All the leaves are brown
and the sky is gray
I went for a walk
on a winter’s day
Winter is still a few days off. I took this picture walking along the Seine yesterday.
I’m not really dreaming of California. Would you be? But now I’ve got that song in my head.
A la mode: Doesn’t mean melting ice cream on hot pie in France, it means “in fashion.” But, if you ask me, on the streets of Paris it often evokes the former, rather than the latter definition…
Girls, you can’t let yourselves be intimidated by the legendary style of French women. It’s not a legend; it’s a myth. There’s a difference. Yes, there are impeccable icons like Catherine Deneuve, but most French women don’t shop where she does. I have yet to come across the local Frederick’s of Hollywood where the rest of them do seem to get their clothes, but I know it’s around here somewhere.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as the Parisian fashion statement, and it’s “It was made, therefore it should be worn.”
I had a discussion about the way French women dress with my friend Elaine this summer. She said that she’d figured out their secret. According to her, what they do every day is open their closets and put on whatever falls on the floor. I think she hit the nail on the head.
See? And this is verrrry mild. Dig the dangly pom poms on the slouchy fur boots. I can’t even begin to comment on this get-up. Once again, we see evidence of the “six degrees of separation” mentality (see L’Organisation), this time informing the way French women dress.
The leave-it-to-gravity approach to dressing seems to follow the bell curve, like all things in nature. It works (brilliantly, even) about 10% of the time. I have literally stopped in my tracks to admire and study some of these outfits. Er, concoctions. At the other end of the bell curve are what can only be described as train wrecks. In the middle: “Why. Just why.”
Seriously, though, they seem to know no restraint. They don’t pick one smashing item and build the rest of the outfit around it, the other articles complementing and emphasizing the fabulousness of the stand-out piece. They don’t do mix and match. They do mix and mix. And mix. You can see them wearing boots with zippers, metal accents, and tassles with their fuzzy, ruffly sweaters, harem pants, suede belts, oversized purses… Their clothes are engaged in a power struggle that can be truly exhausting to witness.
But they wear virtually no make-up and keep their nails short and natural. To do otherwise would be tacky.
So, ladies, if you’re coming here and you want to blend, leave the lipstick behind and cut your nails. Don’t bring muted colors or high necklines. Except for your winter coat (90% of the women in Paris have black wool coats). No tennis shoes. In fact, your shoes should not look comfortable, even if they are. Don’t bring anything loose. Evidently French men have a right to examine that mole on your seventh rib through your shirt. If they ever make it past your breasts, that is. And French women are happy to oblige them. (I’ll address this and related topics separately soon…) Which brings me to bras: don’t bring any of those heavily padded Victoria’s Secret-type bras. The ones that make you look like you have fake boobs even if you don’t. Men and women here like breasts to look real, evidently (a refreshing change, actually). Whatever you do, don’t pack clothes that “match.” And don’t sweat the scarf thing. Just pack the first one that falls on the floor and you’ll be fine.
I hope it’s clear that all of this is commentary, not criticism. I’m just somewhat bemused and flabbergasted, coming from a more conservative and repressed culture. I sincerely admire French women for what is clearly an ardent desire for uniqueness (except when it comes to winter coats…), as well as their fearlessness when expressing their personal style. They are decidedly sexy, comfortable in their skin, and they obviously embrace their femininity. I’m all for that. I also have to admit that there are people from all over the world living in Paris, so not all of these women are French.
I’ll gather more evidence when I can discreetly snap pics and share them with you. Just for grins.
You live too close to the Boulevard Saint MIchel. No parisian woman would ever be caught dead shopping there. Only tourists and suburbanites are clueless enough to actually think it is a trendy place to shop (and those are the people you describe in your post). Try riding the #1 subway line. Any woman who isn’t dressed in black or grays is a tourist going to the Louvre.
As a male, though, this is the thing about parisian women: No matter how they are dressed, whether they are pretty or not, thin or not, tall or not, they are very feminine. They exude femininity. I can’t really explain it any better than that. Or to try and emphasize my point, I can tell you that living in NYC for over 8 years, it was the exact opposite. No matter how they were dressed, whether they were pretty or not, thin or not, tall or not, NY women projected zero femininity. They were utterly and completely asexual. I felt like I was living in Saudi Arabia or something. They might as well have been wearing a burka.
Go figure.
First of all, I’m talking about French women in Paris. Whether they live here or not, or were born here, I can’t tell. I’ve spent plenty of time on the various metro lines and in the streets, stores, and museums of Paris. I know a French native speaker when I hear one. Second of all, you’re a French man. I doubt you even make it to the mole, much less notice whether or not the belt is fighting with the boots… Besides, men don’t look at women the way women look at women. We assess the clothes they wear in an entirely different way. After a friend’s wedding in Paris in 1998 (American friend, French groom, a cadre d’entreprise), I was seated next to one of the groom’s friends, a French woman in her 40s, at the reception. Parisian, I assume. It was a big reception, couple hundred people, about half American and half French. To start a conversation, I asked her what she thought of the way the American women dressed compared to the way French women dress (since everybody was dressed up). She said she thought the way American women dressed was boring because they always wore black and gray and dressed conservatively. True, the “classier” women are not as bad as those who are clearly not middle or upper class, but as far as I can tell even they have a unique concept of what goes with what. All I can do is continue my research and I’ll recant if necessary, but at this point, I stand by my claims. Generalizations made in the interest of humor, of course.
You had it right in your original post about the natural look. Basically, parisians tend to look and dress “natural”–with just enough small details to indicate what “cultural tribe” they belong to–and don’t wear tons of ostentatious and clashing accessories (unless they are over 60 and living in the ritziest neighborhoods of the city).
With 60 million tourists visiting Paris each year, plus the thousands of out-of-towners who work in Paris, the odds of seeing an actual parisian woman in the wild during daylight hours is actually quite remote. But for a native Parisian, they immediately stand out in a crowd, irrespective of their moles or other attributes, fleshy or not, precisely because they don’t look anything like what you describe, or like the asian teenager you pictured :-)
I repeat, I was talking about French women, not necessarily locally grown Parisians, and you can’t tell me that in a city of 2 million they all have good taste. How do you know the Asian girl wasn’t born in Paris? (And she was in her mid-20s) If a young woman of Asian descent is born and raised in LA, especially if her parents aren’t first-generation immigrants, she dresses and acts like an LA girl. Why would it be any different here? Tourists, expecially female ones, don’t go around alone. They don’t speak French on cell phones. They don’t have re-re-used Gibert bags in their laps on the metro. I can recognize tourists by the things they look at when they’re out and about, by how long they stare at menus, and so on, even if they don’t stand out like Americans. That’s a no-brainer. I know the difference.
Ooooh, I can just hearyou two…makes me want to come and just check out the street life. But alas, I have nothing to wear.
[...] what I said about à la mode meaning “in fashion” in French? I promised I’d share. OK, I [...]