Françoise Hardy, an eighteen year old girl who is not just a singer but a phenomenon, has in the past six months, changed the way French teen agers want to look, want to be. To imitate Bardot is out.
Young girls now long for Françoise Hardy’s tall, unbony narrowness, for her shoulder-length straight hair, so thick it tends to obscure everything about her beautiful face except those immense grey-green eyes.
When she talks in her almost inaudible voice, she comes across as intelligent, totally wholesome : looking clear even in existential blacks. She writes all her own songs, plays with a guitar while she sings mostly low-beat ballads about lost love, perfidious Best Friends, other young agonies. Sung with a soft simplicity, those songs seep from transistors all over Paris, Françoise Hardy has flatly arrived.
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