Gamine

[1] Gamine was chosen for 1899, being described by Philip Howard in The Times as follows: An elfish young woman.

In that context, the closest English word – of Anglo-Norman origin – is probably "waif" (although "gamine" is often seen as conveying an additional sense of style and chic).

For example, in a press release of 1964, impresario Andrew Loog Oldham described the 17-year-old singer Marianne Faithfull as "shy, wistful, waif-like";[3] and writer and musician John Amis referred to German-born actress Luise Rainer (1910–2014) as Paul Muni's "waif-wife" in the 1937 film, The Good Earth.

These included the Canadian-born Mary Pickford (1892–1979),[5] who became known as "America's Sweetheart" and, with her husband Douglas Fairbanks, was one of the founders of the film production company United Artists; Lillian Gish (1893–1993),[6] notably in Way Down East (1920); and Louise Brooks (1906–1985),[7] whose short bobbed hair, widely copied in the 1920s, came to be regarded as both a gamine and a "Bohemian" trait (this style having first appeared among the Paris demi-monde before World War I and among London art students during the war.

[9] In the 1950s "gamine" was applied notably to the style and appearance of the Belgian-born actress Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993): for example, in the films, Sabrina (1954) and Funny Face (1957).

[10] On film and in photographs, Hepburn's short hair and petite figure created a distinct and enduring "look", well defined by Don Macpherson,[11] who cited her "naïveté which did not rule out sophistication", and described her as "the first gamine to be accepted as overpoweringly chic".

1931),[12] who played the leading role in the 1958 musical film of Gigi; Jean Seberg (1938–1979),[13] best known in Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960); Shirley MacLaine (b.

The French singer Juliette Gréco (1927–2020),[16] who emerged from Bohemian Paris in the late 1940s to become an international star in the 1950s, also had gamine qualities.

Audrey Hepburn's most iconic "gamine" role, as the main character Holly Golightly, came in 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Moss was part of a trend of "wafer" thin models which was satirized in Neil Kerber's strip cartoon "Supermodels" in the magazine Private Eye.

[59] Corinne Bailey Rae alleged that she was called a gamine in her song, "Choux Pastry Heart" (2005).

Gamines share similarities with the modern, cinematic "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" stock character.[how?]

In the modern romance The Life and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon, one of the female characters is a 'gamine', wife of the Doctor Black, the surgeon of Ruth Patchett, the heroine of the story.