Credits: ManoSolo13241324 / Wikimedia Commons — CC0.
At Pak Kret, near Bangkok, Ève Gilles, 22, Miss France 2024, represents France at Miss Universe 2025. On November 19, 2025, she unveiled a national costume inspired by Jeanne d’Arc: silver armor, a sword and a white flag adorned with a dove, to carry a message of peace. The last pageant for the young woman from the North, before a Miss Universe 2025 final broadcast in France on Paris Première on November 21 at 2 a.m..
A French Heroine Reinvented, In Thai Light
She is 22, poised and openly fond of historical nods. Ève Gilles, crowned Miss France on December 16, 2023 at the Zénith in Dijon, now moves forward with confidence. Indeed, she takes the stage of Miss Universe 2025 in Thailand as a leading figure. The young woman is not content to compete among a little more than 120 contestants. She writes a modern fable where Jeanne d’Arc becomes a banner of peace. The armor shines under the spotlights, while a sword is fastened at her waist. Also, a white flag is embroidered with a dove and a tricolor ribbon. The gesture is clear. In a world she calls deeply divided, she wants to “embody a warrior committed to peace.” The phrase, which others might use as a slogan, she embraces without irony. Moreover, she does so with a contained fervor fitting heroines. Indeed, that rings true when they know where they come from and where they’re headed.
A Costume Designed As A Narrative
The national costume was entrusted to Aymerick Zana, a designer seasoned in stagewear and familiar with flamboyant transformations. The armor consists of a corset and a skirt with metallic sheens. It also includes thigh-high boots, gauntlets and a cape. Together, these elements are cut for stage and camera. At her hip, a sword studded with rivets. In her hand, the banner with peace symbols. Nothing here is merely decorative. This visual vocabulary, borrowed from an imaginary Middle Ages, feeds on pop culture that loves armored heroines. It connects yesterday’s legends to Gen Z aesthetics and reminds how Jeanne d’Arc travels through centuries without losing her intensity.
The reference is not without risk. In France, Jeanne d’Arc remains a contested figure, summoned by opposing narratives—at times national, at times mystical, at times feminist. By choosing this totem, Ève Gilles walks a ridge. She owns it. She insists on freedom and peace, two words that neutralize attempts at appropriation. She claims a tribute to “an inspiring woman” and wants to keep the story alive. However, she does not seek to fetishize a saint. Rather, she wants to recall that a teenager once altered the course of a country. The symbol is updated with ’80s volumes and emphasized shoulder pads. Finally, a theatricality that allows shine without slipping into gaudiness completes this modernization.
Cilaos, La Réunion, As Sign and Source
Between the idea and the armor, there was a path. The Jeanne angle was first suggested by Ève Gilles’s father. Then the contestant recounts a moment of revelation in Cilaos, on the island of La Réunion, in front of a depiction of the Maid. There she saw a sign, a way to tie her journey to a larger narrative. Myths need a place to land. This one, nestled in the high Réunion valley, serves as an intimate matrix for a stage construction. The young woman adds a personal layer to the national monument and thus avoids the temptation of a postcard costume. No beret, no baguette, no cabaret posters. She deliberately rejects clichés and prefers a narrative, vertical France, a bit mystical and oriented toward peace.
Since arriving in Thailand in early November, her schedule alternates photo shoots in Phuket and Pattaya, visits, physical training, runway rehearsals, and English work. On November 19, 2025, near Bangkok, she presented her national costume. In the stands, smartphones form a second audience. Images flash, cut into stories, reels, vertical videos where every detail becomes a chapter. The pageant itself now integrates this multiplied mirror. It’s no longer just about impressing a jury, but about capturing a cloud of screens.
In this arena, her circle acts as a bubble. The dancer Max, from the North like her, arranges the catwalk. Yacine, a close friend, watches over the short hair and makeup. The parents and the partner act as a bulwark against dispersion. The team keeps the tempo and protects the contestant. She repeats that Miss Universe 2025 is her last pageant in the world of Misses. The promise is stated without dramatics. If the crown called, she says she’s ready to live abroad for a year to honor a possible reign. She is ready to suspend French life, routines and the relationship.
Crafting A Highly Visible Silhouette
Behind the armor is a fashion language. With stylist Joanes, Ève Gilles defined a legible signature. Colors blaze, volumes expand, the outfit asserts a signature, pants grow in scale, shoulders are emphasized. This grammar of revisited ’80s is expressed in silhouettes that catch the light. The strategy is clear. In a contest where global attention is at stake, being seen matters as much as being scored. The outfits, designed as successive stages, summon French houses and cutting-edge creators. Pierre Cardin for the architectural, Stéphane Rolland for spectacular minimalism, On Aura Tout Vu for atelier daring. French fashion here presents itself as a controlled patchwork rather than a uniform. The whole composes a wardrobe both varied and coherent, ensuring an identity without freezing into a school.
