Françoise Hardy, the Ultimate Symbol of ‘French Girl’ Style

By day, the French woman wears white denims, leather-based loafers, wind-swept bangs and a naked face.

By night time, she wears a 35-pound metal gown by Paco Rabanne, the metallic plates gleaming in opposition to her tanned pores and skin.

As we speak she is legendary: the topic of Vogue articles, Pinterest boards and TikTok compilations. However within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, she was very actual.

Françoise Hardy, who died of most cancers on Tuesday, discovered fame first as a singer. She popularized the breezy French pop genre known as yé-yé. She acted, too. In 1966, when she starred within the John Frankenheimer movie “Grand Prix” — a Formulation 1 drama by which Ms. Hardy wore minidresses from her personal closet alongside racing fits — The New York Times described her as an avatar for her technology: “younger, cool, uncommunicative however unpretentious.”

Ms. Hardy was conscious then, as she later wrote in her memoir, that journalists have been extra typically captivated by her look than by her skills. (The primary phrases of that Instances article famous her “lengthy hair the colour of flippantly toasted chestnuts.”)

“The English-language press was a lot much less concerned with me as a singer than they have been as an ambassadress of French fashion,” she wrote in “The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles,” printed in the US in 2018 by Feral Home.

Her “rangy, androgynous construct,” as she described her physique in her guide, suited the fashionable, house age aesthetic of the French couturier André Courrèges, whose angular items she wore onstage. She cherished the way in which his geometric designs gave her an “extraterrestrial silhouette.”

However Ms. Hardy was additionally self-critical, writing in her memoir that she had an “inborn discomfort round appears to be like and lenses,” and telling Life journal in 1964, when she was 20, that “I can’t stand to put on something that may make individuals take a look at me.”

Maybe that explains her understated offstage wardrobe, which, by the mid-Nineteen Seventies, constituted denims, unfussy tops and tailor-made jackets. She favored pants even after they drew the eye she had needed to keep away from. “Individuals screamed and hollered,” the designer Yves Saint Laurent told Women’s Wear Daily in 2005, describing the scene when Ms. Hardy arrived to the Paris Opera wearing his famous Le Smoking tuxedo. “It was an outrage.”

It was this easy riot that impressed the general public’s obsession. Half a century later, Ms. Hardy has been cemented because the ur-French girl — naturally and nonchalantly stylish — nonetheless a muse for vogue designers. A information launch for the most recent Tom Ford assortment, proven in Milan in February, referred to runway fashions as “sturdy and assured, with the sting of Françoise Hardy.”

Ms. Hardy embraced her position as French fashion ambassador. However the title got here with some stress. As an emblem, she turned extra of a super than an actual human lady. Males have been overtly obsessed together with her, together with Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Bob Dylan.

Later in Ms. Hardy’s life, as she promoted her memoir, she would develop “exasperated” with the way in which male journalists reacted to her, based on Christina Ward of Feral Home, who dealt with the American advertising and publicity for the guide.

“All of them had a wierd fanboy method, like that they had imagined being in love with Françoise as she was in 1963,” mentioned Ms. Ward, who described Ms. Hardy as having a prickly exterior on account of being objectified for many years. “She needed to carry this burden of what different individuals considered her.”

Nevertheless it wasn’t onerous to see why so many individuals have been drawn to the perfect.

Erik Torstensson, co-founder and inventive director of the modern denim model Body, cited “the air of insouciance in her fashion.”

“Her wardrobe outlined the fashion classics of our technology,” Mr. Torstensson wrote by e mail on Wednesday. “The ditch, the smoking tux, the Breton and flares, she even made a boiler swimsuit and bike helmet look impossibly stylish, for god’s sake.”