“She looks like everybody,” stated a 2009 article on the French version of Slate entitled “Why Does Everyone Love Charlotte Gainsbourg?” “True, not every woman is 5-foot-8 and has that I-just-rolled-out-of-bed-and-pulled-on-a-sweater-and-I-look-amazing-anyway look. But she’s nonetheless simplicity incarnate.” Her clean-scrubbed, slouchy daytime look has almost single-handedly redefined everyday French style for a generation of young Parisian women. Her look, which she has cultivated since her late teens — wind-blown hair, unpainted lips, jeans, trench coats, cowboy boots, half-buttoned men’s-tailored shirts, chunky scarves — typifies an artfully rumpled yuppie-hipster hybrid that has taken hold in France: the bourgeois-bohemian, or le bobo. “Tons of Paris girls were running around like her, with the jeans, the old boots, the very long coat, the bed-head hair,” said Adeline Rapon, 21, from Paris. “Françoise Hardy had that look a bit in the ’60s and ’70s,” she added, referring to the French chanteuse. “But Charlotte really doesn’t care at all, and that’s what I like.” Charlotte was and is very, very tomboy, never a Lolita. Marie-Noëlle Demay, editor in chief of France’s Marie Claire, added that Ms. Gainsbourg had a very simple, natural elegance: “Girls want to look like her, because she’s not a sex bomb who’s going to steal your boyfriend.”
