They were young people expressing their individuality by wearing big or garish clothing (similar to the zoot suit fashion in America a few years before) and dancing wildly to swing jazz.

During the German occupation of France, the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, had an ultra-conservative morality and started to use a whole range of laws against a youth that was restless and disenchanted.

Many Zazous liked to dress in the style anglais with umbrellas (seen as a symbol of Britishness in France) a popular fashion accessory and their hair done up à la mode d'Oxford (as Simone de Beauvoir called it), had a fondness for speaking to each other in English as it was more "cool" and loved British and American popular music.

Hall described the Zazou look as follows: "the young men wore dirty drape suits with "drainpipe" trousers under their sheepskin-lined jackets and brillianted liberally their long hair, the girls favored tight roll-collar sweaters with short flared skirts and wooden platform shoes, sported dark glasses with big lenses, put on heavy make-up and went bare-headed to show their dyed hair, set off by a lock of a different hue".

In his autobiography, Christian Dior wrote of the style: Hats were far too large, skirts far too short, jackets far too long, shoes far too heavy...

For lack of other materials, feathers and veils, promoted to the dignity of flags, floated through Paris like revolutionary banners.

It was their ironic and sarcastic comments on the Nazi/Vichy rulers, their dandyism and hedonism, their suspicion of the work ethic and their love of "decadent" jazz that distinguished them as one of the prototype youth movements questioning society.

One fascist magazine commented on the male Zazou: "Here is the specimen of Ultra Swing 1941: hair hanging down to the neck, teased up into an untidy quiff, little moustache à la Clark Gable... shoes with too-thick soles, syncopated walk."

Black Americans felt freer in Paris than they did back home, and the home-grown jazz scene was greatly reinforced by this immigration.

Manouche Gypsy musicians like Django Reinhardt started playing swinging jazz music in the Paris clubs.

[6] An associate of the Zazous, the anarchist singer/songwriter, jazz trumpeter, poet and novelist Boris Vian was also extremely fond of z words in his work.

By 1942, the Vichy regime realised that the national revival that they hoped would be carried out by young people under their guidance was seriously affected by widespread rejection of the patriotism, work ethic, self-denial, asceticism and masculinity this called for.

In 1986, the British duo Pet Shop Boys wrote a song about Zazou called "In the Night", which was the B-side for the first single release of "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)".