France is the nation that did more to make short hair on women fashionable than any other: unapologetic short-haired heroines such as Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Gréco, Coco Chanel, Jean Seberg (American but co-opted by French New Wave cinema) and, briefly, Brigitte Bardot.
Seberg’s big breakthrough in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan was conditional on her going for the big chop. She kept it and it served to make her one of the coolest, hippest, most modern-looking women of that, and subsequent, eras.
