FASHION Magazine
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The fashion of Jean-Luc Godard: Examining the French New Wave director’s influence on style
Photography courtesy of TIFF Reference Library Look back at Jean Luc-Godard’s style setting moments »
It’s no secret that the French have an enviable way with style. Effortless chic is basically in their DNA (think #iwokeuplikethis, circa always), and nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the 1960s films of Jean-Luc Godard. The French-Swiss filmmaker best known for pioneering the French New Wave changed the way films were made by taking a Brechtian approach to storytelling, alienating and distancing the spectators from his often unlikable characters. “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order,” he famously said.
Beyond influencing award-winning filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Godard’s ultra-stylized movies have had a huge impact on the fashion world, inspiring the collections of everyone from Anna Sui to Rodarte and Band of Outsiders. In fact, Godard’s muse and wife of four years was Danish model Anna Karina (so named by none other than Coco Chanel) who embodied ’60s style on the cover of Elle and in high-profile ads for Palmolive. Brigitte Bardot’s voluminous bedroom hair in Contempt and Jean Seberg’s pixie cut in Breathless are regular runway references that make it easy to spot how Kate Upton and Jennifer Lawrence found their signature ’dos.
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The French New Wave spends July at Cinematheque Ontario
Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless When Stuart Murdoch, the sad singing Scotsman best known for fronting Belle and Sebastian, met his wife, he left her Breathless.
Says the New York Times Magazine: “As a courtship present, Murdoch made her a replica of the New York Herald Tribune T-shirt Seberg wore in the opening shot of Breathless.”
Cute, right? But then: “‘I may have also done that for an earlier girlfriend,’ Murdoch admitted sheepishly.”
Ah yes. How appropriate. Like Murdoch’s women, all fashionable lovers of French New Wave know the delight of discovering a genre made exactly, exquisitely, for them—the super-chic haircuts, the striped shirts and plaid minis, the smoky-eyed (and forever smoking) gamines—only to realize they’re just the latest suckers for the lovely clichés of Parisian art-house cinema.
But don’t let that stop you from falling: this summer, the Cinematheque at the AGO is screening gorgeous pics by Godard and his precocious coterie of peers.