Miss France: the beauty pageant winner with a 'woke' haircut

The judges of this year's Miss France beauty contest have sparked a row after being accused of choosing a "woke" winner.

Eve Gilles, 20, representing France's northernmost region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, won the competition in Dijon last Saturday and became the "first contestant with a pixie cut to claim the crown", said The Telegraph.

The event in Dijon took place in front of a live audience of 5,000, with 7.5 million watching on television. 

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Having come third in the public vote, Gilles was selected by the pageant's all-female jury as the winner, igniting a wave of "criticism of the judges' decision" on social media. Gilles has since been defended by other viewers and some prominent politicians in France.

The background

The Miss France competition has attempted to "modernise" itself in recent years by diversifying the contestants, allowing "candidates of any age, along with mothers, wives and trans women" to all take part, added The Telegraph.

While these changes were "controversial in their own right", said Kathleen Stock on UnHerd, they appeared for a while "as if they would make no difference to the sempiternal formula" for picking the winner of the pageant. 

But despite the outward changes to the show, it ran into trouble just a week before this year's final. The broadcaster TF1 and the show's production company Endemol were ordered to pay €40,000 (£34,500) in compensation to two Miss France 2018 finalists when images of their breasts were broadcast to a viewership of 8 million people. They were unaware a camera had been set up backstage and the images were shown while they were changing costumes.

Because of the highly publicised controversy, the timing of Gilles' victory has "seemed to some particularly suspicious", added Stock, leading to accusations of the show succumbing to "le wokisme".

The latest

Since winning, Gilles said she purposefully "chose an androgynous look with short hair" and hit back at critics by saying "no one should dictate who you are".

The backlash to her victory on social media was "hostile", however, said Euronews. Critics "viciously attacked her thin frame" and said she "only won to appease 'woke' culture".

Gilles became the first woman with short hair to win in the show's more than 100-year history, and she said she was "choosing to ignore all the hateful comments" directed at her since her victory, said NBC News.

There is nothing to indicate "wokeism" was a "real factor in the decision" of the judges, added Stock, but it is "certainly true that Gilles's look has been claimed as a win for 'diversity'".

The reaction

Gilles' crowning as Miss France "sparked some, quite frankly, bizarre reactions on social media", said Meg Walters in Glamour, but "equating a pixie cut with woke-ness makes no sense". She added that it is a lack of understanding that the hairstyle "has a long history in French fashion", but also that critics want contestants to "show off femininity only of a certain kind", one that "champions western, white, outdated, overly-sexualised beauty standards".

The row transcended social media and took on a "political dimension", said The Telegraph. "Left-wing MPs came to Ms Gilles' defence", including Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, "a figurehead in France’s MeToo movement", and Fabien Roussel from the French Communist Party.

The entire furore is "bizarre in a nation that is supposed to celebrate femininity in all its forms", said Agnès Poirier in The Guardian. She added that Gilles' win was a "cause for celebration", and that it was part of the "longstanding French tradition of championing unique beauty".