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Cue “I’ll Stand By You.” Chrissie Hynde has logged on to decry a Vogue article criticizing the late Brigitte Bardot.
Bardot, the French actress, singer, model, and animal rights activist who became a cultural icon during the sexual revolution, died last month at age 91. Later in life, Bardot adopted right-wing cultural stances, expressing skepticism about the #MeToo movement and aligning herself with far-right politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen, who opposes Muslim immigration into France. “I am against the Islamisation of France!” Bardot once wrote. “Our ancestors, our grandfathers, our fathers have for centuries given their lives to push out successive invaders.”
Remembrances of Bardot in the media have inevitably reckoned with this part of her legacy, including a recent Vogue piece titled “Mourning Brigitte Bardot Doesn’t Mean Absolving Her.” One key line from the article: “Few would dispute Bardot’s part in embodying and advancing the sexual revolution, but was that role — or any other facet of her legacy — powerful enough to outweigh her history of hate speech?”
Hynde encountered this article and was not pleased with it. “Are you kidding me? Vogue magazine vilifying Brigitte Bardot the minute she died?” the Pretenders leader wrote today on her personal X account. “Vogue magazine, and every fashion magazine in the world for that matter, owes more to Brigitte Bardot than any other human living or dead.”
Attached to the post was a longer written statement, which reads as follows:
Are you kidding me? Vogue magazine vilifying Brigitte Bardot the minute she died?
Vogue magazine, and every fashion magazine in the world for that matter, owes more to Brigitte Bardot than any other human living or dead.
She personified grace, elegance, beauty, glamour, style, and women’s rights.
She was an animal rights activist and anyone who knows anything about animal rights knows that we will always side with the animal if it’s being tortured or abused in any way.Politics has nothing to do with it.
And by the way, a ‘phobia’ is an irrational fear. I cannot imagine that Bardot had any irrational fears judging by the way she lived her life. Perhaps people working for Vogue magazine should buy themselves a dictionary.
I’m not even sure why anyone buys Vogue magazine but then I’m in the rock ‘n’ roll business. We don’t use make up artists or stylists. If anything we just try to emulate our heroes, like Lemmy and Brigitte Bardot. They expressed themselves by the way they looked… they didn’t hire people to do it for them.
XCH
Last summer, just before announcing her duets album, Hynde shared a eulogy for Mission: Impossible composer Lalo Schifrin lamenting that composers today are not operating on his level. Before that, the Pretenders played metal covers with Bill Burr. The duets record, by the way, featured Hynde and Cat Power covering Morrissey, another noted Le Pen supporter, but presumably that’s just a coincidence.