First on the itinerary was lunch at L’Avenue, the velvet-lined and chandelier-lit restaurant beloved by celebrities and supermodels, and the paparazzi who linger permanently on the footpath, hoping to catch their prey with blinding flashlights. Our group, however, didn’t inspire a single click of a camera button, all being from the anonymous side of the glamour industry — PRs, beauty editors, a makeup artist and a fashion designer, who happily toiled behind the scenes, lenses and glossy pages. Not that we were immune to fashion’s power, to the relentless pursuit of looking one’s best. Anyone whose work takes them anywhere near the ever-spinning world of style — as most Parisiennes would know — eventually succumbs to its gravitational pull.
Fashionable restaurants must sometimes question the value of their stylish status, because fashion people don’t really eat. It would be much healthier for profits (if not your clients’ heart health) to appeal to the fat cats of the world. But L’Avenue is the kind of place that doesn’t arch an eyebrow if you order a salad — hold the dressing — and proceed to play with it for an hour. Which is pretty much what we did that afternoon, swishing and swirling our leaves and tartares around our plates. We all shared a basket of pommes frites, bien sûr — so elegantly slim in France they look as though they couldn’t possibly pose a threat to the waistline. Karlie was the only one to eye them suspiciously. Her bride diet, combined with the stress of coordinating a wedding on the other side of the world, had seen her whittle herself away to the size of a Parisian chip, plus the corset of her medieval-inspired wedding gown would not have allowed for a soupçon of additional weight. ‘I’m going to gorge myself on the croquembouche cake,’ she sighed, visualising the future feast in an attempt to satisfy present cravings.
French food is surprisingly light if you want it to be. It might have a heavy-handed reputation for rich creams and buttery sauces, but the so-called nouvelle cuisine — with its herb-tinged love of soup, seafood and fresh, colourful vegetables — is a refreshing alternative. And one that means, of course, you can easily earn yourself kilojoule credit for alcohol . . . which we proceeded to spend by ordering bottle after bottle of crisp sancerre. After all, wine is so good for you in France that they say santé (health) when clinking glasses.
‘Ah, c’est la vie,’ declared Mel, a fellow beauty editor.
‘I just want to freeze this moment,’ I said. ‘We’ll never experience anything like this again: all of us together, single, with not a care in the world but to drink wine and shop and enjoy each other’s company.’
Karlie’s phone beeped. ‘I do have one extra care in the world,’ she sighed. ‘The candles we ordered for the church have apparently turned up yellow. I have to somehow track down a hundred new white ones.’
‘Well, I guess shopping for French candles is a pretty fabulous problem to have,’ said Janey, also a beauty editor. ‘In the meantime, let’s have one more toast: to ladies who French-lunch.’
The French lunch is a national treasure. When the rest of the working world started eschewing a midday break to scoff down a sandwich at their desk, the French steadfastly continued to dine out, because le déjeuner represents all that they hold dear. It’s a chance to make a statement about working to live rather than living to work — and living to eat rather than eating to live. And it’s an opportunity to indulge in conversation along with cuisine — lunch is about chewing over quenelles as much as the pros and cons of the latest labour strike, imbibing one another’s opinions along with a carafe of house wine.
French wining and dining is such an art form that it has even won a place on UNESCO’s cultural heritage list. There food is art on a gold-trimmed porcelain plate, a feast for the eyes as much as the tastebuds. It’s telling that this elegance survived the Revolution, before which only the upper classes ate in style. Liberté, égalité, gastronomie. Everyone deserves to dine. Some of the most legendary French chefs have risen from poverty, hungry with desire to live well. Fittingly, the two biggest, Carême and Escoffier, were inspired by architecture and sculpture respectively, helping to give French food a reputation for artistic flair. It was the French who first linked culinary taste with the aesthetic kind of taste: le goût. You just aren’t living if you’re not eating fabulously.
