Posts Tagged ‘Brigitte Bardot’
Kikidoll just brushed the sand off her suitcases after a week spent in South Beach, Miami for the largest, oldest and by far most prestigious of the swim shows in the world, Swim Show 2011.
Staged during the Mercedes Benz Swim Week, hotels, beach-side venues, clubs and swanky candle-lit restaurants all play host to global glitz and glitter as supermodels, celebrities, designers, buyers and press all descend to mingle over a couple of local cocktails por costumbre– those minty/lime mojitos–at pool or beach side, while previewing next year’s fashions for swim and resort wear.
Toney hotels stage showcased fashion shows and events around the clock. Built alongside The Raleigh, Mercedes Benz erected a tented catwalk in a number of days. Famed for its 1940′s Art Deco decor and one of the- if not the- largest and deepest shaped swimming pools on the beach, the jewel-box Raleigh screams out old Hollywood glamor and style. Black and white photos of previous guests–Clark Gable, Janet Leigh and the beachiest babe of them all Brigitte Bardot adorn the Raleigh’s walls. Service is on first-name basis, the rooms are jazzed up for the new era of high-tech guests in soft peaches and cream. Munching on their French fries alone is pure pool-side bliss. Kikidoll test-drove a few of her 2011 pieces in the pool with her models during a local shoot there before the hub-bub began, and found it hard to leave their comfort zone.
Down the way at other hotels, The Standard, Mondrian and W, other swim events and showings were buzzing.
Sneak peeks? Neon is hot, ruffles and pretty are strutting their stuff and metallics have fizzled. Bikinis were flirty and sexy and one-pieces were cut out and away. More later, but for now safely deep-six the animal printed tank, in the deep end.
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- “Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week 2011 Photos,Pictures” and related posts (wallpapers123.blogspot.com)
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Ooh-la-la!
Brigitte Bardot, or BB as she was known, or even just ‘Bardot’, practically invented the bikini.
More than that fateful 2-piece garment, she invented a whole niche industry for fashion, press and film representing an untapped age segment, that, up until her appearance on the cover of Paris magazine Elle in 1950 at age 16, was entirely ignored and unknown.
The world of teenagers.
It sounds so much prettier in French–the unexplored canvas of les juenes filles, or the ‘young girls’. Up until this point in time, only women or children were so portrayed by the media–there was no fashion or magazines devoted to teenagers–there were only grown-up married women in tweedy Chanel suits and crisp Dior shirt-waisted dresses or chubby, red-cheeked school girls in serge uniforms of navy and grey. No pubescent girls like Bardot at the beach in a Hawaiian print bikini!
Even Nabokov’s tale of a child-woman, Lolita, who seduces a much, much older man would not yet be written (or banned) for a further five years!
BB created a fashion all her own; a look that overtook the formality and heavy construction of the Parisian couturiers ‘New Look’. Barefoot, bikini-clad, her wild, tangled mane of hair as frisky as a Camargue horse’s tail –she exuded insouciance, freedom, carefree-ness, juxtaposed alongside an aching, budding sexuality. Let’s put it this way–she was sex on legs.
And she dressed like that. Like a jeune fille, a teenager– although at that time, mind you, there was no template for dressing like one. A simple, fitted camisoled-cotton sun dress, a stripey sailor’s tee exposing both shoulders (now known as a Bardot neckline), boy shorts, Capri trousers–always girlie, flirty, never lewd, but casual, and always mostly barefoot–always unstudied and flung-together. In fact, her look was the opposite of say, someone like the divine Miss Dita von Teese whose every ensemble is a creative tour de force of planned elegant sexuality.
Bardot, with her nubile, seductive and completely natural sensuality–encased by her full, naturally pouty bee-stung lips, bed hair, perfectly erect posture from her training as a ballet dancer and her proportionately, womanly curves–caused indignation, unrest, arrests, event threats of immorality– when she was launched onto a bigger screen in her husband Roger Vadim’s 1956 film And God Created Woman.
Bardot, cast as the voracious, sexually wanton Juliete, became a cause celebre and went from jeune fille to God’s gift to Men. Her carioca dance scene where she drives the 3 main male characters into an erotic frenzy has become a defining moment in cinematography. She was adjudged by the editor of Paris-Match to be ‘immoral from head to toe’. Of course, all this furore and clamor to ban her did was to elevate and promote her status to an even higher pedestal–that of budding sex goddess!
Bardot went on to make more than 50 films before ‘retiring’ and withdrawing to her beloved beaches of St. Tropez at age 39, devoting herself to animal and political causes. She assiduously eschewed the glitz and artifice of high fashion, make-up, plastic surgery and the spotlight, instead choosing to follow her desires and pleasures on her own terms.
Of course the irony today is that all women want to dress like ‘jeunes filles’ forever, and all women want to look like Bardot.
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