2023-08-02 11:25:55
Geneviève de Fontenay, known as the godmother of beauty queens in France and her decades-long supervision of the Miss France contest before finally stepping out of the limelight due to controversial situations, has died at the age of 90, according to what her close associates reported yesterday.
De Fontney has withdrawn from public life in recent years, and last June she was charged with insult and incitement.
De Fontney gave up the presidency of the “Miss France” competition in 2010 due to differences of opinion with those in charge of the event. She was gradually excluded by her peers in the field, especially because of her views, which were described as puritanical regarding the standards of beauty and femininity.
In 2002, European production giant Endemol, which specializes in reality TV shows, bought the rights to the Miss France contest. Soon, de Fontenay, known as the “Lady in the Hat,” and Endemol entered into a “moral conflict,” according to her description, over the organization of the competition and its celebration.
She ended up withdrawing from the event and launching her own contest, Miss Prestige, which sparked a legal war with Endemol.
De Fontney, whose original name was Geneviève Moleman, was born in 1932 in Longueuil in the Mort-et-Moselle region in northeastern France, into a family of ten children, of whom she was the eldest. She has drawn attention since childhood with her elegant clothes that she used to wear.
In 1954, she met the head of the body supervising the “Miss France” competition at the time, Louis Poirot, known as the nickname de Fontney, who was 24 years older than her, and she alone assumed, starting in 1981, the presidency of the Miss France Committee following the death of her husband, Louis de Fontney. .
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