The fictional perfect French Girl has become an embedded trope in women’s media over the past several years: Nary a week goes by without some magazine, book, or blog telling readers how to eat, dress, groom, fuck, parent, age, and breathe like a mythologized French woman. (The underlying message being that if you’re not following that highly scientific advice, reader, you’re doomed to be a sloppy sack of shit.)
Well, the time has come to breathe a sigh of relief, mes chéris: men have finally received a dose of Francomania in their lifestyle publications, too.
GQ tweeted out the following, tantalizing readers with ever-magnetic promise of seeming slightly more Gallic:
“When It Comes to Casual Suits, You Should Copy a Frenchman” (dek: They Just Get It), urges readers to look to French actor Vincent Cassel for sartorial guidance after he wore a nice suit in Cannes (also French). “Vincent Cassel is best known for his edgy film roles (La Haine, Irreversible, Black Swan),” Liza Corsillo writes. “He’s also known for possessing a personal style that’s part elegant, part casual—and never not cool. You know, that French thing.” Ah oui, that French thing. We women are familiar.
Perhaps men’s lifestyle publications will now be overtaken with French Girl-esque advice. After years of women being told to channel say, Brigitte Bardot or noted moon-landing truther Marion Cotillard, now men will be ordered to look to Serge Gainsbourg and Charles Baudelaire and Tony Parker for inspiration. They’ll be inundated with advice for how to dress like a Frenchman (mime shirts), eat like a Frenchman (baguettes), and laugh like a Frenchman, with nowhere to turn.
Ooh la la!
