“For the first time, there is a young woman who has short hair”

2023-12-16 19:04:14
A screenshot of the “Miss France Official” Instagram account

Looking at the list of candidates for the title of Miss France 2024, it is difficult to notice that the participation criteria have evolved. Like every year, an impression of uniformity emerges from the thirty Italian shots of the young women competing on Saturday December 16. However, this edition is the second to be held with a relaxed starting selection: the age limit, previously set at 24, no longer exists, candidates can now be married, have children and even visible tattoos.

So much for the theory; in practice, the average age has hardly changed (it remains just below 22 years old, with 80% under 25 years old and an “oldest” of 28 years old), not a single centimeter of inked skin is visible. eyes and none of the regional misses are mothers. A single small visual disagreement could catch the eye: “For the first time, there is a young woman who has short hair”, defends Alexia Laroche-Joubert, president of the Miss France company from 2021 to 2023 and current boss of Banijay France (owner of the brand via its subsidiary Endemol). From there to talk about diversity…

On the other hand, according to her, one criterion remains “impossible to change”that of the minimum height of 1.70 m, for a “very technical reason” : “The show is live and we don’t know in advance which candidates will go through the stages, we can’t make dresses that fit girls 1.60 m or 1.80 m or make hems live. » Either.

The debate on the lack of representativeness and diversity of the Miss France competition is not new (The world already echoed it in 1975) but it is more and more vivid: in October 2021, the association Dare feminism! filed an appeal before the industrial tribunal to denounce, among other things, a “discriminatory and illegal recruitment process”without winning the case.

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Unable to change things from the inside, numerous parallel competitions have developed: “I have seen around ten appear over the past two or three years and, today, there must be more than a hundred”testifies Elsa Schwebel, president of the organizing committee of one of them, Ambassadrice France, founded in 2019. It is precisely because she was not able to compete in Miss France because of her size ( 1.65 m) that she launched this alternative which only imposes an age criterion (being under 30 years old), “to be able to allow those who could not access it to live their little girl’s dream”.

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