This doesn’t help. The women flash by too quickly for me to discern the guiding principles of their outfits. And even when I sit opposite someone stylish for hours, I can’t figure out how she conjures so much je ne sais quoi with a sweater and a cocktail ring.
I don’t want to copy these women exactly, anyway. And even if I did, I doubt whether the same looks would work on me.
Nor can I fall back on my birthright: shopping. Though I’ve lived in Paris for years, I’ve never quite figured out how to shop here. The American boutiques I grew up with—including my mother’s—were a cross between a sorority house and a therapist’s couch. While trying on clothes, you’d tell the saleswoman everything you hate about yourself. Fellow shoppers would join the conversation, and soon you’d know all about their vacations, diets and divorces. Everyone understood that it went no further.
It’s still that way. An American saleswoman tells me that one of her menopausal customers once lined up tubes of vaginal lubricant near the cash register, ranking them according to which ones she liked best.
“What size jeans do you wear?” a saleswoman once shouted to me from across a store.
“If I go to the bathroom first, I think I can fit into a twenty-six,” I shout back.
“That’s what all my customers say: ‘I’m a poop away from a size twenty-six,’” she replies.
No discretion is required. In American boutiques, we women are all comrades in an epic battle to look decent. When I was a teenager, someone once walked past my mother’s storefront, having gained weight and gone gray. The women inside remarked that she had “given up”—a reminder of what can happen if you surrender.
This isn’t how it works in Paris. Salespeople here are courteous but distant, murmuring sizes discreetly and using the formal vous. Customers don’t launch into neurotic soliloquies in the changing room. When I hand back a skirt that I’ve just tried on, and tell the young saleswoman that I’ll need to lose two kilograms (about four and a half pounds) before I buy it, a chilly silence comes over her. I’ve apparently revealed something way too intimate.
There’s practically no solidarity between customers, either. I once emerge from a dressing room at the same time as a woman who’s trying on exactly the same outfit as me. As we examine ourselves, like twins, in the mirror, she doesn’t even make eye contact. In French shops, women are each in their own trench, doing battle alone.
I once read that there are two kinds of shoppers: those who just see what they like and buy it, and those who need to see every possible option before they can decide. French shoppers mostly seem like the first kind. They home in on a single jacket or pair of pants, examine themselves silently in it, then either buy it or not.
And shopping isn’t just for ladies here. A woman’s husband might observe from a couch while she tries on clothes, then discuss the merits of a jacket with her in hushed tones. It’s not emasculating to opine on a blouse. Whereas, when I return from my shopping expeditions, Simon glances at my purchase for about a second, mumbles “nice,” then turns back to his book.
Someone tells me that Parisiennes typically acquire one “signature piece” per season—a jacket or a pair of shoes that they can weave into their existing wardrobes. I resolve to do this, too, but I can’t decide which piece to anoint: The green suede boots? The jumpsuits that are big this season? Perhaps a vintage fur? If I did lose those two kilograms, perhaps I could try a menswear-inspired look, like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall? I buy one signature piece, then another. Soon my closet is stuffed with failed attempts to find my pièce de résistance.
I’m the second kind of shopper, who needs to see all options. Buying clothes feels like an exploration of all my possible selves. I might walk into a store looking for jeans. But an hour later I’m in a dressing room piled with tops, shoes, dresses and bathing suits. I try on anything that strikes me, from wide-leg pants, to long dresses, to pleated skirts.
French salespeople rarely see anyone shop like this, and they’re giddy at the prospect of a huge sale. But after forty-five minutes in a changing room, submerged in clothes and unexpressed self-loathing, I either rush out apologetically without buying anything, or I feel so guilty that I pluck a random sweater from the pile and pay for it.
The next day, seized with regret, I almost always want to return the sweater. In America, no one is surprised when you walk back into a store, having changed your mind.
In France, however, returns are technically permitted but actively discouraged. When I once try to return an unworn scarf at a French department store, the salesman dramatically sniffs the length of it for evidence of my scent, then demands to know what the problem is. I eventually discover a retort—usually a lie—that instantly silences French salespeople: my husband didn’t like it.
The net result of all this buying and returning is many wasted hours, with little to show for them. I still can’t figure out what to put on in the morning.
* * *
—
Then I meet Bryn Taylor. Taylor is a New Jersey native who travels around America coaching men and women on how to dress. She has come to Paris to observe French fashion, and we agree to meet for coffee.
I’d expected a tiny, whiny stylist in oversized sunglasses. But Taylor is sturdy, unpretentious and tall. (Both her father and uncle played professional basketball). She has cropped black hair and wears a no-nonsense blue blazer. She says she mostly dresses her clients—many of whom are in their forties—in midpriced brands. “I came from New Jersey. We grew up in malls. I’m not really a luxury person,” she explains.
Taylor says her clients often start out by insisting that they want to look “unique.” “‘Unique’ is a word I hear more than you’d want to imagine,” she tells me. But usually they can’t explain what they mean by “unique,” and they send Taylor photographs of outfits that have little in common with each other. “You get this whole collage of their brain, essentially. A lot of it is disjointed, not realistic. They don’t know what they’re responding to.”
