Paris Dreaming

by Katrina Lawrence

  After ordering coffee and cake in the delightful tearoom — the mansion’s former dining room — I excitedly pulled out my new purchase. ‘It smells like moth balls,’ said Mum, crinkling her nose. She instinctively picked up her cup of floral tisane, as though to clear her nasal passages of such olfactory nastiness.

  My mother’s fashion taste has long been what you’d call modern. Not in the sense that she slavishly follows the latest trends, rather that she has always chosen clothes that will let her live the fast-paced life of a woman with places to go, things to do. She has little time for skirts that are too tight or sleeves weighed down with details. Ever the onwards-and-upwards kind of woman, she has never worn clothes that look backwards, clothes burdened with the trimmings of the past.

  True, Mum was having slight trouble shaking off her shoulder pads from early on in the decade, but only because they seemed so well suited to the act of barging into the future. She would eventually streamline her fashion look, and actually dress in a more typically French fashion than I’d ever adopt. That’s because modern French style is surprisingly simple.

  There’s a telling self-portrait of Nélie André. She’s wearing a dress in a shade of cocoa-brown, in what seems to be velvet, its only adornment a flutter of white lace at the sleeves and neck and a softly folded bustle at the back of the skirt. Her casually upswept hair is offset by a delicate yellow rosebud. Despite living in such exquisite surroundings (her preference for eighteenth-century rococo paintings would have made a royal mistress feel at home) Nélie chose to style herself in a most understated way.

  The paring down of personal style was a trend taking hold among the Parisian haut monde towards the end of the nineteenth century. Thanks to ready-to-wear, the bourgeois masses could now easily copy high-fashion looks, crinolines and all. As they kitted themselves out more and more elaborately in an attempt to look all the richer for it, those whom they were imitating reacted by eschewing obvious displays of wealth. While the middle classes splashed on a rainbow of colours, widely available due to breakthroughs in synthetic dyes, the upper classes — who had long been able to afford gowns tinted in rare natural pigments — began to literally tone things down.

  The bourgeoisie eventually caught back up with their high-society counterparts, dressing down so as to balance fashion out across the board. This emergence of a subtly stylish national uniform was a fitting social leveller for a country equally obsessed with the tenets of equality and elegance. Some say that the signature Parisian style of discretion threads back to the French Revolution, when even a hint of aristocratic luxury could cost you much more than money. But in fact, modern Gallic chic came a century or so later, when Madame André and her friends showed that the truly stylish did not need to prove their point. It was an early example of the famous Chanel motto ‘Elegance is refusal’.

  These days, most Parisiennes conform to dressing in simple shapes and shades: dark, sleek blue jeans; a crisp white shirt; the horizontally striped top known as the marinière; cashmere in soft, muted tones; a well-tailored black tuxedo jacket; a trench coat in the same classic colour as a Haussmannian façade.

  One of the most celebrated French style muses is Jane Birkin, the English it-girl who hooked up with Serge Gainsbourg, the singer, songwriter, pianist, poet, painter, actor, director and all-round national treasure of France (with his dapper suits, gravelly growl of a voice and mesmerising way with words, he was also nothing less than a modern-day Baudelaire). Wearing little more than lithe-legged jeans, sheer T-shirts and long, swinging hair, Jane the honorary Parisienne sold sleek French style to the world, especially when the house of Hermès designed a bag for her. The Birkin is to this day a top bucket-list item for many women. Despite having a cult luxury bag named after her, Jane continued to flit around Saint-Germain with a simple straw basket her only accessory — one of those women so ridiculously stylish they don’t need to over-emphasise it.

  I’ve sometimes wished I’d discovered Jane before Brigitte (perhaps Serge did, too; he had tumbled in lust with BB after they collaborated on ‘Je T’aime . . . Moi Non Plus’ — a song so steamy that Brigitte begged him not to release it for fear that her third husband, German playboy Gunter Sachs, would discover the affair; a heartbroken Serge went on to record the tune with Jane). It would have saved me a lot of money, at the very least. As a fashion icon, Jane inspires a considered, if simplified, approach to style. Brigitte, on the other hand, is all impulse and frills. Ever since I fell for that flea-market dress, my wardrobe has bulged with all sorts of gowns, kaftans and frocks. I shop with my heart, not my head, which has led me to an oversupply of flounces and florals, and a serious shortfall of classic separates. One of my most glaring Francophilic failings is surely my inability to wear jeans and a pristine shirt. Still, I don’t regret it too much. I might never have carried off a frock — or filled it out — quite like Brigitte, but she taught me, at an emotionally formative age, the importance of feeling physically free, comfortable in your own skin.

