Row over Miss France winner’s brief hair is bonkers

A girl who cuts her hair is about to vary her life, mentioned Coco Chanel. How true this has turned out to be for fellow Frenchwoman Eve Gilles, 20, who has simply been topped Miss France and located herself on the centre of a really weird — and albeit disturbing — debate.

The pageant organisers are going through accusations of pandering to political correctness for anointing somebody who has chopped her beforehand lengthy locks right into a pixie minimize and, thereby, it could appear, betrayed the very essence of femininity.

French politicians from the far Left to the far Right of the political spectrum are wading into this absurd gender skirmish, either side making an attempt to attain factors for their very own events.

As for Gilles herself, she has defiantly declared her look each ‘androgynous’ and a victory for ‘variety’, fuelling this trumped-up controversy and unwittingly changing into the goal of transphobics.

It seems that Gilles is the primary winner within the 103-year historical past of the pageant who, quelle horreur, does not have lengthy flowing hair, prompting one viewer to declare on X (previously Twitter): ‘Miss France is now not a magnificence contest however a woke contest which is predicated on inclusiveness.’

Another complained: ‘Ms Gilles is instilling wokist values into society.’

In reality, each side of this debate are as bonkers as one another. As far as I’m involved, all magnificence pageants are anachronistic, sexist and completely pointless, and it surprises me that somebody as good as Eve Gilles, who’s finding out maths and laptop science at college, ought to need to become involved in it within the first place.

But this, the one debate price having for my part, is not even at problem right here.

What we’re witnessing is an instance of how even one thing as innocuous as a haircut — one which, to my thoughts, is cute, flattering, immensely female and a matter of non-public alternative — can develop into a spotlight for hysterical and indignant outbursts that at the moment are attribute of how polarised society is changing into.

We appear to be coping with three distinct factors of view. The first, that the crowning of Eve Gilles as Miss France is a blow for conventional notions of what constitutes a lady’s magnificence.

By any regular requirements, even when she had been bald, Gilles would nonetheless be thought of stunning. Yet one critic mentioned: ‘The androgynous physique is clearly there to function woke.’

It does not get extra insulting than that. Gilles is slim and athletic, with beautiful toned legs and, sure, a pair of breasts. A completely trendy and wholesome lady.

The second standpoint, as espoused on social media, is that Gilles have to be trans. Again, due to her wholesome athleticism and her gamine hair minimize.

Gilles has by no means claimed to be trans. In the previous, she has mentioned: ‘I’m under no circumstances a tomboy; I really feel like a lady.’ But this does not cease the haters airing their vile feedback.

And then there are the politicos, surprisingly united from Left and Right. On the one hand, hearty congratulations got here from Marine Le Pen, presidential hopeful of the far Right; and a thumbs up, too, from Fabien Roussel, nationwide secretary of the Communist Party.

Rousel wrote: ‘Support for Eve Gilles, elected Miss France, who’s already struggling the violence of a society which doesn’t settle for that girls outline themselves in all their variety.’

President Macron, in the meantime, has saved nicely out of it. So far.

Isn’t there one thing curiously French — and curiously contradictory — about this entire kerfuffle? When it involves femininity, and certainly sexuality, the French appear to journey up reasonably typically over their values and opinions.

Just because the actress Catherine Deneuve, and 100 different girls, all actresses, teachers and writers, signed an open letter in 2018 (the 12 months Harvey Weinstein was charged), slamming the #MeToo motion and defending males’s ‘freedom to importune’, our Gallic cousins have what, to us Brits, appear oddly old style concepts.

Defending flirting is one factor, however this damning of a ‘witch-hunt’ towards males which was ‘damaging to sexual liberty’ took most girls right here without warning.

Yet in line with French cultural commentator Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, France is a rustic that’s ‘extra conformist’ than England, ‘much less egalitarian’, and the place there may be ‘much less social mobility’.

For the French, she believes, magnificence pageants like Miss France are the Disney Princess model of life, with ‘the tiara, the lengthy hair, the physique form’, and when that picture is challenged by a lady who does not conform in both her look (the pixie crop) or ambition (Gilles desires to be a statistician and, not like magnificence queens of the previous, is not calling for ‘world peace’) it does not sit nicely.

