And God Created Woman, the title of the 1956 film that made Brigitte Bardot a global star, is the phrase that captures the magic of her. Bardot had an allure that was dazzling in its glamour, yet so natural that to gaze on it felt like a gift from the heavens.
In style, as in life, timing is everything – and Bardot became the poster girl for that sweet spot of postwar France in which the storied heritage of Gallic culture was electrified by the Bohemian spirit of Paris in the 1950s and 60s.
With her penchant for gingham – she famously wore a pink gingham wedding dress for her second marriage, in 1959 – she seemed to sing of the nostalgic, apple pie femininity with which Christian Dior had recently bewitched the world in his New Look of the late 1940s. But there was also a wildness to her. The gap-toothed smile was all wine and Gauloises. The off-the-shoulder necklines that came to be named for her made her look as if she was wrapped loosely in a towel or a bedsheet, rather than fully dressed.
That Bardot was naturally a brunette, as seen on her first French Elle covers in the 1950s, does not matter. She will always be the ultimate blonde. Her signature look – one that she always said she could do better and faster than any Hollywood hairstylist – was the “choucroute”, a half-up-half-down style. A loosened, bedroomy take on the English “beehive” or the French “chignon – it was sophisticated without being uptight, scene-stealing while apparently effortless.
Bardot’s beauty is often described as feline. She was as much big cat as sex kitten, making leopard print one of her style signatures. There is a memorable scene in her 1971 film Boulevard du Rhum in which she wears a leopard print bikini with a matching loincloth. She loved leopard print while off duty, too, and the black-and-gold spots of the leopard car coats she wore around Paris in the 1960s were a perfect match for her golden hair and black eyeliner.
Bardot’s best-known fashion legacy is the clavicle-exposing, wide-necked Bardot top. The style now has a sweetly nostalgic air, but was daring when she popularised it in the 50s. Bardot helped bring the sun-worshipping style of Saint-Tropez into the sartorial spotlight. At the Cannes film festival in 1953 she had yet to dye her hair blonde, but she was already in an off-the-shoulder top. That first Bardot top, in blood red, was so rakishly loose so that it appeared at risk of falling down entirely, styled simply with slender gold hoop earrings that almost grazed her naked shoulders.
She helped to invent the bikini – or at least, to make it a phenomenon. In the 1940s, the fashion designer Louis Réard, among others, had noticed women on beaches in southern France knotting their blouses high to tan their stomachs. In 1946, he debuted a new invention – four triangles of fabric, connected by string – which he dubbed “the bikini”. It was Bardot, who wore one in her film Manina, the Girl in the Bikini in 1952, who made the new look an international sensation.
Before she became a model and later an actor, Bardot had trained as a ballerina, and ballet style remained an influence on her look. The posture ingrained in the ballet studio helped imbue her on-screen performances with the magnificence of a goddess. The wide headbands she adopted to pull back her hair when tired of peering beneath her thick fringe were a holdover from her ballet-school days.
And Bardot brought into being that perennial staple of French-girl chic, the ballet flat. In the 1950s, she asked Repetto, the maker of ballet shoes for the finest Paris ballet companies, if they would make a version of the shoe with a toughened sole for streetwear. The Cendrillon version went on sale in 1956 and has remained a bestseller ever since.
When Bardot walked away from cinema at just 39, she fixed herself in time. Her style legacy is a vision of femininity that felt instinctive, sensual and, above all, unapologetically free.