L’Avenue is so named because it’s situated on Avenue Montaigne, the crème de la crème of Parisian shopping strips, a grandiose street lined with immaculately tended horse chestnut trees and every designer store worth its weight in handbags. In other words, it’s a dangerous place to be after a mostly liquid lunch. Luckily we had strict guidelines keeping us in check: we were shopping for Karlie, specifically for an outfit for her town hall ceremony, the civil wedding being the only legally recognised form of marriage in France. While not the scene of frothy white extravagance, it’s nevertheless a traditional affair and calls for something suitably refined. We found her perfect ensemble in Valentino: a vanilla-white trouser suit, as soft as Chantilly cream. And for the finishing flourish: an ivory camellia brooch from Chanel.
‘Did you ever in your wildest girlhood dreams imagine this?’ I asked Karlie.
‘Are you kidding — it was my wildest dream,’ she exclaimed. ‘Shopping in Paris for your French wedding is surely the very definition of every girl’s fashion fantasy.’
There are many reasons Paris became the world’s fashion capital. Originally, it was a nifty strategy for the Sun King, Louis XIV, to not only deck himself out in his beloved frills and finery, but also wield further power over his aristocratic subjects, to keep their minds filled with ruffles rather than rebellion. There was no serendipity about it; Parisiennes, regardless of what they might like to tell you, weren’t predestined to be the world’s most fashionable women.
Fashion was also the lace-trimmed handiwork of pure, cold economics: the king, together with his Minister of Finances, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, pioneered a state-supported interventionist policy to create the French luxury industry and fill the country’s coffers with coins. And fashion — the jewel in the luxury crown — was indeed a golden affair. ‘Fashion is to France what the gold mines of Peru are to Spain,’ claimed Colbert, who reigned over this shiny new realm. Where once there was just tailor-made, couturières now ran fancy boutiques where women could buy off the rack, inspired by the illustrations of fashionable socialites they pored over in the burgeoning fashion press, the precursor to today’s street-style snaps. All of France — and soon much of the world — wanted to dress à la parisienne.
The remarkable thing about the early French fashion industry was that it managed to be both exclusive and democratic, a contradictory allure that still holds today. Like fine dining, high fashion persisted beyond the Revolution, appealing to the middle classes who wanted to dress up in rank. Parisians of all classes have long admired things of beauty. Which is somewhat odd given their often violent history — although perhaps it’s these moments of ugliness that have helped them appreciate glamour all the more. There’s a deep respect for luxury in France, especially given the fact that the industry keeps so many French people in work. Paris also surely took to fashion because the city has been perfectly designed for the ritual of fashion display. Swan along Avenue Montaigne swinging several shopping bags and you’ll surely agree.
I’ve always loved that this high-fashion street is named after the Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne, who railed against sumptuary legislation — the fashion laws of the time that limited the ownership of the likes of brocade, lace, gold and silver to the elite. The anti-fashionista believed that the world would be a better place if only prostitutes wore ‘scarlet or goldsmiths’ work’ and if ‘abominable breeches’ were done away with altogether. An armchair philosopher, Montaigne was famous for his rambling, chatty essays, in which he opined on everything from cannibalism to idleness, with a startling openness that revealed a little too much about his bodily functions. It was a style of literature way ahead of its time: inner observation to help explain the outer world. If Montaigne were alive in modern times, he
would have been one of the world’s leading bloggers.
In the early years of the new millennium, the digital diary known as blogging was only just picking up steam. It was a form of media largely for people who craved a connection with the outside world and needed to order and clarify their complex intimate thoughts. It was a group that didn’t include me. I didn’t do introspection all that well at the time. Or, more to the point, I chose not to.
‘I worry that our lives are a bit superficial,’ I once confessed to Janey after a few glasses of champagne at a launch one evening. We’d been listening to someone talk about her brand’s new lipstick for forty-five minutes, and the mind-numbingness of it had sobered me into some sort of minor existential crisis.
‘Are you superficial if you know it?’ she laughed. ‘I’m sure genuinely surface people don’t think to that extent.’
