It’s a big year for traditional beauty standards: the Design Museum announced an exhibition on Barbie, and now France has followed suit with a museum devoted to the beauty pageant Miss France.
The competition is regarded as a national institution and has remained one of the most popular annual events on French television, despite decades of controversy and accusations of sexism.
The Miss France museum will open in an elegant Belle Époque villa in the Riviera resort of Saint-Raphaël next year.
Once the holiday retreat of Lord Rendel, a British industrialist and Liberal politician, the 19th-century villa is now owned by the town of Saint-Raphaël. The local authority is refurbishing it at a cost of €1.5 million and entrance will cost €5 to €7, according to Frédéric Masquelier, the town’s mayor.
The exhibition will include more than 100 costumes worn by contestants, winners’ crowns, shoes, paintings, photographs and footage of highlights from the pageant.
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Frédéric Gilbert, president of the Miss France Society, rejected suggestions that a beauty contest was not a fit subject for a museum.
“Miss France has existed for more than a century and there is a real history to recount,” Gilbert said. “We are always one of the two most popular programmes on television, reaching an audience of seven to nine million each year. That is comparable to a football match when the national team is playing.”
He said that exhibiting the costumes, some of which took more than 200 hours to make, would “showcase French know-how and fashion”.
In the UK and many other European countries the popularity of national beauty contests has plummeted. Even Miss World is no longer shown on a major UK channel.
Feminist groups have long argued that Miss France should be scrapped because it reflects outdated attitudes, but Gilbert argued that it has survived by adapting to societal changes.
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“Miss France has always been under attack even back in the 1970s and 1980s, but the profile of the contestants is different now,” he said. “Former Miss Frances are actresses, TV presenters, even doctors. It’s not a reality show where people are fighting all the time. It has values and it is about respect.”
The mayor said Saint-Raphaël was happy to house a museum “of national and international interest”.
“It is no longer just a beauty contest in the traditional sense,” Masquelier said. “It has been updated. The young women are elegant and they wear beautiful clothes, but they are intelligent and articulate.”
Most contestants are students or graduates, and they must be good public speakers. They still parade in swimwear, however, and they are judged mainly on their looks. The choice of the first Miss France with a “gamine” short hairstyle, instead of the usual long tresses, provoked an outcry on social media last year. After her victory in December, Eve Gilles, 20, said she was “not just a haircut”.
“I am human, inevitably criticism affects and hurts me. My body is the way it is. Whether I like it or not, that’s how I am. If people don’t like it, they don’t like me and that’s it,” she told the French broadcaster TF1.
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Miss France was first held in 1920 and according to Gilbert, “still represents the elegance and the charisma of the French woman”.
“It unites the generations as families watch it together and discuss who should win. A lot of viewers are very young and the winner is chosen partly by members of the public. The contestants represent the different parts of France, so it’s also about regional rivalries, a bit like supporting your local football team.”
Local identities are strong in France and the contestants wear sashes indicating the region they come from. “French people love arguing about which part of the country has the best food, the best wine, the best beer, and Miss France is an opportunity to express regional pride and support their local contestant,” Gilbert said. “It’s good-natured but television viewers get involved and pretty passionate about it.”
The contest has also sparked conversations about race as its winners have become increasingly diverse, with the first black Miss France crowned in 1993.
Last year, the jury, which accounts for half the votes to choose the winner, was made up exclusively of women for the third time since 2019. The remaining votes are cast by members of the public who phone in.
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The victory of Gilles was controversial not only because of her short hair but also because she was placed first by the jury but third in the public vote, behind contestants representing French Guiana, an overseas region on the coast of South America, and Guadeloupe, a department in the Caribbean.
