In 2006 famed Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira released his film Belle Toujours, an unofficial sequel to Belle de Jour. It imagines an encounter between Séverine (Bulle Ogier) and Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli, from Belle de Jour) many years later. The role of Séverine was offered to Catherine Deneuve, but she turned it down. "I read the script because they wanted me to do it," she said in a 2009 interview with The Guardian, "but I didn't want to do it. I had the impression that it was only giving an explanation 30 years later for what I was, and what I had done." She was leery of doing something "that was only a proposition for Manoel de Oliveira, that had nothing to do with Buñuel. If it had been me," she continued, "I don't know, I think it would have been a little uh, 'So what?' you know? I think it would have taken something off Belle de Jour."

In 2012 Vanity Fair named Belle de Jour one of the "25 Most Fashionable Films of All Time." "Long a point of reference for the fashionistas at the glossy magazines," said Vanity Fair, "Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour offers up the blanc-de-Chine beauty of Catherine Deneuve, who plays the upper-class Séverine Serizy in one nifty little Yves Saint Laurent dress after another. These exquisitely simple shifts and double-breasted A-line coats, hemmed innocently to the knee, belie the baroque sexual fantasies of Deneuve's character--from whipped slave to bound Saint Sebastian to precocious schoolgirl. With her tumble of hair pulled back into tight buns and gleaming French rolls, she suggests an over-the-top Hitchcock blonde--the heroines of Vertigo [1958], The Birds [1963], and Marnie [1964] absorbed into one damaged, deceptive persona."

by Andrea Passafiume