  On our last day in Paris, I once again had some time to myself, before meeting my parents for dinner. Beneath my winter coat, my new dress swished around me as I strolled along the Seine. This time, by that river, I felt lighter, more liberated. As the famous Parisian magic hour imbued the sky with an amber glow and transformed the Seine into a length of rippling golden silk, the future indeed seemed brighter, and sixteen sweeter. I might not have taken many steps closer to understanding the woman I wanted to be, but I at least knew how I wanted her to dress.

  CHAPTER 3

  INGÉNUE

  ingénue nf innocent, unsophisticated young woman

  In which, aged almost eighteen, I enter a Belle Époque of my own.

  I felt like I was floating on that first day back in Paris, on such a high that my toes seemed to hover above the cobbled streets. Although today it was my hands, not feet, that needed grounding. I was en route to a manicure appointment I’d made months before, when the stress of Year 12 started to take its physical toll. I’d filled so many notebooks throughout the year that the skin on my hands eventually cracked and bled. I had to cover them in plasters for my exams lest any red smears detract from my words. Serious pampering à la parisienne was in order.

  The beauty salon was located just behind the Champs-Élysées, up near the Arc de Triomphe, and I paused at the foot of the avenue to admire the vista that ended in the triumphal arch, the iconic monument that had, for me, become so symbolic of goals and dreams. For the moment, however, I had no immediate objective other than tending to a different kind of extremity.

  This was no ordinary nail bar. After stepping through the gilt-trimmed doors, into the rose-scented atmosphere, I was ushered over to a brocade-covered armchair.

  ‘Une coupe de champagne, mademoiselle?’

  That would be a oui. Conveniently, the legal drinking age in France was sixteen.

  The manicurist soon returned, perched herself on a velvet stool, and placed a silver tray, topped with myriad bottles of red and pink nail polish and a flute of champagne, on the gilded table between us.

  As I took my first sip, I felt like I could dissolve with pleasure. I’d dreamed of this very moment for months. It had been the single incentive propelling me through the torture of my final school year. Still, it all seemed surreal. I couldn’t quite believe that my parents had allowed me to go to Paris on my own. When I’d originally formulated this grand schoolies plan, they’d simply nodded noncommittally, no doubt hoping that ‘Organise Paris Trip’ would drop off my to-do list at some point during the frantic year. It didn’t. As I saved up every cent possible, I wallpapered the study in posters of Paris, believing in the powers of visualisation, and somehow the trip morphed from wishful thinking into accepted fact. In the end, I think Mum and Dad simply decided they had enough faith in me, as they did in the world (or, at least, Paris) to set me free for a short while, although Mum did experience a moment of qualm at the airport. It was only after I solemnly promised to collect-call he
r twice a day, as well as check in daily with a former colleague who’d recently relocated to Paris, that her grip loosened, and I fluttered into customs with the nervous excitement a bird must feel when taking its first tentative flaps before swooping into the wide open sky.

  ‘Rouge ou rose?’ asked Madame Manucuriste.

  Would it be possible instead to have une manucure française?

  ‘Mais non!’ she exclaimed, sensibilities clearly offended. ‘Ce n’est pas du tout chic.’

  I’d later discover that the so-called French manicure — where glossy pink nails are tipped with a thick white line — is as American as apple pie. Some clever Yank came up with the look and a do-it-yourself kit, and gave it the misleading moniker in the knowledge that most women easily fall for anything à la française.

  An hour later I was strolling back down the Champs-Élysées, my nails painted a Parisian-esque pink, no particular destination in mind. And it suddenly hit me: I was not only in Paris on my own for the first time, but in life, too, and I could do whatever on earth I wanted. School was the trodden path behind me, and the coming years stretched before me like a grand avenue. My own Belle Époque had begun.

