The words icon and muse are often touted around the fashion world but it’s still a rare soul that encapsulates the real meaning of those monikers. Françoise Hardy, the French singer who has died at the age of 80 from cancer, was one of a handful of women who set the style tone of the second half of the 20th century, the effect of which continues to resonate.
The singer, born in Nazi occupied Paris in 1944, became synonymous with the much touted insouciant Parisian style which was a low-key cocktail of her time spent in swinging London coupled with a pared-back French sensibility. She came to London in the Sixties, recording at Pye Records’ Marble Arch studios and performing at The Savoy. Her melancholic lispish yé-yé style entranced as much as her striking girl next door beauty which captured the lenses of Richard Avedon, David Bailey and William Klein, as well as the hearts of David Bowie and Bob Dylan (who famously penned a poem about her).
She was catnip to the designers of the day, and the melding of her casual glamour - that fringe, scant makeup - with the striking modernity of the clothes of Yves Saint Laurent, André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne who all took her as muse creating an eternal fashion pitch. It’s a blend that has become synonymous with the definition of a carefree attitude to fashion which is still heralded as the pinnacle of taste. “When I came to London to perform at the Savoy in the mid-60s, I was well aware that the British press was more interested in the way I dressed than in my songs,” Hardy, often touted as the “the very essence of French style”, told The New York Times in 2018.
Her impact resounded across those seeking to depict the era through design. Rei Kawakubo named her label Comme des Garçons, founded in 1973 after being inspired by Hardy’s song "Tous les garçons et les filles."
She was the Anglophile ying to Jane Birkin’s Francophile yang, two women (who were friends, Hardy worked with Birkin’s partner Serge Gainsborough) setting a template for that impish androgynous-leaning look which designers and It girls still ply from (see Alexa Chung, among others).
Whether in one of Rabanne’s weighty gold chain mail mini dresses (dubbed ‘The most expensive dress in the world’ which she modelled at the International Diamond Exhibition in May, 1968) to flares and leather jackets, YSL Le Smoking trouser suits, beatnik roll necks and oversized sunglasses, trench coats with a just-turned cuff, mini skirt suits or fur coats and Roger Vivier knee high boots, she had that much coveted je ne sais quoi to always look perfectly herself.
Her legacy remains in the shape of fashion today - a common addition to designer moodboards -with the much touted French girl aesthetic taken frame by frame from her stylish playbook.
Françoise Hardy, an eternal style muse
