Here’s a name to add to your list of cool sixties French girls: Sylvie Vartan. Hugely famous in France, she’s an actress turned signer—by accident. (A musician her brother was working with needed a female voice on a recording, Vartan stepped in and her career was launched.) Vartan was of the original Yé-Yé girls (teenage pop musicians), alongside Françoise Hardy and France Gall and in 1964, she performed in the same billing as the Beatles at the legendary venue, L’Olympia. These days she is equally recognized as a style icon: In 2004 Paris’s Palais Galliera dedicated an entire exhibition to her look.
Born in Bulgaria, Vartan, along with her family, moved to Paris when she was eight. In 1963, she went platinum, à la Brigitte. It was a decision as symbolic as aesthetic, and it made her a teen idol. A year later, French Marie Claire would write: “On the Champs-Elysées little Vartans already have replaced little Bardots.”
Vartan received the Vogue seal of approval in 1963, when she was introduced as “the new nineteen-year-old darling of ‘le clan des rock’n’rollers’ . . . Bright, jokey, ebulliently pretty, she has a long, supple neck, sexy legs, a cat named for Dizzy Gillespie . . . .” Vartan, who wore André Courrèges in the magazine, would launch a line of jeune fille clothing, and was dressed largely by Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan at Christian Dior, and (much, much later) by Bob Mackie for her high-production, American-style shows. So pervasive was her sixties style that in 1975 a Canadian journalist would write that “there was once a time . . . when it seemed the only three women in the glossy fan and fashion magazines were Sylvie, Françoise Hardy, and Jean Shrimpton: they all had ‘le look.’”
Today it’s Vartan’s jeans game, which she gradually segued from the street onto the stage, that has us in thrall. In her Ye-Ye stage, she used jeans, worn with sneakers or ballet flats, to work a collegiate look. The bedazzled denim came later (in 1973), as would fringed or high-waisted, flared styles she collected on her travels—which for the Parisian star were as far-flung as Oklahoma. The only rival to her jeans genius was Johnny Hallyday, her pompadoured rock ’n’ roll husband, aka the French Elvis: Together they were their era’s answer to Beyoncé and Jay Z. Here, some of Vartan’s chart-topping denim looks—and how to translate them for today.
