Hot Couture: Brigitte Bardot's Fashion Revolution

A short group discussion on the reading we were assigned that goes with lecture six-'Beyond Hollywood':

• Bardot seems to emulate a very constructed image
• Although she is not a 'Hollywood' star i.e she is originally French, her persona personifies the constructs of a typical Hollywood icon/star
• Married to the director of most of her films-her key conceptual designer of her identity as a public icon
• Era of the 1950's-the boom of the teenager. Bardot emulates a teenage persona which is possibly why she was so popular
• Promotion of body image, clothes, hairstyles-because she became such an icon designers could promote their clothing by allowing Bardot to wear their items and they would be instantly called fashion and become a hit
• Marilyn Monroe seems to have a more mature persona than Bardot's sex kitten child-like body

• Bardot was carefully and purposefully marketed as a sex symbol-why is this so appealing to the demographic at the time?
• For men is she an object to be gazed?
• For women is she the desirable?
• Clothes were specifically designed for Bardot's figure-represents the power and symbol she has at the time and still does
• Child of youth mixed with sex symbol icon
• Stars like Jane Fonda, Catherine Deneuve would copy the Bardot look
• She became the archetypal French sex goddess
• Late 1950's and early 1960's she became the "most photographed woman in the world"
• Brigitte grew up in a wealthy setting with a very fashionable, well connected mother. Started a Childlike fashion revival, including gingham and broderie anglaise. Emblem of youth with overtly feminine dress +radical American youth clothes: James Dean’s jeans. Beatnik Duffle coats.
• Bardot’s generation had economic freedom, but not social, therefore used delinquency and Cinephilia as outlets. She was essentially revolting against the feminine construct which had been presented to her by her mother and her mother's peers.
• Her clothes: child like but ostentatiously sexualized.
• Choucroute hairstyle combined invitation and defiance. Simultaneously said fuck me, and fuck you. ‘Bardot adopted and promoted fashion that liberated the body (and hair) from the constraints of rigid couture outfits, leaving behind bourgeois conventions.’ Simplicity and cheapness.
• Bardot rejected couture as ‘for grannies’ and promoted young designers. Bardot’s clothes easily reproducible, so she was the centre of fashion production and consumption change. Youth and joie de vivre. She was an essential figure in the rise of the teenager and the working class.
• Her ‘highly sexed behaviour lost its appeal in 'the permissive age', her fashion sense was no longer innovative.’
• Bardot in 2011 has formed a completely different identity. Now it is ‘offensive’ to look as if she does not give a toss. Going against the constructed image.