Catherine O’Mahony

The impossibility of being Mme Macron: why we need to get over the French thing

IT CAN’T have escaped your notice that everyone is obsessed with Brigitte Trogneux this week. Of course, this all started because she is 24 – TWENTY FOUR – years older than her husband and now French presidentelect Emmanuel Macron, which is a detail so powerfully unexpected that nobody seemed able to quite get over it when it first emerged. What’s more, when they met he was a teenager and she was 40. FORTY! She was a teacher. She was HIS teacher. Her kids are the same age as her husband. One of them was in his class at school.

It’s like a movie plot. A very French movie plot. Or a racy novel.

The basic facts of this unlikely romance have been repeated over and over by the world’s media in tones of never-ending wonderment.

It must have been very tedious for Brigitte. And yet, perhaps not. Perhaps she really is “the power behind the throne”, which is the latest evolving angle on the World’s Most Absorbing Frenchwoman.

And perhaps, if that’s the case, she’s simply delighted at all the attention. It’s a great story after all. It very possibly helped her husband get elected.

And all she herself needed to do to survive the prurient onslaught, it is becoming gradually evident, was wear a few nice outfits, swish her carefully chopped hair, beam delightedly and wait for the headlines to evolve into something less like morbid fascination, and more like fawning adoration.

Which brings me to the kernel of the issue. The latest thing, it seems, is working out not so much who Mme Macron really is, but determining how we all could be more like her. There are rival theories on how this can be achieved, so I will need to condense them down into the most popular.

Rule 1: You need to dress better. Lots better.

Specifically, you need to be elegant in a Mme Macron-ish type of way. Which appears to be very tanned (in a curiously un-French way), and then dressing sort of like a chic rock chick. This requires very tight leather trousers, or extremely skinny jeans. Also a tailored jacket with some kind of interesting detail. Neutral colours in the main, although Mme Macron does wear the odd splash of bright blue, so you have to be open to colour as well (when to plunge? You will know when the time is right). You need to wear short skirts and high heels too when the occasion calls for it. And you need to look great in them, even though you are 64 years old.

This brings me to rule number 2 which is, you need to be 64 but look 20 years younger. This is a tricky one. Though apparently, the Mme Macron experts say, it can be achieved by dint of a lot of exercise (Pilates or maybe just weights), following a “clean” diet (or possibly just subsisting on cigarettes and coffee – nobody is quite sure) and getting some subtle plastic surgery (the odd dab of Botox).

You also need a very large fringe. And possibly hair extensions to get the bouffant look. And some judicious highlights to round it off.

No biggie, the advice suggests, just a bit of maintenance. If Brigitte can do it, so can you.

Well, I am not so sure but let’s proceed to rule 3, in any case, which boils down to carrying oneself with a certain appealing air of ‘je ne sais quoi’. It is not 100pc clear to me what this means but it may have something to do with smiling a lot (but not too much) and with gazing adoringly at your presidential husband (but not in an annoying Nancy Reagan-ish way).

It has to do with generally projecting the notion that, yes, you are clearly a hyper-special 64-yearold muse-to-the-president, but really you’d be just as happy hanging out with your kids and seven grandchildren, possibly while inhaling espresso and smoking Gitanes (or something). Are you following me? Probably not, because it’s all so utterly impossible. There was a moment when everyone wanted Michelle Obama’s arms but at least that was something faintly attainable. As role models go for the average Irish woman, Brigitte Trogneux is possibly even more improbable than the last glamorous French first lady, Carla Bruni.

It would take me a decade to look like Brigitte Trogneux. I would have to give up work and dedicate myself to it permanently. I would possibly need a double leg transplant to make the micro skirts work for starters. And then I still wouldn’t have the je ne sais quoi bit.

We need to get over the not-being-French thing.

For as long as I can remember, women who are not French have talked about French women as though they were some kind of higher being. The holy grail for any stylish person has long been the acquisition of ‘Parisian chic’. I wore a beret for years because of it (and no, it didn’t work).

Many books have been written on this subject. There was ‘French Women Don’t Get Fat’, of course (which I seriously doubt, but hey). There was ‘What French Women Know’ (more or less everything, apparently). You can even buy a book called ‘My Stylish French Girlfriend’, which is basically a series of accounts of how French women live, work and what they eat, so you can imagine you actually know them.

The thing is though, you can research as much as you want, but you’ll never be a French person unless you actually are a French person. Also, and no offence to any French people I may have met, it has to be said that not all of them look like Brigitte.

Mme Macron is indeed a very stylish woman who looks extraordinary for her age and appears to have a great relationship with her much younger husband. Bien joué, Mme Macron.

But unless you have grown up in France, fallen in love with a 15-year-old-boy, left your husband to marry him and then supported your spouse to win the presidency, you have zero hope of actually walking in her (designer label) shoes.

Time for a Gallic shrug. Let’s move on.