First Person

Me and my ‘man hair’: why Miss France gets my vote

As the French beauty pageant faces a backlash after crowning Eve Gilles the winner – despite her pixie crop – ex-Glamour editor Jo Elvin, who has had short hair for the past 20 years, reveals the real reason people don’t like it...

Monday 18 December 2023 19:09 GMT
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Some of the most beautiful women alive have had short hair – so why do we expect any different from the winner of Miss France
Some of the most beautiful women alive have had short hair – so why do we expect any different from the winner of Miss France (Getty/AFP)

Years ago, over a lovely family dinner in an Italian restaurant, my then eight-year-old daughter, Evie, turned to me and said: “Mum, some of my friends say you have man hair.” My husband nearly choked laughing at the table.

Well, it appears that little children are not alone in having a very rigid view of what constitutes “woman hair”, as evidenced by the outrage caused at the Miss France beauty pageant this week.

It’s hilarious, really – the spittle-flecked rage being directed at a woman who has had the gall to win the title when she has man – sorry, I mean short – hair. People are angry because the new Miss France, Eve Gilles, 20, is wearing her crown atop a gamine crop. Every other hopeful contestant has the same cookie-cutter, long, straight, “proper lady” bonce.

Jo Elvin had her hair cut into a pixie crop nearly 20 years ago
Jo Elvin had her hair cut into a pixie crop nearly 20 years ago (Getty)

It’s as though decades of short-haired fabulousness have never happened. Angel-faced Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday anyone? Brigitte Nielsen’s 1980s platinum Bond villain? What about Jean Seberg’s iconic 60s gamine crop in A Bout de Souffle and Bonjour Tristesse? In fact, is this beautiful, chic look not quintessentially French? “Claire, it’s FRENCH!” yells Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag when trying to reassure her sister about her severe new crop. How is Eve Gilles’s hair “woke androgyny” – as the mob are complaining – when it’s channelling the decidedly un-woke 90s, whose sex symbols were supermodel Linda Evangelista, sporting a sharp crop in George Michael’s “Freedom” video, and Demi Moore, whose tomboy-ish mop in Ghost had every woman I know rushing to the salon back in the day.

Still, I’m not entirely surprised. We all know that everyone secretly thinks short hair on women is uglier than long hair. Come on, we do, don’t we? If we’re being honest. Yes. Yet, since the heyday of 1920s flappers, short hair has marked a woman out as cutting edge (no pun intended) and fashion forward. And forgive the immodesty, but it’s just a fact that I regularly have strangers stop me in the street to compliment my short style. I love my hair’s wash and go low maintenance, and my hairdresser, George Northwood agrees that I look dreadful the minute it nears my chin.

Miss France 2024, Eve Gilles performs during the Miss France 2024 beauty pageant in Dijon
Miss France 2024, Eve Gilles performs during the Miss France 2024 beauty pageant in Dijon (AFP via Getty)

But even my own husband pulls a face when it’s freshly cropped (”Why do you have to get it THAT short?”) and often teases me by calling me LLoyd Christmas – the name of Jim Carrey’s bowl cut-sporting moron in Dumb and Dumber. He loves me, I’m sure, but I know he (not so) secretly wishes my hair was longer, a bit more feminine”.

My daughter, now 18, is still trolling me, with comments like: “Your hair is giving big Justin Bieber energy.”

“Yeah well, you look like Jesus,” I clap back. Because interestingly, she and all her friends have the same poker-straight, waist-length hair. She shoots me daggers if I ever dare suggest she should cut it off. For all their Generation Z protestations about freedom to be exactly who they want to be, they all seem rather attached to this particular marker of feminine identity.

Many, many women tell me they’d never be “brave” enough to have hair as short as mine. I’ll never forget the handsome young man, a Hollywood hairdresser, who told me my haircut was lovely and then immediately followed up by saying what he really loved about it was that it was “so age-appropriate”. I laughed/groaned, but he persisted; “Seriously, I see so many women in LA trying to look younger than they are with long hair, it’s so refreshing to see a woman really owning her middle age.” It remains the most spectacularly backhanded compliment I have ever received, and all thanks to my age-appropriate pixie hair.

But it speaks volumes about where we are, as a people. Short hair on women is tolerated, and sometimes revered, provided it stays in one of its designated lanes. So it’s fine for older women who have no more need for a flirty, long “man magnet” mane. Thumbs up too for women like me, of any age really, who identify as “serious career women”. And once, when I was out walking the dog, a gang of teenage boys passed me in the street and one of them said, “Look, that cool lesbian has a really cute dog.” Athletes, if they must – although it feels as though the Anna Kournikovas of the world, with their traditional long and lovely blonde locks, get more of the big sponsorship bucks.

This beauty pageant furore? It’s because short hair has apparently jumped into the wrong lane. It exposes that actually, great swathes of the public think that only standardised “lady” Disney princess hair, marks a woman as truly “pretty”.

Jo Elvin on the front row of Nicole Farhi’s fashion show in 2011, which had many short-haired models on the catwalk
Jo Elvin on the front row of Nicole Farhi’s fashion show in 2011, which had many short-haired models on the catwalk (PA)

If there’s anything short-haired women have in common, it’s that we know all of this and we really don’t care. If in the year 2023, we’re still going to pit women against each other in such a backwards concept as a beauty pageant, can we really be at all angry or surprised that it elicits such backward opinions?

It takes a particular kind of confidence to rock a haircut that is a singular, signature look. Mine has been my go-to look for nearly 20 years and I can’t see myself changing that any time soon. So let me say: Vive la Eve! I stand with you in “man hair” solidarity.

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