I went home and registered for a sponsor child, cringingly aware it was merely a guilt-driven gesture, but one that would disperse some good into the world all the same. One day I’d try to do more, I assured myself before falling asleep, only to wake up and hit the beauty circuit treadmill once more.
Looking back, I think I stayed in the world of beauty for so long because, yes, it was fun and glamorous and all that, but also because of its intoxicating youthfulness. Beauty, at least in Australia, is utterly obsessed with youth; every second product that launches seems to be some anti-ageing wonder. So when you’re in the thick of this, you can’t help fretting about every little facial line. But for me, I think I was also fighting emotional wrinkles, those inner kinks and dints you get when life becomes complicated. So I didn’t date with any serious mindfulness (think a succession of affairs so wrong to begin with they were always going to end badly). And in the same way, I didn’t push my career. Perhaps, on some level, I thought that taking a promotion would require me to step up in other areas of life, too. I was, for the moment, happy to remain young at heart — and in every other way, too.
I’d once wished my life would have sorted itself out as neatly as my mother’s had, but I now understood mine was its own story, and I appreciated that women no longer need live by a linear plotline and set chapters. Mum hadn’t had her twenties to herself. I was more than making up for that. In many ways, my twenties were like one long hens’ party. My friends and I were at the age and life stage where you can’t hold too much against a girl for taking herself lightly. I knew that the various commitments of marriage and a mortgage were hovering somewhere just beyond the horizon. In the meantime, I decided to relish the moment, go with the flow of each day, and live without an agenda — except to enjoy myself — for as long as I was lucky enough to do so.
After walking north along Avenue Matignon and turning right onto Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré — that other vaunted Parisian fashion strip — we Parisian hens found ourselves clucking outside the presidential Élysée Palace. ‘Pompadour, we salute you,’ I sighed, as we peered through the lacy wrought-iron gates. The guards probably figured we were hoping for a glimpse of Jacques Chirac. In actual fact we were envisaging the ghost of the palace’s much more powerful former tenant. It’s another sign of the potency of fashion in France that the president’s digs were most famously those of the Marquise de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV in the eighteenth century, and one of the country’s leading taste-makers.
How Pompadour gave her flamboyant name to a 1950s male hairstyle is beyond me — as she favoured neat, rippled ’dos herself (technically called tête de mouton: sheep head) — but Pomp (her name has nothing to do with lowercase-p pomp, although she did love ostentation) influenced pretty much every other element of style at the time. If you’ve ever sipped herbal tea out of a pastel porcelain cup or quaffed champagne from an etched-crystal coupe, luxuriated in a gilt-edged velvet armchair or arranged peachy roses in a celadon-green vase, or brushed rose-pink blush over your powdered complexion, you have La Pomp to say merci to. She practically single-handedly created the rococo style, at once delicate and exuberant, which is still synonymous with French flair and femininity.
Born into a world increasingly in thrall to the thrills of fashion, the then Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson was the poster girl for the power of a makeover, rising from humble bourgeois beginnings to become the king’s right-hand woman through virtue of sheer determination and strategic artifice. She was the patron saint of prettiness — as her biographer Nancy Mitford commented, ‘Few people since the world began can have owned so many beautiful things’ — and shopped on the luxury-laden street where she would eventually reside. It remains alive with her spirit of fabulous frivolity.
We walked past more former grand townhouses, one of which was home to another of history’s glamour pusses, Pauline Bonaparte. Now the British Embassy, its throne room was once Pauline’s decadent boudoir, which is deliciously ironic, as Napoléon’s sister might have become a princess when she married Prince Borghese, but her behaviour was far from regal. The highly sexed socialite indulged in a series of affairs with eminent men, who were totally entranced by her unabashedly feminine wiles. At a time when the trend-setting Merveilleuses (marvellous women) of post-revolutionary Paris wore little more than gauzy gowns moistened with water to enhance cling factor, Pauline was the true princess of provocation. She was particularly renowned for the high esteem in which she held her bust — so much so that she had a set of gold punch cups moulded on one of her breasts, and wore such gossamer-light bodices that she may as well have walked around topless.
