Off-the-shoulder tops and a signature hair-do: Brigitte Bardot’s style legacy | Brigitte Bardot

A.God Created Woman, the title of the 1956 movie that made Brigitte Bardot a global star, is the phrase that captures her magic. Bardot had a dazzling allure, but was so natural that looking at her felt like a gift from the heavens.

In style, as in life, timing is everything, and Bardot became the poster girl for that sweet spot of post-war France in the 1950s and 60s, where the deep heritage of Gallic culture was revived with the Bohemian spirit of Paris.

With her penchant for gingham (she wore a pink gingham wedding dress for her second marriage in 1959), she sang of the nostalgic, apple-pie femininity with which Christian Dior had recently wowed the world with his late 1940s New Look. But there was also a wildness about him. The gap-toothed smile was all wine and Gauloises. The off-the-shoulder necklines that gave him his name made him look as if he were loosely wrapped in a towel or sheet rather than fully clothed.

It doesn’t matter that Bardot was naturally brunette, as seen on the first French Elle covers in the 1950s. She will always be the best blonde. Her signature look, which she always said she could do better and faster than any Hollywood hairstylist, was the “choucroute,” a half-up, half-down style. A relaxed, bedroom version of the English “beehive” or the French “chignon”; she was sophisticated without being uptight, stealing the scene while seemingly effortless.

Bardot’s beauty is often described as feline. She was as big as a sex kitten and was sporting leopard print, one of her style signatures. There’s a memorable scene in the 1971 movie Boulevard du Rhum where she wears a leopard-print bikini and a matching loincloth. She loved leopard print when off duty, too, and the black and gold dots of the leopard-print car coats she wore in Paris in the 1960s matched perfectly with her golden hair and black eyeliner.

Bardot’s best-known fashion legacy is the collarbone-baring, scoop-necked Bardot top. The style has a sweetly nostalgic vibe now, but it was daring when the ’50s popularized it. Bardot helped bring Saint-Tropez’s sun-worshiping style into the sartorial spotlight. At the Cannes film festival in 1953, she had not yet dyed her hair blonde, but she was wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse. The first Bardot top, a blood red one so ostentatiously loose that it looked like it was at risk of falling completely off, was styled with thin gold hoop earrings that barely grazed her bare shoulders.

She helped invent the bikini, or at least make it a phenomenon. In the 1940s, fashion designer Louis Réard, among others, noticed that women on beaches in the South of France were knotting their blouses high to tan their bellies. In 1946, he introduced a new invention that he called the “bikini” (four triangles of fabric tied together with strings). It was Bardot who made the new look an international sensation, wearing the hat in the 1952 film Manina, Bikini Girl.

Bardot trained as a ballerina before becoming a model and later an actor, and her ballet style continued to influence her appearance. The ingrained presence in the ballet studio helped infuse her on-screen performances with the grandeur of a goddess. The wide headbands she used to pull her hair back when she got tired of looking under her thick bangs were a holdover from her ballet school days.

And Bardot introduced the flat ballet, an essential element of French girl chic. He asked Repetto, who had produced ballet shoes for Paris’ top ballet companies in the 1950s, if they could make a version of the shoe with a hardened sole for street wear. The Cendrillon version went on sale in 1956 and has remained a bestseller ever since.

Bardot recovered in time when she left the cinema at the age of 39. Her style legacy is a vision of femininity that feels instinctive, sensual and, above all, unapologetically free.