The current Miss France has accused her critics of body-shaming her after winning the country’s national beauty pageant.
Eve Gilles’ short pixie bob caused a storm when she was won back in December 2023, with trolls saying her hair was ‘too boyish’ and ‘less attractive.’
The public, whose vote counted for 50 percent, put Miss Guiana and Miss Guadeloupe ahead of Eve but critics claimed the all-female judging panel was motivated by ‘wokeness’
No short-haired woman had even reached the final of the 103-year-old pageant before.
Reflecting on the outcry in a new interview with The Times, the 21-year-old said the comments about her physique were far more distressing than the opinions on her hair.
Gilles told the newspaper: ‘I chose my hair. I didn’t choose my body or metabolism. It was body shaming.’
The backlash against her hair, she says, began as soon as she progressed through the regional rounds. She says: ‘It was like a tsunami coming up behind you don’t see it but you know it’s right here.’
When she was crowned, Gilles hit back at the onslaught of criticism that came her way, saying: ‘We’re used to seeing beautiful Misses with long hair, but I chose an androgynous look with short hair’ and adding: ‘no one should dictate who you are’.
She continued: ‘Sometimes it’s been very difficult. I’m human and in the beginning especially it was very upsetting for my mother. But I got over it and when she saw that I was fine, she was fine too.’
Gilles, from Quaedypre, a village near Dunkirk says she’s never had any face-to-face abuse, saying: ‘Nobody has the courage. People only say they love me.’
‘I dreamed of being a Miss since I was little,’ she said, but ‘as I got older I didn’t really know how to start,’ and wanted to feel ‘good in my body, good in my head’.
‘These are things that we learn to live with the, and I don’t understand how we can criticise something that we can’t change.’
