Frances Striped Shirt and Beret Origins of a Stereotype

French people are often portrayed wearing a navy and white striped shirt, a beret, a baguette under their arm, and a cigarette in their mouth. Did you ever wonder how much of this stereotype is true? As you can well imagine, French people don’t actually walk around like this. The classic French striped shirt is somewhat popular, but the beret—not so much. French people do love their bread and many buy a fresh loaf every day, although since la baguette or le pain is often dusted with flour it is usually tucked into a shopping bag and not under ones arm. On the other hand, smoking is still very common in France, although it is no longer centered around the once supremely iconic  Gauloises cigarettes, and it wont happen  in a public place where smoking has been banned since 2006 in line with the rest of Europe. So if you look hard enough, you may encounter the relatively stereotypical image of a French person wearing a navy striped shirt and holding a baguette, but it is highly doubtful that person would be smoking in a public place and wearing a beret. The French Striped Shirt The French striped shirt is called une marinià ¨re  or un tricot rayà © (a striped knit). It’s usually made of jersey and it has long been  part of the sailors uniform in the French Navy. La marinià ¨re became a fashion statement at the beginning of the 20th century. First Coco Chanel adopted it during World War I when cloth was difficult to find. She used this simple knit fabric for her expensive new casual-chic line inspired by the French Navy. Well-known personalities from Pablo Picasso to Marilyn Monroe adopted the look.  Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent both used it in their collections. But it was really Jean-Paul Gaultier  who, in the 1980s, promoted this simple piece of clothing onto the world stage. He used it in many creations, even transforming it into evening gowns and using the image of the striped shirt on his perfume bottles. Today, many French people still wear this kind of sailors shirt, which has become a must for any casual, preppy wardrobe. Le Beret Le bà ©ret  is a popular flat wool hat thats worn mainly in the Bà ©arnaise countryside. Although traditionally black, the Basque region uses a red version. Most importantly, it keeps you warm. Here again, the world of fashion and celebrities played a role in making the beret popular. It became a fashionable accessory in the 1930s after being worn rakishly askew by a number of movie actresses. Nowadays, adults in France no longer wear berets much but children do, in bright colors like pink for little girls.   So thats the story of one of the many outmoded clichà ©s about French habits.  After all, how could people living in a country with one of the highest concentrations of haute couture houses dress the same way for decades? What youll see on any street in France is people with a great sense of classic, individualized style.