Row over Miss France winner Eve Gilles’ short hair is bonkers. Her gamine look is ultra-feminine – and was invented by the French in the first place! writes LINDA KELSEY

A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life, said Coco Chanel. How true this has turned out to be for fellow Frenchwoman Eve Gilles, 20, who has just been crowned Miss France and found herself at the centre of a truly bizarre — and frankly disturbing — debate.

The pageant organisers are facing accusations of pandering to political correctness for anointing someone who has chopped her previously long locks into a pixie cut and, thereby, it would seem, betrayed the very essence of femininity.

French politicians from the far Left to the far Right of the political spectrum are wading into this absurd gender skirmish, each side trying to score points for their own parties.

As for Gilles herself, she has defiantly declared her look both ‘androgynous’ and a victory for ‘diversity’, fuelling this trumped-up controversy and unwittingly becoming the target of transphobics.

It turns out that Gilles is the first winner in the 103-year history of the pageant who, quelle horreur, doesn’t have long flowing hair, prompting one viewer to declare on X (formerly Twitter): ‘Miss France is no longer a beauty contest but a woke contest which is based on inclusiveness.’

Another complained: ‘Ms Gilles is instilling wokist values into society.’

Frenchwoman Eve Gilles, 20, has just been crowned Miss France and found herself at the centre of a truly bizarre — and frankly disturbing — debate

The pageant organisers are facing accusations of pandering to political correctness for anointing someone who has chopped her previously long locks into a pixie cut (pictured: Lauren Oakley)

Hollywood screen goddess, Jean Seberg stars in Saint Joan in 1957

In truth, both sides of this debate are as bonkers as each other. As far as I’m concerned, all beauty pageants are anachronistic, sexist and utterly pointless, and it surprises me that someone as smart as Eve Gilles, who is studying maths and computer science at university, should want to get involved in it in the first place.

But this, the only debate worth having in my view, isn’t even at issue here.

What we are witnessing is an example of how even something as innocuous as a haircut — one that, to my mind, is cute, flattering, immensely feminine and a matter of personal choice — can become a focus for hysterical and angry outbursts that are now characteristic of how polarised society is becoming.

We seem to be dealing with three distinct points of view. The first, that the crowning of Eve Gilles as Miss France is a blow for traditional notions of what constitutes a woman’s beauty.

By any normal standards, even if she were bald, Gilles would still be considered beautiful. Yet one critic said: ‘The androgynous body is obviously there to serve as woke.’

It doesn’t get more insulting than that. Gilles is slim and athletic, with gorgeous toned legs and, yes, a pair of breasts. A thoroughly modern and healthy woman.

The second point of view, as espoused on social media, is that Gilles must be trans. Again, because of her healthy athleticism and her gamine hair cut.

Gilles has never claimed to be trans. In the past, she has said: ‘I’m not at all a tomboy; I feel like a woman.’ But this doesn’t stop the haters airing their vile comments.

And then there are the politicos, strangely united from Left and Right. On the one hand, hearty congratulations came from Marine Le Pen, presidential hopeful of the far Right; and a thumbs up, too, from Fabien Roussel, national secretary of the Communist Party.

Rousel wrote: ‘Support for Eve Gilles, elected Miss France, who is already suffering the violence of a society which does not accept that women define themselves in all their diversity.’

President Macron, meanwhile, has kept well out of it. So far.

Isn’t there something curiously French — and curiously contradictory — about this whole kerfuffle? When it comes to femininity, and indeed sexuality, the French seem to trip up rather often over their values and opinions.

Just as the actress Catherine Deneuve, and 100 other women, all actresses, academics and writers, signed an open letter in 2018 (the year Harvey Weinstein was charged), slamming the #MeToo movement and defending men’s ‘freedom to importune’, our Gallic cousins have what, to us Brits, seem oddly old-fashioned ideas.

Defending flirting is one thing, but this damning of a ‘witch-hunt’ against men which was ‘damaging to sexual liberty’ took most women here by surprise.

The gamine crop was soon adopted by Audrey Hepburn, an actress adored by millions

More recently, from Natalie Portman, Audrey Tautou and Carey Mulligan to Scarlett Johansson, Michelle Williams and Halle Berry (pictured), there’s hardly a modern celebrity who hasn’t at least tried the pixie crop

Actress Natalie Portman with short cropped hair 

Yet according to French cultural commentator Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, France is a country that is ‘more conformist’ than England, ‘less egalitarian’, and where there is ‘less social mobility’.

