Jane Birkin made the look famous. Now Jeanne Damas is selling her version of it to the masses through her clothing brand, Rouje.
Sitting outside at Gemma, the restaurant at the Bowery Hotel in lower Manhattan, Jeanne Damas offered a textbook example of what many might call French-girl style.
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It was a Wednesday morning in September, and the last day of New York Fashion Week. Damas, 31, had arrived from Paris the day before.
Later that evening, she would be opening a new store in Manhattan for Rouje, the fashion brand she founded in 2016, which has become known for feminine basics with a Parisian sensibility. Not long after she started the brand, GQ called Damas “the coolest, most beautiful French girl in France right now.” French Vogue has described her as “the Paris girl personified.”
Rouje, which started as an e-commerce business, has expanded steadily into brick-and-mortar retail. The New York store, on Broome Street in SoHo, is its first in the United States; seven others have opened in Britain and France, including in London, Paris and Bordeaux.
As Rouje has grown, Damas said, she has made few changes to its aesthetic, which has always been rooted in her own wardrobe. “I never really changed my style since my teenage years: a pair of jeans, an oversized jacket, ankle boots and a wrap dress,” she said.
She first became recognised for her style by blogging about it. (One of her earliest fans was French fashion designer Simon Porte Jacquemus, who, after connecting with Damas online, had her model for his brand.) On Tumblr and later on Instagram, she’d post photos of herself on Paris’ cobblestone streets and in outfits that were often accessorised with a glass of red wine or a swipe of red lipstick. Her fondness for red lipstick, she said, inspired her to name her brand Rouje.
Although Rouje has been informed by Damas’ personal taste, it is hard not to see similarities between her sensibility and that of singer and actress Jane Birkin, who died in July. Birkin was British, but for many came to epitomise an effortlessly elegant and particularly French style. With Rouje, Damas, a native Frenchwoman, has commoditised her version of that style — and has positioned herself and her brand to become new standard-bearers of the French-girl look.
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Advertise with NZME.Damas was recently cast to portray another French-born fashion muse — jewellery designer Paloma Picasso — in Kaiser Karl, a forthcoming Disney+ TV series about fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. Jérôme Salle, the director of the series, said Damas has “a French style but with a modern elegance.” She was a natural fit, he added, to play a woman whom Salle, 52, described as a former “it girl” in France.
Delphine Courteille, 48, a hairstylist in Paris who has worked with Damas, said other clients have cited her as an aesthetic inspiration; specifically her hairstyle, which Courteille described as “very Parisian” and always with “Jane Birkin-style” bangs.
“There’s a lot of femininity and lightness that makes women want to be like her,” Courteille said of Damas.
Dhani Mau, 34, the editor-in-chief of the website Fashionista, said Damas’ digital presence (she has 1.5 million followers on Instagram) has helped to bring French-girl style, and the references that inspire it, to a wider audience. “Before you had to watch French films, find photographs or go to France,” Mau said. The fact that Damas is often seen wearing Rouje clothes on social media, Mau added, has helped associate the brand with the French-girl look.
Also helpful in advancing that association were photos of French actress Léa Seydoux wearing a red, printed Rouje wrap dress on the set of the James Bond film No Time to Die. “She had our red dress and we didn’t know,” Damas said, adding that after those photos circulated, she started to see Rouje on “lots of actresses, especially in France.”
In addition to dresses (starting at NZ$360), Rouje sells tank tops (NZ$100), T-shirts (NZ$115) and jeans (NZ$310), the types of easy basics favoured by Birkin. Camille Charrière, an influencer in London who is half French, described such items as a hallmark of French-girl style.
“The French love their basics,” said Charrière, 36, who is a contributing editor at Elle UK. “The whole point of French style is that it’s something slow that you build over time.”
Isabelle Chaput, 33, a French fashion photographer and content creator who lives in Manhattan, said that the preference for basics stemmed in part from a resistance to keeping up with trends. “Parisians don’t want to look like they are trying too hard,” she said.
Damas used the word “simplicity” to describe the appeal of French-girl style. “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s boring.”
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Advertise with NZME.She said that while Birkin has had an influence on her and on Rouje, “the style is not about copying.” She described her approach as less about replicating a specific wardrobe than making clothes that evoke a certain lifestyle. “It’s not the dress itself, but the life you have in the dress,” Damas said.
Her take on the look has been influenced by style outside France, she added. Some slip dresses she has made for Rouje, she said, were inspired by garments she saw women wearing when she visited New York years ago.
“It’s funny because me and my creative team are not really inspired in France, then we come here and we are inspired by everything,” Damas said.
“Women in New York are more audacious with their looks, which, in my opinion, is liberating,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Beatrice Hazlehurst
Photographs by: Maansi Srivastava
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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