onbeauty: Street Style Before Street Style: Francoise Hardy

Street Style Before Street Style: Francoise Hardy

We often forget the times when not everyone owned a computer o had internet access. Oyster Magazine reminded us from the old times when nobody had an Iphone and fashion was more about personal style than the brand you wear. You can read the whole article after the jump.

Impossibly beautiful French singer Francoise Hardy was one such subject of pre-DSLR street style. We don’t know if she mixed “chain store with vintage with designer” (a direct quote from every person on a street style blog ever), but we do know that her outfits would probably make Face Hunter froth at the mouth.

Street Style Before Street Style: Francoise Hardy

 At the forefront of the Yé-yé Parisian pop scene in the sixties, Hardy’s record Tous les garçons et les filles
 sold over a million copies and she later collaborated with the likes of
 Blur (in 1994) and Iggy Pop (in 2000), with Bob Dylan dedicating her a 
poem, ‘At The Seine’s Edge’.
 Hardy has also become a fashion icon, inspiring Nicolas Ghesquière of 
Balenciaga and – see for yourself – probably a handful of other 
designers and fashion figures (a glo-mesh Paco Rabanne tracksuit? So Anna Dello Russo).  

Street Style Before Street Style: Francoise Hardy

 Hardy is also humbled by the word ‘icon’, which provides interesting 
contrast to the shameless self-promotion oft associated with street 
style subjects today. In a BBC Radio interview
 last year, she reflects on being taken up by fashion houses: “It was 
work, things I had to do, a chore – I didn’t enjoy it at all… It is 
quite impossible to stand — to be admired too much — it is not a normal 
situation… I don’t like that at all… I am not comfortable with my 
professional life really, so the word ‘icon’ –  it’s as though you were 
talking about someone else, it’s not me really… I feel happy when I’m on
 my bed, in my room with a good book.”

Street Style Before Street Style: Francoise Hardy

While these photos of Hardy are interesting social documentations of a
 specific time, place and person, they also go a long way in showing 
that while many things have changed (please note the lack of any 
BlackBerrys or Starbucks cups), some things remain very much the same…