Her clients’ closets sound a lot like mine. They’re the accumulation of failed attempts to look unique. A woman might own twenty pairs of black pants, all of which she describes as “wrong.”
And like me, Taylor’s clients “say they get completely lost and confused when shopping. They are overwhelmed,” Taylor says. They’re no longer sure what’s age appropriate, and they frequently have body-image issues. “Stomach, arms and butt are the three big ones,” Taylor says. “Post-forty, I would say the majority of my clients do not like to show their arms.”
Her clients are so hyperaware of what they dislike about themselves, they’re not sure what they do like. “It’s almost like they’re living in a body they don’t understand or recognize,” she says.
This is a cultural problem. In the US and Britain, there’s “anxiety at the core of fashion,” writes the anthropologist Daniel Miller, who studies clothing and consumption. In our version of feminism, women expect to “make choices for themselves and not be dictated to by external pressures.” In fashion, as in other realms, we don’t want to be bound by our origins, our station in life or even our own bodies. Of course I don’t want to buy what’s on the mannequin, and Bryn Taylor’s clients insist that they want to look “unique.” Somewhere deep in our American (or British) minds, we think we’re supposed to invent a style from scratch.
That’s a tall order for ordinary women without design degrees. Most of us have trouble even describing which clothes we like. And we’ve created an obfuscating haze around our bodies, making it hard to see what we really look like. In one study, more than 90 percent of female college students said they did “fat talk,” described as “a back-and-forth conversation where each of two healthy-weight peers denies the other is fat while claiming to be fat themselves.”
And unlike in France, in the Anglophone world there’s a sense that shopping for clothes is a trivial,
guilty, girlish pleasure. You’re not supposed to take it too seriously. When a customer can’t make up her mind, I’ve heard a saleswoman in an American shop remind her, “It’s just a dress.”
We’re on a quest to find ourselves through clothes, and to be unique. But we’re ashamed of our bodies, too, and we suspect that caring about clothes at all is a slightly shameful secret. It’s no wonder that we buy twenty pairs of the wrong pants.
* * *
—
Bryn Taylor’s solution to the “uniqueness” problem is to ignore it. Instead, she focuses on her client’s budget and body type. When she discovers an especially well-cut blazer, she might put several different women in it. If a blue blazer looks good on someone, she might add a blazer in white or in leather. (Blazers, I’m gathering, are the signature item for fortysomethings.) Likewise, if a client feels great in sheath dresses, Taylor will look for another sheath dress with a fresh detail.
A unique look eventually emerges from this process, simply because of the woman’s stature, coloring and accessories. And anyway, once a client is wearing clothes that suit her, “the ‘unique’ thing flies out the window,” Taylor says. “They were grasping at ‘unique,’ but they didn’t know what they meant. I think they just wanted to look good.”
I realize that, in her New Jersey practicality, Taylor has seized on an approach to clothes that’s essentially Parisian, too. There are plenty of French women who make shopping blunders and who want to hide their upper arms. But certain cultural messages in France make shopping less traumatic.
For starters, I’ve never heard a Frenchwoman say she’s striving to look “unique.” Women here almost always say that they aspire to look “elegant” and “chic.”
This is partly because French feminism aims for equal rights, but with all the codes of elegance and seduction left intact. In one TV clip, an interviewer asks Simone Veil, the French feminist who helped legalize abortion, whether she’ll undo her trademark chignon so the audience can see her long hair down.
“Right away, if you’d like,” Veil says with a coquettish smile, then starts removing the bobby pins.
There’s nothing demeaning or superficial here about taking your appearance seriously. “For me, a loss of interest in dressing well and using makeup is a form of depression,” explains Inès de la Fressange, a well-known model in her sixties who embodies the conventional wisdom of well-heeled Parisians.
Christine Lagarde, the Frenchwoman who heads the International Monetary Fund, doesn’t mind discussing her fashion influences. She tells an interviewer that early in her career, she learned to dress well from a Belgian boss who was “very strong and elegant” and “always very attentive to how she looked.”
Lagarde says that Americans offer a cautionary tale. “When I came to America and saw a lot of working women in the 1980s and 1990s who always dressed like men, that had an influence on me, too—to not do that.”
Aiming for elegance instead of uniqueness takes off some of the pressure. There are established formulas for looking elegant and chic, in much the same way that there are recipes for making a chocolate cake. Unless you’re a full-time fashion professional, why try to invent the recipe for elegance from scratch? You would probably end up having a nervous breakdown in a dressing room.
Parisiennes don’t all get it right, of course. And they think it’s natural to pass through periods of experimentation in your twenties and thirties. But they say that, gradually, “you find your style.”
You do this, in part, by knowing your own body. Forget the blurring of fat talk. Especially as they enter their thirties and forties, French women are encouraged to make cold-eyed, pragmatic assessments of their assets and deficits. No one believes that they can wear all possible pants.
“I am lucky because I had parents who are tall and slim, and my own size has not changed,” Lagarde tells an interviewer. (In her twenties Lagarde was a synchronized swimmer on France’s national team.)
