Françoise Hardy, the Ultimate Symbol of ‘French Girl’ Style

By day, the French girl wears white jeans, leather loafers, wind-swept bangs and a bare face.

By night, she wears a 35-pound steel dress by Paco Rabanne, the metal plates gleaming against her tanned skin.

Today she is mythical: the subject of Vogue articles, Pinterest boards and TikTok compilations. But in the 1960s and 1970s, she was very real.

Françoise Hardy, who died of cancer on Tuesday, found fame first as a singer. She popularized the breezy French pop genre known as yé-yé. She acted, too. In 1966, when she starred in the John Frankenheimer film “Grand Prix” — a Formula 1 drama in which Ms. Hardy wore minidresses from her own closet alongside racing suits — The New York Times described her as an avatar for her generation: “young, cool, uncommunicative but unpretentious.”

Ms. Hardy was aware then, as she later wrote in her memoir, that journalists were more often captivated by her appearance than by her abilities. (The first words of that Times article noted her “long hair the color of lightly toasted chestnuts.”)

“The English-language press was much less interested in me as a singer than they were as an ambassadress of French style,” she wrote in “The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles,” published in the United States in 2018 by Feral House.