The French screen star and animal-rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died at her home in southern France, per reports. She was 91 years old.
As revered for her sensual performances in films by Roger Vadim and Jean-Luc Godard as for her distinctive brand of undone chic, Bardot remained a pop-cultural icon long after she retired from acting in 1973, at the age of 39.
In 2016, on the occasion of the release of Brigitte Bardot: My Life in Fashion, a visual memoir from Flammarion, Leslie Camhi spoke to the aging star, then 82, about her childhood, her lovers, and her singular style. Revisit that conversation—published in the November 2016 issue of Vogue—here:
She kneels at her dressing table with her back to us, her torso wrapped in a towel, her head turned slightly in profile, tiger cub’s nose and Cupid’s-bow pout peeking out from beneath a luxuriant blonde mane. With one manicured hand, she holds up a little mirror into which she gazes, transfixed by her own image, like Venus in an old-master painting—yet bathed in the light of modern celebrity.
Vogue ran William Klein’s photograph of 24-year-old Brigitte Bardot on a full page in March 1958, alongside a brief article mentioning the French star’s “maximum of animal magnetism” and her four films playing simultaneously in “intellectual movie-art theaters” in New York. It is not a fashion photograph—its subject is shown après bain or just before the towel drops, when we might, at least in imagination, possess her. The Summer of Love is still almost a decade away. Yet despite her babyish features and seemingly tender flesh, Bardot represents, all on her own, a one-woman sexual revolution.
“I never was fashionable, so I never went out of fashion,” she says, giving a rare interview from La Madrague, the villa in St.-Tropez, its high walls covered in bougainvillea, that has been her refuge for more than half a century. Though she is 82, in somewhat fragile health, and notoriously reclusive, her deep, rich voice—colored, perhaps, by years of smoking—still conveys an astonishing vitality. Bardot’s charm, like that of a child, is her intense allegiance to the present, her absolute lack of vanity, and her directness. “I mean, I never followed fashion; I did it my own way. I was ahead of my time,” she says simply. “And when you are right too early, you are always wrong.”
Nothing in her very proper bourgeois childhood could have predicted the iconoclast to come. Born in 1934, Bardot grew up the elder of two daughters in a conservative Parisian family. “My parents were elegant and serious people who preferred the company of sophisticated society,” she recalls. “They were not the least bit bohemian.”
She studied ballet from age six until fourteen, winning admission to the prestigious Paris Conservatoire. (The future Hollywood star Leslie Caron was a fellow student.) “I had no interest in clothes,” she says, though she began modeling as an adolescent, initially for a milliner friend of her mother’s, and appeared on the cover of French Elle in 1949 wearing a pink pleated taffeta gown by couturier Jacques Heim. She was spotted and plucked for the movies, eventually making …And God Created Woman with the man she married at eighteen, director Roger Vadim.
A memoir in photographs, Brigitte Bardot: My Life in Fashion, published this month by Flammarion, reprises the images and looks that made her—despite her professed indifference—an avatar of style. The top couturiers of the day, including Pierre Balmain, Christian Dior, and Dior’s successor, the young Yves Saint Laurent, dressed the starlet for grand occasions. But in Vadim’s movie she wore her own clothes—simple shirtdresses, form-fitting shifts, a dancer’s leotard—or nothing at all for her role as Juliette, a disarmingly free-spirited and lustful teenage orphan, who sunbathes naked and sows erotic mayhem around St.-Tropez. (The little fishing village, frequented by artists and a handful of cognoscenti, was not yet a favorite playground of the jet set.) Censors on both sides of the Atlantic were appalled.
Her loose, golden hair was like a banner waving in defense of the new hedonism and against a prior generation of “ladylike” French stars, with their corsets and stays, their careful coiffures, furs, and pearls. “I always tried to dress in a way that made me feel good,” Bardot says, “at ease in my own skin, comfortable in my clothing—and naked, too.” (Bardot could get “copyright credit,” her French biographer Marie-Dominique Lelièvre writes, “every time a girl in the street today fixes her hair by running her fingers through it.”)