  It might be difficult to sense the former glamour of the Champs-Élysées, now largely a strip of flashing cinemas and fast-food joints, but the avenue was an epicentre of action during the original Belle Époque, which dawned just after 1871 and drew to a dark close on the eve of the First World War. The era was so named after the fact, by a post-war generation looking back through a filter of colour-saturated nostalgia. But idealised reminiscences aside, the period was uncommonly glamorous, and surprisingly so given that it came so soon after the devastations of the civil war known as the Siege of Paris.

  Perhaps it was a case of post-traumatic frenzy. Paris has never been as hedonistically happy as she was during these ‘beautiful’ years, a time when she became the undisputed global capital of pleasure. Life was as bubbly as a magnum of Moët, and Parisians partied in the gardens at the foot of the avenue, in the pretty pastel pavilions there, and at the legendary café-concerts, open-aired wonderlands where singers serenaded patrons by the electrified twinkle of fairy lights. Along the avenue, dotted with elegant lampposts and stately elm trees, carriages swept courtesans to and fro, their seductive silhouettes echoing the feminine curvature of the buildings.

  I crossed over to Guerlain, the famed beauty brand whose vanilla-sweetened fragrances perfumed the Belle Époque as much as my teenage years. For the past few Christmases, my grandmother had gifted me Guerlain Météorites, a jewel-like box of violet-scented, iridescent powder pearls designed to ignite the face with an ethereal luminosity. To this day, the aroma of violet fills me with the sense of pride I felt on receiving such a grown-up gift, as well as an aching longing to live up to its glamour — and for me Guerlain will forever be the essence of Parisian womanliness.

  I made to push open the glass doors, into the glossy marble foyer illuminated by chandeliers cut from the same Baccarat crystal as Guerlain’s perfume bottles, but suddenly stopped, transfixed by the scene before me. It was like looking into a hothouse of rare and exotic birds. The boutique was filled with beautiful Japanese women, wrapped in exquisite kimonos and obis — glossy fabrics saturated in fuchsia, mint and raspberry, and bright prints of cherry blossom, butterflies and dancing cranes. They struck me as maikos, or geishas in training, although they weren’t wearing the usual tell-tale thick white rice-powder face paint. Their skin in fact looked fresh and scrubbed clean, and I saw that most of them were close to my age. Still, I was too awestruck to shatter the mesmeric image and venture inside. So, sadly, I’ll never know the true story of their visit. Although I’m sure it has something to do with the universal desire to learn the beauty secrets of the women of the world’s most seductive city.

  The word geisha literally means ‘art person’, and a successful geisha is a true entertainer. She dances beautifully, her delicate fingers flit lyrically over traditional instruments, and she excels in the arts of flower arranging and calligraphy. She pours tea for the table, but she can also lean in, being confident enough to chat about a wide range of subjects. People often consider geishas a type of courtesan, but sex is not part of the deal. French courtesans, on the other hand, despite priding themselves on their conversational skills, were ultimately all about sex. They weren’t called grandes horizontales for nothing.

  French courtesans were also known as demi-mondaines, creatures of the demi-monde, a term coined by writer Alexandre Dumas, fils. It was the half-world of women who flirted at the shadowy fringes of society. Ignored and unacknowledged by high society, they nevertheless made their extravagant presence felt. If you knew where to look, it was easy to spot them — parading along the Champs-Élysées or attending opening nights at the opera in full finery, a neon-bright billboard for their own business.

  The courtesans were creatures of their century. They were women who fought to redefine what a woman could be, after the Parisian patriarchy had tried to put her in her powerless place. As seductive as hell and tough as nails, it’s little wonder they left a lasting impression, influencing what it means to be a French woman. The most successful courtesans were beautiful, yes, but they had to have so much more. They invested wisely, patronised the arts and forged lasting friendships. They were the complete package. To this day, the ideal French woman is a direct descendant. She’s a bundle of serious substance — confidence, intelligence, eloquence — wrapped up in a seductively soft bow.

