She's a contemporary of Jane Birkin, but while Jane Birkin has always just been too breathy for me to take, Francoise Hardy has this complicated old school charm. She sings about the sensation of being a single woman surrounded by happy couples, and wanting to be astonished by Benoit, and she does an awesome cover of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne." Paris has a massive history of style icons and actresses like Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot (I love Brigitte Bardot too, more on that later), but Francoise Hardy just epitomizes this smart, kind of badass, laid-back style that I really love. She's complicated and interesting. Which I think is a big difference between the United States and France. I get the sense that women like Francoise Hardy are more likely to be popular in France than in the United States, where we can't really seem to get more creative than Audrey Hepburn. And no offense to Audrey Hepburn, but Francoise Hardy isn't cute. There's no aiming to please or adhering to a preconceived notion of femininity going on here. And yet, Francoise Hardy was and still is a huge popstar.
Anyway, I love Francoise Hardy. Her music, her leather jackets and striped t-shirts, her style. And I think that Cat Power, Jenny Lewis, and any woman in indie rock with bangs and angst is pretty indebted to her. And I love them too, but you can't really dispute this:
Monday was crazy as per usual. Bikram yoga in Montmartre was just right though. Maybe if this writing thing doesn't work out, I'll just become a yoga instructor. I can just see it -- shouting "Tirez! Tirez! Tirez!" to a room full of suffering French and American yogis and yoginis trying to balance their entire bodies on one foot. Or I could just have two professions that pay terribly.
In the words of Francoise Hardy, je suis bien perplexe.
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