Our fashion critic considers the secret to achieving that laid-back, effortlessly chic attitude that the French seem to express with a simple scarf.
For Frenchwomen—or at least the classic image of them—a scarf is more than an accessory. It’s practically a national emblem, as essential to their identity as sneakers are to Americans. Brigitte Bardot wrapped them around her hair, Brigitte Macron often knots them at her neck, and Marion Cotillard wears them with casual elegance. Christine Lagarde has turned the silk scarf into her personal calling card.
Walk through Paris and you’ll notice scarves everywhere: looped neatly around necks, tied to handbags, or woven through hair. But making a silk scarf look delightfully undone is surprisingly difficult if you didn’t grow up experimenting with them. For the uninitiated, mastering the look can feel almost intimidating.
“You really have to be born in France to understand how to wear a scarf properly,” said writer Dana Thomas, a longtime Paris resident and contributor to The New York Times. “No one else seems able to pull it off quite the same way—it’s so deeply tied to the culture.”
That idea became clearer when I asked Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, the former Vogue and Elle editor who styled some of Hermès’s earliest scarf ads, how she ties hers. She simply waved her hands, twisted them dramatically, and tossed an imaginary scarf around her neck. “I just go tch tch tch,” she said with a shrug. She prefers them as headbands, knotted slightly off-center, or wrapped around a ponytail with the ends left to fall freely.
Lucie d’Halluin, a 25-year-old painter and Thomas’s daughter, estimates she owns around 40 scarves—big, blanket-like ones and tiny silk squares she wears in her hair or tied at the throat like a choker. Yet even she can’t easily explain the technique.
“It’s instinctual,” she said. “You start when you’re little, copying your grandmother or your aunt. You put on a scarf the same way you pull on socks. It becomes part of your style vocabulary.”
Maybe that explains the flood of scarf-tying guides—the best-selling How to Tie a Scarf: 33 Styles, Hermès’s own instructional videos and card decks, and the thousands of #scarfstyling videos on TikTok.
Still, d’Halluin has a few concrete tips—mostly warnings. With a classic Hermès carré (the 90-centimeter square), she would never wrap it around her neck more than once unless it’s freezing. Otherwise, she said, “you end up looking like you’re wearing a travel pillow.” She prefers to tie the knot in front or just off to the side, never at the back.
And for a choker-style look, she follows a simple mantra: “Fold, fluff, twist.”
Whatever you do, don’t skip the fluffing, she added. Without it, “you look like a flight attendant.” With it, you achieve that elusive, unmistakable je ne sais quoi.
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