“My wild and free side unsettled some, and released others”
– Brigitte Bardot
At the Cannes film festival in 1953. Bardot’s off-the shoulder neckline became known as the Bardot neckline. Photograph- Kary H Lasch-Brigitte Bardot- My Life in Fashion
Discovered by a magazine editor as a teenager, Brigitte Bardot (28 September 1934 – 28 December 2025) became one of the most iconic faces, models and actors of the 1950s and 1960s. She was the embodiment of youth and sex. Charles de Gaulle called her “a French export as important as Renault cars.”
Her film career (47 movies) features more misses than hits, but for anyone keen to see what the fuss was about should look to her performance in the crime melodrama En Cas de Malheur (In Case of Emergency) (1958), adapted from a Georges Simenon thriller.
Bardot also had a music career, which included recording the original version of Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus, which Gainsbourg had written for her while they were having an extramarital affair. (Afraid of fallout after her then husband, the playboy Gunter Sachs, found out, Bardot asked Gainsbourg not to release it. He re-record it with Jane Birkin, to huge success.
Known to French headline-writers as “BB” – that is: bébé – Bardot was a muse for Dior, Balmain and Pierre Cardin.
She was the the woman whom sculptor Alain Gourdon used in 1970 as his model for a representation of Marianne, the national figurehead of France.
She is credited with having ‘invented’ the wide headband, the off-the-shoulder top and the choucroute hairstyle. Her style is celebrated in the book Brigitte Bardot: My Life in Fashion by Henry-Jean Servat, published by Flammarion.
Being photographed by William Klein for Vogue in 1959.
Photograph: William Klein/Vogue
“I tried to make myself as pretty as possible and even then I thought I was ugly. I found it madly difficult to go out, to show myself. I was afraid of not living up to what people expected me to be.”
– Bardot to Vogue Hommes International
With Jean-Pierre Cassel in The Bear and the Doll from 1970.
With Sacha Distel on a motoscafo on the grand canal in Venice during the city’s film festival in 1958.
Just short of her 40th birthday (which she marked with a nude photoshoot with Playboy) Bardot retired from acting. “I was really sick of it,” she told Vanity Fair. “Good thing I stopped, because what happened to Marilyn Monroe and Romy Schneider would have happened to me.”
Sporting her ‘invention’ on the set of Contempt at the Cinecittà studios, Italy, in 1963. Photograph: Cinémathèque Française/Brigitte Bardot: My Life in Fashion
Dancing the mambo with Turkish singer Darío Moreno in an outfit designed by couturier Jacques Esterel.
Wait until I’m dead before you make a movie about my life [or else] sparks will fly.”
– Brigitte Bardot
Her choucroute beehive, as seen in 1960.
Photograph: Cinémathèque Française/Brigitte Bardot: My Life in Fashion
Being photographed by William Klein for Vogue in 1959.
Photograph: William Klein/Vogue
Bardot on the set of A Ravishing Idiot.
Photograph: Cinémathèque Française/Brigitte Bardot: My Life in Fashion
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