50 years of ‘Belle de Jour’

My all-time favorite fashion movie starring my style icon turns 50 years old today! Though not explicitly about fashion, the dark and unnerving ‘Belle de Jour’ expertly employs fashion to reflect the character’s internal struggle between propriety and perversity. Released on this day in 1967, Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine, the new wife of a physician living in Paris who is bored with bourgeois domestication. To satisfy her fantasies, she becomes a call girl by day, reverting back to her upper class French life at night. Eventually, these two vastly different lives collide, creating an opportunity to display Séverine’s contradictions through fashion. Yves Saint Laurent personally designed Deneuve’s costumes for the film, marking the start of a strong relationship between the two with Deneuve as one of Laurent’s most adored muses. The images of Catherine Deneuve walking around Paris in the tailored sheaths, day coats, croc bags are still so striking today, 50 years later.