For the French, she believes, beauty pageants like Miss France are the Disney Princess version of life, with ‘the tiara, the long hair, the body shape’, and when that image is challenged by a woman who doesn’t conform in either her appearance (the pixie crop) or ambition (Gilles wants to be a statistician and, unlike beauty queens of the past, isn’t calling for ‘world peace’) it doesn’t sit well.

‘The French don’t like it when people do stuff for which they were not destined,’ says Moutet, who thinks this may be what’s happening in the furore over Miss France.

By way of emphasising her point, she adds: ‘Britain, for example, is a country that prizes and loves eccentricity; in France, eccentricity gets you fired from your job.’

I have to confess a certain nostalgia for a time when a haircut was nobody else’s business but one’s own, rather than a public statement of diversity.

Of course, we know that a woman’s so-called crowning glory is a powerful signifier of sexuality and fecundity. And that in the past, thinking of another famous French woman, Joan of Arc, cutting your hair off and going into battle disguised as a man was a protest against the rules and expectations of womanhood.

But whoever thought one’s follicles would become a political issue in 2023?

Curiously, it was the French who invented the gamine look — originally called the coupe à la garçonne (boy’s cut) — in the 1920s, making it even more peculiar that there’s such a fuss going on about Eve Gilles’ arguably retro Parisian style today.

The gamine look, which was revived in a big way in the post-war period, was not about androgyny but a persona that was playful, free, unfettered, cute. Not the voluptuous Marilyn Monroe model for sure, or indeed the Brigitte Bardot one, but one that certainly had a kind of sex appeal. Less femme fatale than liberated free spirit.

It was typified by the pixie crop of actresses like Leslie Caron, who went on to star in Gigi, and Jean Seberg, who sent hearts fluttering when she appeared with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in 1960. (Seberg also played Joan of Arc, channelling her look for the rest of her career.)

Diana’s pixie crop in 1990 — styled by Sam McKnight in a spontaneous decision made on a photoshoot for the cover of Vogue — helped her define herself as a woman determined to tread her own, independent path

Linda Evangelista at the Azzedine Alaia Spring 1990 show circa 1989 in Paris

The gamine crop was soon adopted by Audrey Hepburn, an actress adored by millions.

These women were seen as refreshing symbols of the modern era. They were not targets of feverish accusations of being traitors to their sex, or placed in the position of being political footballs.

For any woman who’s over the age of 50, I’d say it’s frankly mystifying that a woman’s haircut could cause any controversy at all. I’ve had my hair long, short and every length in-between; and while some cuts might have been more flattering than others, there was never anything to provoke outrage.

Those pixie cuts of the 1960s, that went on to inspire plenty of other celebrated women, were taken up (or not) according to taste.

Everyone from Mia Farrow to Linda Evangelista to Princess Diana adopted the style. Diana’s pixie crop in 1990 — styled by Sam McKnight in a spontaneous decision made on a photoshoot for the cover of Vogue — helped her define herself as a woman determined to tread her own, independent path.

I don’t recall any public or political outcry. Women simply sighed and thought, how very gorgeous is that!

More recently, from Natalie Portman, Audrey Tautou and Carey Mulligan to Scarlett Johansson, Michelle Williams and Halle Berry, there’s hardly a modern celebrity who hasn’t at least tried the pixie crop for size. It’s what many women choose to do with their hair: try out different looks at different times in their life — and see how it makes them feel.

Maybe it’s because you’re fed up being a slave to the curling tongs and the blow dry, and it’s liberating to just wash and go.

Maybe it’s the response to a relationship gone wrong and the desire to try something new, starting with your appearance.

For Eve Gilles, who cut her hair before even putting herself forward for the competition, it was ‘because I wanted myself like that’.

‘I see myself as a strong, determined woman, regardless of the size of my hair,’ she said.

I just wish she hadn’t got enmeshed in the whole diversity/androgyny mess, which for me fuels a debate that’s essentially wrong-footed.

What’s startling to me is how detrimental to women this never-ending woke debate is. When a woman’s haircut can become the focus of such impassioned views, it’s sad proof that we are somehow going back rather than forward in terms of equality.

As the similarly pixie-cropped French MP Sandrine Rousseau, coming to the defence of Gilles, put it: ‘So in France, in 2023, we measure the progress of respect for women by the length of their hair.’

I pray in Britain that we are smarter than that. I’m sure my generation is: but those younger than us? I am not at all certain.

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