Carine Roitfeld, the former editor of French Vogue who’s now in her sixties, does a similar self-critique. “I don’t have a generous cleavage, but I do have nice legs and ankles, so I wear skirts,” she explains. “I don’t have a beautiful mouth, so I apply makeup to my eyes and don’t wear lipstick.”
It’s easier to be a focused shopper once, like Roitfeld, you’ve ruled out whole categories of clothes. “I love large coats, but they’re not for me—I would just look lost in them,” she says. “In the end, my style comes down to a skirt closely fitting my slim waist, seamed stockings, high heels and a sweater.”
Finding your style isn’t just about making a spreadsheet of your strengths and weaknesses. Agathe Buchotte, owner of a Parisian boutique called AB33, tells me that it’s also about “mastering your own image.” This means having a sense not only of your own shape but also of your own qualities, and of what other people see when they look at you. Whatever you look like, you know it and you own it.
This explains why some women could conjure so much allure with so little. They understand themselves and they make confident, specific choices. This becomes more critical in your forties. If you’re unsure where your body starts and stops, you don’t know what others see in you and you’re trying out all possible versions of yourself, it shows. A fortysomething who doesn’t know her own shape will have trouble getting dressed in the morning.
Buchotte doesn’t think it’s easy to hit the mark. I’ve often walked past her store’s front window and admired the outfits that embody the shop’s haphazardly chic style. Buchotte says she often spends hours deciding what to put on the mannequins—which is all the more reason to lean on established patterns created by experts. She aims for ensembles that seem to have fallen together naturally. There’s an overall harmony, but you can’t point to the planning.
And the French don’t just think aesthetics are important for their own sake. They assume that there’s a symbiotic relationship between what you wear and your well-being. When you know yourself and you’re comfortable in your own skin, it’s easier to choose the right clothes. But once you’re dressed in a style that suits you, you feel better.
This explains why, in the forties, classics like a “little black dress” suddenly seem too basic. They lack personality and definition, and make us seem like we lack these qualities, too. Now that our skin is blotchier, we can also get lost in wispy, flowery dresses and be dwarfed by prints.
Solutions vary, but one reliable choice is modern, structured clothes with clean lines and unexpected details. They should neither be too generic nor too off-the-wall. A few well-chosen details make the difference: the collar of a patterned shirt peeking out of a well-made sweater; a slouchy satin blazer that you can wear with everything. (Yes, I’ve bought into the cult of blazers.) If the forties have a signature color, it’s navy blue.
The guidelines are similar for men. “I used to want clothes that say something about me. Now I just want to buy really solid stuff that fits great,” the Philadelphian tells me. He describes with awe a “crazy overpriced sweater-blazer” that he wouldn’t have noticed five years ago, because it’s a solid color and low-key. But it fits him perfectly. “There’s nothing amazing about it, but now it’s one of my favorite things to wear,” he says.
I notice that French shoppers and salespeople focus on la silhouette—the outlines of the whole ensemble. There are formulas for that, too. If you’re wearing a bulky sweater, match it with slim pants. Baggy pants probably need a slimmer top. An A-line skirt looks better with a small heel. Once you’ve nailed the overall shape, each individual element is less important. You can buy cheaper versions of most tops and pants, as long as the silhouette is just right.
All this elegance can be stifling, of course. In Paris, there’s never a time when you’re allowed to just wear sweatpants to the supermarket. Parisians look so good, in part, because it would be humiliating not to. Clothes aren’t just self-expression her
e, they’re also a kind of armor, creating an impenetrably chic facade so that you can’t be mocked. Even inside your own house, around your immediate family, social codes require that you look decent.
But there’s an existential payoff for following the French rules: when you know your body well, you come closer to knowing yourself. “Who I am is certainly part of how I look, and vice versa,” wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, an American (though she studied French literature and married a Frenchman).
“I want to know where I begin and end, what size I am, and what suits me,” wrote Le Guin, who died at eighty-eight. “I am not ‘in’ this body, I am this body. Waist or no waist.”
The experts say that once you’ve cracked your personal fashion code, you shouldn’t stray too far from it. Your style will evolve over the years. (The mistake that ages you is not changing your style, Inès de la Fressange says.) However, says Buchotte, “it must always resemble you. You have to stay close to yourself.”
* * *
—
Liberated from my need to create a fashion persona from scratch, I march into my favorite boutique and throw myself at the mercy of the saleswoman there. I’m so desperate, I don’t worry about being overly confessional. (Though I have strategically had my fashion crisis during one of France’s twice-yearly sales.)
“I need help,” I tell her. I explain that I’m surrounded by brigades of fashionable women, but that I don’t know what to wear.
She looks me in the eye to make sure I’m serious. Then she tells me exactly what’s wrong with my outfit: My sandals are “juvenile.” My sequined handbag is moche—a rather severe word for “ugly.”
Then she walks around the store pulling clothes off the racks: some cropped black skinny jeans, a printed blue tank top and a navy blazer with three-quarter sleeves. I’d never noticed any of these items before. They don’t exactly call out to me.
But when I emerge from the dressing room and slip on the wedge heels she hands me, I see a new person in the mirror: a member of the chic Parisian army.
There Are No Grown-ups Page 10