Diaphanous dresses are not as suited to modern Paris, I discovered, as we crossed Rue Royale, stepping over a metro grate just as a train whizzed beneath us and — whoosh! — a warm gust of wind blew everything up around my head, revealing little more than a g-string below. Car horns blared and my cheeks blushed to pink Pompadour proportions. Pauline wouldn’t have minded but I was mortified. ‘I just want a hole to open up right now,’ I wailed, as everyone else fell about hysterically. Surely perishing on Paris’s most fabled fashion street wouldn’t be a bad way to go?
We were now on Rue Saint-Honoré, with its even higher, headier concentration of chic. This part of Paris has been the spiritual home of high French fashion since Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s legendary couturière, set up shop down the road. Post-Pompadour rococo, trimmings became less important than the actual cut of the dress, and the industry of couture — derived from the Latin for ‘sew together’ — was in the ascendant, reaching the pinnacle of haute when Charles Frederick Worth opened his rooms on the nearby Rue de la Paix and made a true art of the tradition of tailoring for women. Instead of designing from scratch, in consultation with a client, however, he produced a limited number of gowns every season — shown off in a precursor to today’s fashion parade — that could be adapted and altered to fit each woman. He famously invented the bustle, bumping out the era of the crinoline, which meant ladies no longer had to fear their skirts swaying in the wind, revealing their pantaloons to the public — the shame of which I now could appreciate.
The haute couture market is not what it was in its 1980s heyday when thousands of women flocked to Paris to pay $40,000 for a made-to-measure dress. But couture is economically viable in one crucial way: by garnering publicity it helps sell a brand’s various other products, such as perfume and lipstick. It’s also the accessories that make money, which is blindingly obvious in Place Vendôme, the heart of Paris’s fine jewellery industry. We turned off Rue Saint-Honoré to do a loop of the plaza, a vast space girded by a chain of seventeenth-century townhouses that were once home to the top bankers in town. Whether from glistening coins or glittering earrings, Place Vendôme has always smelt like money.
Boucheron, Cartier, Chanel, Dior, Chaumet . . . We window-shopped our way around the storefronts, oohing and ahhing at the diamonds on display, dazzling brilliant cuts (originally invented for the Sun King to give him maximum sparkle power) and elegant marquise cuts (a shape commissioned by the following king, in homage to his lover Pompadour’s dainty lips). E
ven the square itself is chiselled like a cut gem, its corners sliced off for an octagonal effect, the light bouncing off one facet to another to another.
‘You know, I don’t even need the ceremony,’ said Janey. ‘I just want the rock.’
‘Well, diamonds last a lot longer than guys,’ added Mel, who was belatedly going through her single-girl phase after the recent end of a long-term relationship. ‘Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry, Karlie!’ she suddenly exclaimed, mortified. ‘What a stupid thing to say to a bride-to-be. Of course I don’t mean you; you never put a foot wrong.’
Karlie smiled, deflecting any negative vibes with a casual shrug. It was true: her life was meticulously planned. She never launched into anything unless she was sure it would be a success. She reminded me of my mother in many ways: clear-headed, determined, whip-smart. Although she was marrying at a relatively young age, she was an old soul, and I had no doubt that she was following the right playbook for her.
We strolled by the Ritz Hotel, which had redefined luxury for the twentieth century. Such was the glamour of the hotel — beloved by designers and dancers, playboys and princesses, courtesans and counts — that soon after the 1898 opening its name became synonymous with swank. To put on the ritz is to live it up a notch or ten, to dress up in all your diamonds, and drink and dance the night away. (Even a soup can get its ritz on, according to the Oxford Dictionary, if it’s garnished with ‘an asparagus tip nestled in a small spoonful of lightly whipped cream’.)
Paris Dreaming Page 16