Jeanne d’Arc In The French Imaginary: Contemporary Readings
A multifaceted figure, Jeanne d’Arc slid from hagiography to politics, from genre painting to national narratives. Historians have shown how her image was constructed, criticized, reclaimed. Colette Beaune reminds that the Maid crystallized, from the 15th century, the birth of a nation around unifying myths. Then, she’s reinterpreted in the 19th and 20th centuries according to regimes and sensibilities. Régine Pernoud, a popular medievalist, helped undo clichés about the Middle Ages and reposition women of action, including Jeanne, at the heart of sources, far from school caricatures. Contemporary visual culture, from runways to cinema, extends this plasticity: armor becomes a sign that speaks strength, while the white flag shifts the allegory toward appeasement. Ève Gilles’s costume fits into this long history: it synthesizes a national heroine and a pop language immediately readable, without assigning Jeanne a single interpretation.
In fashion, the stylization of the medieval crosses a “gothic” and spectacular imaginary that fashion theorists like Valerie Steele have analyzed in connection with armed bodies, the corset, silhouettes that perform power while playing the theatricality of dress. This grammar harmonizes with Ève Gilles’s ’80s aesthetic: broadened shoulders, bold volumes, technical shine. It tells less of nostalgia than of a contemporary translation of French symbols.
Miss And #MeToo: Between Empowerment And Inherited Codes
Since #MeToo, pageants negotiate a gray area: offering a platform for individual trajectories while inheriting selection and spectacle codes long criticized. Miss Universe has evolved its rules and costumes: since 2023, married women and mothers can compete. This marks a move toward more inclusivity, alongside other openings already underway. These shifts don’t dissolve all critique, but they shift the judgment framework. It turns toward backgrounds and projects as much as strict morphology.
In this context, Ève Gilles’s proposal plays an understated empowerment: turning controversies over her body or her short hair into a signature, leaning on a heroine whose legend long echoed French debates, and making fashion a language of non-aggressive power. The tension remains: the bikini and the catwalk coexist with messages of peace and freedom. But this tension, far from invalidating the exercise, can form the material for a useful public debate. In this context, symbols are discussed, reinterpreted and contested. Here, the armor is not a barrier: it is a stage tool that frames speech.
Social Networks As Second Stage
Miss Universe now plays out in two phases. There is the stage, with its spotlights, juries, schedules, and codes. There is the second stage, digital, forming a parallel river. Stories, selfies, short videos, live streams, comments, instantaneous rankings. In this image regime, visibility becomes a measure of power. Ève Gilles has embraced this. Her colorful silhouettes create memorable thumbnails. They naturally circulate in the feed, lodge in fast memories, and fuel a global conversation. The performance extends in the repetition of images that, by accumulation, build a narrative.
The choreography is set with the help of a catwalk coach and a hair-and-makeup artist who know angles, light and rhythm. The pageant becomes an image workshop. You must hold grace without losing endurance, speak true without losing momentum. The contestant continually recalls the honor of representing France and her desire to open the international stage. She also wants to promote French designers. This flow of influences resembles a contemporary definition of soft power. Fashion, language, signs, bearing—all circulate in favor of a silhouette.
The Debate On The Usefulness Of Pageants In The 21st Century
Remains the question French society asks these pageants: What are they still for in the 21st century? At the margins, they retain the echo of a format seen as dated, sometimes sexist, regularly contested. They have also become platforms where young women speak out and carry causes. Moreover, they build visibility useful for engagements. The tension is not soluble. It is negotiated, night after night, with real advances and persistent blind spots. Ève Gilles’s trajectory—her short hair, her slimness embraced, her measured speech—shifts certain lines. They do not overturn the table. They force the format to reformulate slightly, to account for a plurality of silhouettes and narratives.
Critics remind that emancipation is not measured by the length of a train or the shine of a crown. Supporters point out that the stages thus won become platforms. The truth, as often, lies in between. There are slow structures, there are fast lives. Contestants negotiate their margins of action there. That evening, in silver armor, the Frenchwoman proposes a pacified reading of a warrior icon. She creates a dialogue between strength and appeasement. The contradiction is apparent. It is above all fertile.
A Wardrobe As A Calling Card For French Fashion
Ève Gilles’s promise is to carry a panorama of French fashion onto the global stage. The wardrobe aggregates both established houses and sharper ateliers. The variety of textures and colors builds an album for cameras to leaf through. France does not appear frozen in museum imagery. It expresses itself in assertive cuts, lively materials, and silhouettes that do not fear angles. The Jeanne d’Arc armor, the showpiece, sits atop this atlas and gives it a narrative peak. One reads there a way of inhabiting the stage and dressing it, a gesture both cultural and diplomatic.
This strategy advances alongside attention to words. Commitment to peace returns like a refrain. It does not cancel competition. It chains it to a readable cause that speaks to a wide audience beyond borders. The contestant does not promise to fix the world’s turmoil. She embraces a simple, almost naive message, then makes it resonate with the image of a heroine. Moreover, her story has crossed centuries. Simplicity here is not weakness. It is restraint, a true note, a recurrent motif.
The Calendar, The Stage, The Screen
The Miss Universe 2025 final takes place in Pak Kret, near Bangkok, on November 21, 2025. In France, the channel Paris Première broadcasts the show starting at 2 a.m. A more convenient rerun is then offered during the day. There will be rankings, lists, discreet tears, bright smiles. Above all, there will be the trace a country left that night in the shared imagination. Pageants pass. Some images remain. The silver armor, the white flag with the dove, the determined bearing of a young woman from Nord–Pas-de-Calais could well stay in viewers’ memory beyond the runways.