This ’60s Classic Laid The Foundations For French Girl Style

At the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Richard Linklater, of Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise and Boyhood fame, is about to debut a brand new release: Nouvelle Vague, the wild and unlikely tale of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the 1960 French New Wave classic which totally transformed moviemaking.

With its jarring jump cuts and strange asides to camera, surreal script and jaunty soundtrack, the rollicking crime caper was a breath of fresh air when it was first released – and a project brought to life with the same renegade spirit which its characters (Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Humphrey Bogart-obsessed criminal on the run, Michel, and Jean Seberg’s enigmatic love interest Patricia) embodied: Godard was a film critic trying his hand at directing for the first time, wrote each day’s script in the morning over breakfast, and filmed on handheld cameras with mostly natural light. Production was completed in just 23 days, on a shoestring budget and without permits, and some scenes were shot secretly on the streets of Paris, including one using a delivery cart with holes cut out to accommodate a camera lens. The result was utterly revolutionary.

In Linklater’s behind-the-scenes retelling, Guillaume Marbeck will star as Godard, Aubry Dullin as Belmondo and Zoey Deutch as Seberg, and while all three have big shoes to fill, the movie’s costumers, in my view, face an even bigger challenge: to recreate and live up to one of the most stylish films ever made.

Belmondo’s Michel, in his boyish Bogart cosplay – boxy suits, too-short ties, fedoras, like a restless child playing dress up – always looks strangely suave, but it’s Seberg’s Patricia who steals the show. A fiercely independent, French-speaking New York transplant and aspiring journalist stuck selling newspapers on the Champs-Élysées, she is the epitome of laidback, understated Parisian elegance, despite not being a native – the textbook definition of French girl style, with several looks that feel totally contemporary.

In the Paris of the ’40s and ’50s, French style was still about wasp-waisted suiting, big skirts and delicate heels, but as we entered this new decade – with onscreen heroines like Seberg, Jeanne Moreau in François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, and Anna Karina in Godard’s Bande à part and Pierrot le Fou – a new, cooler, more casual and undone aesthetic became de rigueur. And it is that look, with its emphasis on classic, well-made pieces, relaxed silhouettes and a certain je ne sais quoi in how it’s all put together, which we still associate with French girl style today.

Ahead of the Cannes premiere of Nouvelle Vague, we look back at Seberg’s best looks from Breathless, which are still as inspiring as ever.