  At the time, I was still to appreciate the multifaceted French definition of feminine allure, and the hidden codes of Parisiennes’ stylistic and social demeanour, which is for the most part modest and unassuming. French girls are traditionally schooled in all facets of etiquette by their mothers, and from a young age they learn what’s appropriate and what’s not. While my mother was a stickler for manners, she preferred to let me experiment and find my own way when it came to my personal style. At the time, Brigitte Bardot was still my icon. I asked myself only one question when I shopped: would BB wear this? I’d yet to realise that the 1960s sex kitten had been expressing herself, and a moment in history, and perhaps that wasn’t quite the right statement for me to make in modern times.

  But also, I wasn’t self-aware enough to truly express myself. I was certainly far from understanding what the full package of femininity entailed. Naïvety played a role, for sure, but it was more that I was taking a while to grow up socially. I’d had a few boyfriends, but none that serious. Romance for me existed mostly between the yellowed pages of vintage books. I might have dressed in a somewhat flirty manner, but it was without artifice or intent. Unlike my icon, I wouldn’t have been able to follow up easily on the seductive messages I seemed to send out. Then again, I wasn’t so interested in the physicality of romance. I would have been too much of a prude for the free-love era of Brigitte Bardot and I certainly wouldn’t have made an overly enthusiastic courtesan. The idea of dating was downright daunting. In an ideal world, I would meet my soul mate by chance, early on, just as my parents had.

  One of my favourite movies as a teenager was Gigi, the musical about courtesans set in turn-of-the-century Paris. I’d watch it every year with my grandmother, and it was only on the third or so viewing that I realised, with a blush, it was a movie about the selling of sex. I’d thought it simply a pretty tale about one girl’s journey to become a true Parisienne. I melted for the gilded snippets of Belle Époque Paris and the frill-laden gowns while singing along to Maurice Chevalier’s ‘Thank Heavens for Little Girls’ (without sensing how faintly creepy the signature tune is). Over time, however, I came to an appreciation of its subtle subversiveness: when Gigi ends up marrying the reformed playboy Gaston, rather than take the role of his concubine, she becomes his equal, and a woman of the twentieth century.

  As the veiled curtain came down on the Belle Époque, a new era began in which women would take greater control of their destinies. This was the world in which Colette, the au
thor of Gigi (and many other lauded titles of French literature) came of age. Born in the countryside of Burgundy, Colette moved to Paris at twenty, upon marrying a family friend known to all as Willy. He was fourteen years her senior, very much the man-about-town, and determined to show his innocent young bride, with her knee-skimming braids and wide-eyed wonder, the ways of a racier world.

  As the legend goes, Willy, a journalist and editor, discovered his wife’s talent for writing and encouraged her to record her schoolgirl memories — albeit with a heavy-handed dose of spice sprinkled throughout. He then took credit for what became the spectacularly successful Claudine novels. I’d read Colette’s Claudine at School but I was far from this mesmerising French schoolgirl who confided her story in this diary of a book, so breathless with excitement and exclamation marks. I didn’t have, shall we say, such a liberally minded view when it came to matters of love.

  As Willy’s fame grew, so did the number of women who threw themselves at him, often dressed and tressed up as saucy schoolgirls. Colette was miserable, as you can imagine, but the marriage wasn’t all doom and gloom. It was through Willy that she met the city’s avantgarde and eventually learned to find and assert her own voice. With her kittenishly heart-shaped face and a newly chopped mane of permed curls, Colette had a feline-like intensity to her. Once divorced from Willy, she threw herself into the philosophy of free love with a ferocious passion, and became a trailblazer for women who wanted to live and love with the freedom that men had always had (just as would Brigitte Bardot, whom Colette saw as a modern Gigi). Scandalous lifestyle aside, Colette was just as famous for her brilliant, poignant prose. She wrote about love and its intricate ins-and-outs with the same pure, raw emotion, not to mention lush and heartfelt detail, as she described the beloved Burgundian landscapes of her childhood. You can hear her heart beat as much as smell the sun-sweetened strawberries and touch the velvety green woods, and it was these evocative descriptions that so entranced me and kept me dreaming of life as a writer.