Her great liberty on-screen was “natural.” Bardot says now. “I was just being me.” So natural, in fact, that having kissed her costar in the film, actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, she promptly fell in love with him, leaving husband Vadim for the first in a series of high-profile, often short-lived romances.
“In the game of love, she is as much a hunter as she is a prey,” Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed in the pages of Esquire, championing her as an unlikely feminist icon. (The men in her life—legendarily louche French pop star Serge Gainsbourg, for example, a disheveled dandy who, distraught in the wake of their brief affair, penned the ballad “Initials B.B.” in homage to her—had no influence on the way she dressed, she says. “Serge,” she purrs, “was really a very reserved and modest boy, and we loved each other madly.”) For the avant-garde, her untamable allure was a welcome form of anarchy. French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard made it the centerpiece of his masterpiece Contempt (1963), and cultural heavyweights Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan devoted, respectively, an essay and a book to her.
“She wasn’t ashamed of herself, she didn’t apologize for her absolute triumph, whereas so many others apologized for their half-victories,” Sagan wrote after Bardot’s 1973 retirement from the screen, though still beautiful and eminently desirable, to devote her life to her animal rights charity (a cause she still fervently champions). “And this is why she scandalized everyone.”
From her brief but dazzling fifteen years in the public eye, Bardot has proved a remarkably enduring icon and this despite her shocking, late-in-life conversion to far-right French politics. The fashions she launched, later channeled through Claudia Schiffer, Alexander Wang muse Anna Ewers, Gigi Hadid, and the shapely model du jour Irina Shayk, were inseparable from a persona that appeared to obey no law but her own pleasure, and not to work very hard at fame, beauty, or anything else.
She wanted something light and supple, like her old ballet slippers, to walk around in, for example. “I told the Maison Repetto,” she says—storied supplier to the world’s prima ballerinas—“and they found the idea amusing.” The “ballerina flat,” first created for her in 1956, has been a staple of chic wardrobes ever since.
She chose a pink gingham dress for her second marriage, in 1959, to actor Jacques Charrier. “Gingham, back then, was used for kitchen curtains—it wasn’t at all fashionable,” she remembers. “But I thought it was pretty!” The picture of the wedding ceremony, with Bardot in the dress by couturier Jacques Esterel, unleashed a gingham tidal wave.
The famously appealing off-the-shoulder “Bardot top,” so ubiquitous on runways and in street style last spring? “They photographed me in my nightgown!” Bardot says, laughing, and the trend took flight.
And her signature low beehive, nicknamed the choucroute (translation: “sauerkraut”) for its many curling tendrils, was in reality “a failed chignon,” she claims. “Though it was a failure, I managed to make it look pretty.” The late singer Amy Winehouse embraced the look, revived most recently in Jeremy Scott’s spring-summer 2016 collection.
A picture of Bardot in 1967 shows her leaving a reception at the Élysée Palace hosted by President Charles de Gaulle. Her outfit—a Sgt. Pepper-style jacket decorated with trompe l’oeil gold brocade, worn with pants, kohl-rimmed eyes, and her long hair loose around her shoulders—made headlines. “Women at the time weren’t allowed to wear pants to the Élysée, much less with a military-style jacket,” she admits. (Protocol also called for a neat chignon.) But “my encounter with le Général, whom I admire profoundly, left a lovely memory.”
Another captures her exiting Maxim’s, the soigné Parisian nightspot, the same year, with her third husband, German photographer and playboy millionaire Gunter Sachs, who wooed her by dropping hundreds of roses via helicopter into her St.-Tropez garden. (Though they were married for just three years, beginning in 1966, several of the obituaries following his death in 2011 identified him as “Bardot’s ex-husband.”) He’s wearing black tie; she’s in a striped silk caftan and barefoot.
She’s still barefoot, Bardot tells me on the phone from La Madrague, where her everyday uniform now consists of black Bermuda shorts and a black T-shirt. “I love going without shoes,” she says. “And anyway, I have very pretty feet.”