like it. She created another classic style
– the wide headband, worn low – when she tied a scarf around her hairline, when she was having a bad hair day.
And it wasn’t just with clothes and hair that Bardot created a new style language. Her legendary SaintTropez house, La Madrague, which she moved to full-time in 1958 (radical in itself for a Paris sophisticate), became the template for a new kind of beach boho lifestyle. Right on the water, all whitewashed walls, tiled floors, rattan furniture and Provençal prints, with her wafting around in bikinis and maxi dresses, pausing occasionally to strum a guitar, it shaped a Mediterranean beach ideal we all still yearn for. Pictures of her walking through Saint-Tropez, hair down, barefoot, in a long white dress, carrying a basket, could have been taken yesterday – just as every woman currently sporting the thigh-high boot craze wishes she looked the way Bardot did in the film clip of her 1967 hit song Harley Davidson. It’s an amazing catalogue of trendsetting innovation for one woman – especially considering she invented it all entirely on her own. No Hollywood studio creating a starlet persona, as they did then. No A-list stylist creating a look, as they do now. Just her. Moi. “I never tried to cause a scandal,” she says. “I was simply the person I wanted to be. Natural, the real me, truthful.”
Some of those truths might be a little hard for us to take now – a less attractive side of that fiercely independent character – but the misplaced ideas of old age will never eclipse the glory of her youth and it’s Bardot’s fabulous style which will be her legacy. And one we can all enjoy. Moi. Us.
I was simply the person I wanted to be.”