Fresh from France, Vanessa Paradis, 19, is the hottest thing since cafe au lait.

If you think Vanessa Paradis (the girl in Chanel's Coco fragrance ads) is a model trying to be a singer, you've got it backwards.

"I'm not able to be a model, and I don't want to be one," explains five-feet-tall Paradis (it's pronounced "Para DEE") in French-accented English. "It was my singing and acting that led me to work with (she emphasized "with") Chanel. I had already done two albums and one film before that happened. You Americans just know me as the Coco girl because you don't know me."

She's right. While she's a new face on this side of the Atlantic, in France and most of the rest of Europe, Paradis is a superstar -- and has been since she was 14, with two smash albums and one Cesar (the French Oscar).

In person, in her hip-hugger jeans, simple top and suede platform boots, she looks cool enough to captivate a new continent. Her first English album, produced by Lenny Kravitz and titled simply Vanessa Paradis, has sunny pop-rock grooves and is guaranteed to make America fall in love with France's hottest export.

Her personal style: "I love old clothes from the sixties and the seventies and twenties and the forties. I also love very tight men's suits from that time."

Favorite singers: "Aretha Franklin, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Rickie Lee Jones, and [French superstar] Serge Gainsbourg. Lenny's a real big fan of Led Zeppelin, so I've listening to them a lot."

Getting along with mere and pere: "I have an amazing relationship with my parents. Of course, when I was fourteen and fifteen, we clashed. It was horrible, but now we're, like, in love with each other."

If she were marooned on a desert island she's bring: "My man, of course."