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French Girl, Interrupted - La Parisienne Is Not a Woman, but a Promise

 




There is probably not a single day on which one has even the faintest chance of encountering La Parisienne in the French capital. Not in a trench coat outside Café de Flore, not with Jean Seberg’s pixie cut on the Champs-Élysées, and not wearing red lipstick, a black turtleneck, and holding a half-read copy of Duras’s The Lover on one of the green chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

In fact, the real-life Parisiennes Caroline de Maigret, Anne Berest, Sophie Mas, and Audrey Diwan would not recommend Duras at all in their self-mocking style manual, How to Be Parisian, as the key to cultivating one’s allure. No, the surprisingly manageable reading list for aspiring Parisiennes — regardless of actual postcode — tends to feature Camus, Sagan, Flaubert, and Proust.

Anyone who has ever patiently worked their way through seven volumes of Proustian subordinate clauses, however, knows that the literary masterpiece has only limited relevance to the “quintessential Parisian art of being a woman.” In À la recherche du temps perdu, women are more often an aesthetic projection screen for desire, jealousy, and fantasies of possession. From that perspective, of course, she suddenly has quite a lot in common with La Parisienne after all.

In Search of the Lost Parisienne

La Parisienne, as Alice Cavanagh describes her in Vogue, is “always impeccably stylish, never gains weight, ages gracefully, and appears untouched by the dangers of lung cancer. She looks like Françoise Hardy, has the sex appeal of Brigitte Bardot, and the intellect of Simone de Beauvoir.”

When it comes to fashion, she makes do with the right basics. Inès de la Fressange, former muse of Karl Lagerfeld, describes the style of La Parisienne as “basically very simple: a man’s jacket, a trench coat, a navy-blue sweater, a tank top, a little black dress, jeans, and a leather jacket.” Model Caroline de Maigret and her friends agree with this reduced wardrobe philosophy. In addition to the pieces already mentioned, they add only a pair of men’s shoes, a bag, ballet flats, a silk scarf, a white T-shirt, and sunglasses.

And there it is: the Made in Paris look.

Curiously, this fashion-conscious siren does not even have to be French, nor does she need to live permanently in the city on the Seine. Some of the most famous Paris fashion girls have been expats. Marie Antoinette was Austrian. Josephine Baker came from St. Louis, Missouri. Romy Schneider grew up in Germany, and Jane Birkin, though she stormed the French charts with Serge Gainsbourg and Je t’aime… moi non plus, came from Britain.

Fashion influencer Sabina Socol was born in Romania and moved to Paris as a journalist more than ten years ago. There, according to Natalie Dixon, she is celebrated by fans as the embodiment of a French fashion It-girl and a kind of modern Brigitte Bardot. English writer Marissa Cox also found herself drawn to the City of Love. There, as she herself writes, she was reborn. Without meaning to, and without particularly trying, she transformed into a full-fledged Francophile and practising Parisienne.

Cliché and French-Girl Capitalism

If all of this sounds to some people like a mixture of reductive stereotyping and a very clever marketing promise, they are not entirely wrong.

La Parisienne, with her innate sense of style, her sexy intelligence, and her basic conviction that physical exertion is a vulgar Anglo-Saxon misunderstanding, exists primarily on social media, in advertising campaigns, in lifestyle manuals, and in the canon of popular culture.

Emily in Paris is merely the latest screen iteration, a world in which characters like Sylvie possess a permanent je ne sais quoi and deliver clichés with near-dogmatic seriousness: “To be a real Parisienne, you must suffer.”

This is nothing new. Netflix is merely copying ideas that have long been established. In the second half of the twentieth century, French cinema created for La Parisienne an entire repertoire of tastes, habits, and political attitudes. Her life, according to this mythology, consists of attending demonstrations, indulging her weakness for New Wave films, and experiencing her existential torments in magnificent Haussmann apartments.

Not to be forgotten: cigarettes, newspapers, a glass of wine, and a Sartre quotation for every occasion.

In the 1920s, Coco Chanel had already helped turn this woman of the world into an icon of chic — freed from the corset, dressed in black, and endlessly elegant. Less, after all, is more.

Myth and Money

Except this “less” is never really little.

What one needs to survive an afternoon quickly adds up: white jeans that look as though they were worn yesterday along the Canal Saint-Martin; a cashmere sweater that must never appear new; a matte red lipstick, applied just imperfectly enough to produce the signature bitten mouth; a perfume that smells très sensuel of identity; a raffia basket that, in most situations, exists entirely outside practical necessity; a styling cream for the perfectly fake undone look; and, of course, the boyfriend shirt, supposedly thrown on by accident.

All in all: around €1,500 — plus the ongoing cost of investing in the illusion that none of it has been bought, but rather inherited by temperament.

This is precisely the genius of the myth of La Parisienne. It makes labour invisible and calls it nature. It turns privilege, through clever marketing, into taste. It transforms restraint into aesthetics. Nonchalance, yes — but only as long as nobody notices the individual steps required to achieve it.

Who Is Not Included

What the myth also conceals is that La Parisienne is never simply a randomly selected woman one might encounter while strolling through the streets of the capital. She is almost always white, slim, bourgeois, heterosexual, well-connected, and culturally secure.

Her boyfriend shirt presupposes the boyfriend. Her inherited vintage bag presupposes a grandmother with a designer archive. Her messy hairstyle requires a hair texture in which dishevelment can be read as effortless chic in the first place.

Even her apparent independence is bound to codes that exclude many real women from the outset. A woman with an address in the banlieue — French, urban, and contemporary, but not fitting the Saint-Germain silhouette — is pushed to the margins, just like the supposedly overstyled cagole from Marseille or women of North African descent, who are rarely narrated as variations of La Parisienne, but rather as her opposite.

It is no wonder, then, that the criticism voiced by writers such as Alice Pfeiffer is directed not only at fashion clichés.

Emily Is Not the Problem

The question of La Parisienne is also a question of who gets to fit the image of a national export product, and what the lived reality actually looks like on the ground.

Against this background, perhaps it is worth taking a second look at the garish caricature of Emily Cooper and her version of the Seine metropolis as a walkable advertisement. On closer inspection, perhaps she is less the American disruption of an otherwise authentic Parisian order. Perhaps this too-loud, too-enthusiastic, too-colourful, too-ambitious algorithm in human form is precisely the mirror that reveals the mechanics of the myth.

Emily, as the stereotypical American, shows what La Parisienne conceals: that femininity in pop culture must be legible, judged, and marketable. One displays her label visibly; the other has learned to hide it beneath a perfectly cut blazer.

Both are products — written, filmed, staged, and relaunched.

After all, one is not born La Parisienne. One becomes her.

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