Fashioning French Womanhood through the Posters of Lefor-Openo

Through archival magazine and video materials, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms will situate Lefor-Openo and their poster characters within the French fashion and popular culture landscape and show how they both employed and rejected fashion to sell a distinct vision of modern French womanhood.

Lefor-Openo helped create a visual identity for modern, postwar France through their poster designs for everything from government referendums to refrigerators. Marie-Claire Lefort and Marie-Francine Oppeneau’s signature character—a cute, wide-eyed blonde based on Brigitte Bardot—encapsulated the new ideal of French womanhood: a pretty, coquettish-yet-obedient wife. Unlike the exquisite elegance sold by Parisian couture houses and on the pages of Vogue Paris, Lefor-Openo used fashion to reinforce an aesthetic of patriarchal femininity and domesticity, cladding their characters in quintessentially feminine, tiny-waisted, full-skirted cotton dresses redolent of nostalgic visions of the past. Though fashions changed dramatically over the 12 years they worked together, their characters’ dresses did not reflect this, further reinforcing the conservatism latent in their posters. 

Laura McLaws Helms is a fashion and cultural historian, writer, and consultant. Specializing in 20th-century dress, pop culture, and design, she acts as a historical consultant to the film, publishing, advertising, and fashion industries. Laura curated an exhibition, Thea Porter: 70s Bohemian Chic at the Fashion & Textile Museum in London (2015) and wrote an accompanying monograph, Thea Porter: Bohemian Chic (V&A Publishing). She has worked on numerous book projects, along with writing for academic journals, magazines, and other publications. Laura hosts an interview podcast and writes a newsletter, both called “Sighs and Whispers,” all about cultural history. 

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