Ullstein/Everett CollectionActress Brigitte Bardot shows off her legs in film director Roger Vadim’s “…And God Created Woman.”September, the month when France makes its post-vacation “rentrée” and social, cultural and political life resumes, is also the month when women dress up again, exchanging loose summer garb and tropéziennes for form-fitting skirts and high heels.
So now is a good time to contemplate the female leg.
Legs, and by extension skirts, have always been on the French mind. But over the past few month, they’ve re-entered the conversation in force. This is one consequence of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair: women are focused on the potential hazards of wearing a skirt to work, especially when male politicians are lurking in the hallways.
Chantal Jouanno, the sports minister and a former French karate champion, charged in an interview in the newspaper Libération that sexism runs so rampant through the National Assembly that she wears pants there to avoid the “salacious comments” of male deputies. Aurélie Filipetti, a Socialist deputy, complained in a television interview about her male colleagues’ “macho jokes” and “harassment by humor.” How to stop the bad behavior? “You must not show up in a skirt,” she said.
The popular daily Le Parisien took the subject to the streets, asking women the question, “Do you hesitate before putting on a skirt for work?”
Angélique Dupre, a 38-year-old customer service adviser, replied that she dressed for success. She said she thought twice before wearing a skirt to the office, “because it attracts ambiguous remarks” from her male colleagues. When she meets clients in the field, however, the skirt becomes a strategic weapon. “It seduces the client more,” she said.
From left: Julien Hekimian/Getty Images; Melanie Frey/European Pressphoto Agency French Interior Minister Michele Alliot Marie (left) and Minister of Economy Christine Lagarde.In France, the body itself commands as much attention as what covers it. In the United States, the focus tends to be on the waist up: full breasts and flat bellies. In France, the waist down is more important: legs and “fesses” (less formal than “buttocks,” but more elegant than “butt”).
For the French, legs capture erotic movement in a way that jiggling breasts do not. One of the most sensual scenes in French cinema is in the 1956 film “And God Created Woman,” when with a single gesture, Brigitte Bardot opens her long skirt to reveal bare legs and the bottom of a black leotard. She dances the mambo in erotic frenzy, the camera focused squarely on her pelvis and legs. Her breasts, hidden under a black high-necked, short-sleeved sweater, are irrelevant.
In Francois Truffaut’s 1977 film classic, “The Man Who Loved Women,” the Truffaut-like protagonist is obsessed with women’s legs. “The legs of women are compasses that circle the globe, giving it its balance and harmony,” he says to himself. In the end, it is a pair of legs that does him in: hospitalized after a car accident, he catches a glimpse of his nurse’s shapely legs, struggles to reach for her, disconnects his drip and dies.
I have a complicated relationship with the skirt. When I moved from Washington to Paris in 2002, I came with a uniform: a handful of Armani pantsuits bought secondhand. If the invitation said black tie, I wore a Sonia Rykiel tuxedo suit, also bought secondhand. I didn’t wear skirts.
Yet there were times when pants just wouldn’t do, so I surrendered, bit by bit. I belong to a private club of 200 high-powered women, among them business executives, lawyers, elected officials, doctors, academics and artists — nearly all of them French. Most come to our monthly dinners in well-cut suits or dresses, high heels and good jewelry. So I bought skirts (black) and dresses (also black).
Even then, the codes confused me. Invited to a book party for a French female friend at one of Paris’ best addresses, I thought a lot about what to wear. (Certain Parisian women inspire fear, with their power to size you up in one glance.) I chose a black pencil skirt and a lace Ventilo jacket, while most of the women at the party were dressed in uniform: expensive, crisply ironed white shirts and tailored black or navy pants.. There was only one other woman in a skirt; she also was an American.
Agence France-Presse–Getty Images A women’s tuxedo from the Yves Saint Laurent 1967 spring-summer haute-couture collection.Skirts, however, are central to how women in France present and think about themselves. They even wear tailored skirts and high heels on their bicycles. And I know no French woman in Paris who wears jogging shoes and carries her dress shoes en route to work. (High-heeled, strappy, rubber-soled Aerosoles are turning up as bike shoes here.) In many cases, I discovered that the point of the skirt is for women to be perceived as sexual beings. One woman in my club told me she always wears a skirt when she takes her car to be repaired – she gets better service, she said. When a male editor friend of mine wanted an ultraserious 20-something reporter to sound more lively on radio, he gave her his “miniskirt and makeup” lecture – urging her to write her scripts as if she were wearing a miniskirt and makeup.
Bien sûr, there is the blessing/curse of skirt wearing — and of conveying sexuality. In his memoirs, former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing described Alice Saunier-Seïté, a female member of his team, as she introduced him at an event in Corsica: her “muscular” body, the “feline ease” of her movements and her “tanned-looking” legs. “A bizarre thought crosses my mind,” he wrote. “When she makes love, she must put the same vehemence into it.” Giscard appointed her his secretary of state for universities. In 1995, when Prime Minister Alain Juppé included 12 women in his government, they were derisively nicknamed the “juppettes,” a play on both Juppé and the French word “jupe,” for skirt. They were seen as inexperienced and mainly there for decoration. Six months later, eight of them were fired.
Which is why for many French women pants are the safe choice, even if pants had a hard time conquering France. Women were allowed to wear pants to white-collar jobs only in the late 1960s, and in the National Assembly years after that. (In 1972, when a guard prevented Michèle Alliot-Marie, the former defense and foreign minister, from entering the Assembly building because she was wearing pants, she replied, “If my pants bother you, I’ll take them off right now.”) It took a man, Yves Saint Laurent, to liberate women by giving them a tuxedo as evening wear.
A decree from 1800 banning the women of Paris from wearing pants has been watered down over the last two centuries, but it’s still on the books. There have been repeated efforts over the years to get it repealed, most recently by Maryvonne Blondin, a member of the Senate, who said she was “amazed” that it was still in effect and filed a motion in June to abolish it once and for all.
Meanwhile, Madame Figaro magazine, in advance of the coming Paris Fashion Week, featured 316 pages of dress-and-skirt looks for winter, with dozens of images of legs in various degrees of nakedness, but only two of big-breasted cleavage.
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