Is Being French Still a Style?

Eugénie Trochu is a Who What Wear editor in residence recognized for her transformative work at French Vogue and her Substack publicationthe place she paperwork and shares new traits, her no-nonsense strategy to style and magnificence, plus different musings. She’s additionally engaged on her upcoming first e-book that explores style as a area of reminiscence, projection, and reinvention.

Born in Normandy, I grew up in a France that also projected a very particular best of the French lady: skinny, very skinny, free, a little mysterious, with that blend of effortlessness and nonchalance that made the entire world fantasize about her. A girl someplace between Jane Birkin, Caroline de Maigret, Jeanne Damas, and all these (largely Parisian) ladies who embodied the gorgeous however barely frozen values of the “French woman” in all her supposed splendor.

A fantasy constructed on open males’s shirts, barely tousled hair, half-faded purple lipstick, Levi’s 501s, and that everlasting “I got dressed in two minutes,” which, for as soon as, was generally true.

I joined Vogue in 2011 and watched that fantasy start to crack from the within. It was lovely, sure, however limiting. It claimed freedom whereas quietly excluding half the nation. When I took over French Vogue ten years later, I needed the journal to inform a totally different story: not the French lady, however the French ladies. The ones who costume in Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux, Paris; these whose our bodies, pores and skin tones, heights, hair, and identities now not match into one single field.

The query “Is being French still a style?” typically follows me, as a result of it assumes there’s nonetheless one mannequin. But that mannequin, we’ve moved previous it. French model is now not a silhouette, it’s a dialog : a rigidity between heritage and modernity, between classicism and boldness. It’s the liberty to be contradictory, to put on classic with Balenciaga, denims with heirloom jewellery, to alter your thoughts with out warning.

The actual French model in 2025 isn’t trench coat, striped prime, and purple lipstick. It’s an angle: refusing to be outlined. Rejecting the entire look, the frozen narrative, the proper picture. It’s this concept that style isn’t a efficiency however a language, one thing that may be intimate, political, joyful, lazy, generally suddenly.

And but, one thing of the parable stays. There’s nonetheless a form of distance in French tradition, a refusal of extra. This “less is more” isn’t minimalism, it’s a quiet restraint that doesn’t suppress expression, however shapes it.