‘The French do not prefer it when folks do stuff for which they weren’t destined,’ says Moutet, who thinks this can be what’s taking place within the furore over Miss France.

By method of emphasising her level, she provides: ‘Britain, for instance, is a rustic that prizes and loves eccentricity; in France, eccentricity will get you fired out of your job.’

I’ve to admit a sure nostalgia for a time when a haircut was no one else’s enterprise however one’s personal, reasonably than a public assertion of variety.

Of course, we all know {that a} lady’s so-called crowning glory is a strong signifier of sexuality and fecundity. And that previously, considering of one other well-known French lady, Joan of Arc, chopping your hair off and going into battle disguised as a person was a protest towards the principles and expectations of womanhood.

But whoever thought one’s follicles would develop into a political problem in 2023?

Curiously, it was the French who invented the gamine look — initially referred to as the coupe à la garçonne (boy’s minimize) — within the Nineteen Twenties, making it much more peculiar that there is such a fuss occurring about Eve Gilles’ arguably retro Parisian fashion as we speak.

The gamine look, which was revived in a giant method within the post-war interval, was not about androgyny however a persona that was playful, free, unfettered, cute. Not the voluptuous Marilyn Monroe mannequin for certain, or certainly the Brigitte Bardot one, however one which actually had a form of intercourse enchantment. Less femme fatale than liberated free spirit.

It was typified by the pixie crop of actresses like Leslie Caron, who went on to star in Gigi, and Jean Seberg, who despatched hearts fluttering when she appeared with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in 1960. (Seberg additionally performed Joan of Arc, channelling her search for the remainder of her profession.)

The gamine crop was quickly adopted by Audrey Hepburn, an actress adored by thousands and thousands.

These girls had been seen as refreshing symbols of the trendy period. They weren’t targets of feverish accusations of being traitors to their intercourse, or positioned within the place of being political footballs.

For any lady who’s over the age of fifty, I’d say it is frankly mystifying {that a} lady’s haircut may trigger any controversy in any respect. I’ve had my hair lengthy, brief and each size in-between; and whereas some cuts might need been extra flattering than others, there was by no means something to impress outrage.

Those pixie cuts of the Nineteen Sixties, that went on to encourage loads of different celebrated girls, had been taken up (or not) in line with style.

Everyone from Mia Farrow to Linda Evangelista to Princess Diana adopted the fashion. Diana’s pixie crop in 1990 — styled by Sam McKnight in a spontaneous resolution made on a photoshoot for the duvet of Vogue — helped her outline herself as a lady decided to tread her personal, impartial path.

I do not recall any public or political outcry. Women merely sighed and thought, how very beautiful is that!

More just lately, from Natalie Portman, Audrey Tautou and Carey Mulligan to Scarlett Johansson, Michelle Williams and Halle Berry, there’s hardly a contemporary movie star who hasn’t at the very least tried the pixie crop for dimension. It’s what many ladies select to do with their hair: check out totally different appears at totally different instances of their life — and see the way it makes them really feel.

Maybe it is since you’re fed up being a slave to the curling tongs and the blow dry, and it is liberating to simply wash and go.

Maybe it is the response to a relationship gone flawed and the will to strive one thing new, beginning along with your look.

For Eve Gilles, who minimize her hair earlier than even placing herself ahead for the competitors, it was ‘as a result of I wished myself like that’.

‘I see myself as a powerful, decided lady, whatever the dimension of my hair,’ she mentioned.

I simply want she hadn’t obtained enmeshed in the entire variety/androgyny mess, which for me fuels a debate that is primarily wrong-footed.

What’s startling to me is how detrimental to girls this unending woke debate is. When a lady’s haircut can develop into the main target of such impassioned views, it is unhappy proof that we’re someway going again reasonably than ahead by way of equality.

As the equally pixie-cropped French MP Sandrine Rousseau, coming to the defence of Gilles, put it: ‘So in France, in 2023, we measure the progress of respect for girls by the size of their hair.’

I pray in Britain that we’re smarter than that. I’m certain my technology is: however these youthful than us? I’m not in any respect sure.