Almost French (18 page)

It doesn’t matter how many times we do this walk: without fail I’m struck by the heart-stopping beauty of Paris. You’d
think the shock would wear off, that seeing it would no longer have the power to leave you wordless. But every sighting feels like the first. Frédéric is as captivated as I am.

I used to marvel at Sydney Harbour too, whenever I saw it. Sparkling blue carves the city with coves and inlets; it’s a wonder of nature. But somehow in Paris the feeling of being awe-struck is even stronger. Perhaps because it is still relatively new to me or perhaps because it somehow seems preposterous that such beauty could be created by people. The city is a testament to civilisation. Of course, I know from the last year that living in a gorgeous environment isn’t enough to make you happy. But breathtaking beauty of any kind is moving. It makes tourists of us all. It anchors your heart to a place. Just like Sydney Harbour, the wonderful sights of Paris inspire emotion, yes, even love.

Hand in hand in the courtyard, we tip our heads back to take it all in. Ridiculous though it sounds, I can’t quite believe I don’t have to pay to come here. That now I can simply walk out my front door and savour such places in private moments. It seems pure indulgence.

One of the consequences of this pervasive beauty in Paris is that it makes leaving your front door feel like you’re stepping onto a stage. It calls for dressing up. Just like actors in a play, the pressure is on those who live here to look the part. Perhaps my most revealing lesson in French dress standards occurs one Saturday morning soon after moving into Paris. Rushing to the bakery to get a baguette and croissants, I chuck on an old, shapeless jumper and my tracksuit pants, which I’d rediscovered at the bottom of a wardrobe when we were packing up our place at Levallois. Catching sight of me, Frédéric looks appalled.

‘Tracksuit pants?’ He’s never seen me wearing them before.

‘What’s wrong with that? I’m only going to the bakery.’

There is a second’s pause. Frédéric’s eyes implore me. Finally, he manages to speak.

‘But it’s not nice for the baker!’

I stare at him, incredulous, thinking, ‘You can’t be serious.’ But he is. In fact, this is probably one of the most serious moments of his whole life. His girlfriend is about to step out in public wearing ‘
pantalons de jogging
’—an item of clothing he wouldn’t even wear jogging. He can’t fathom how I could do such a thing. I can’t fathom why he is making
such a fuss. Head held high, I depart defiantly in my voluminous grey bottoms, more conscious than ever that from behind they make me look like a baby elephant.

For a long time, dress remains an issue between us. Underpinning Frédéric’s reaction to tracksuit pants is a concept which to me is totally foreign:
looking scruffy is selfish.
Not only do you look like a slob but you let down the whole city. In Paris, failure to dress up leads to instant ostracism. Haughty shopkeepers don’t want you in their beautiful shops, let alone to risk getting close enough to serve you.

Coming to terms with this emphasis on appearances is tough. Not because I don’t enjoy buying and dressing in nice clothes. I really do. But trying to look perfect all the time has never been a priority. To me, it seems entirely normal to have good days and bad days. Besides, dressing down has an advantage: it makes you look extra good when you decide to dress up. It’s the Before and After effect, a strategy I like to think achieves optimal impact (hopefully on the dressing up occasions).

But try telling that to a Frenchman.

In France, vanity is not a vice. Rigorous self-maintenance is imbued from birth—it’s a mark of self-pride. Gallic women keep slim not through sweaty spin or pump classes but a strict regime which mixes steely discipline with self-pampering. They take little helpings of each course at dinners and watch how much they drink. To get their bodies back into shape (after giving birth, say) they lather themselves in anti-cellulite creams and book into ‘thalasso’ therapy centres where they spend a week bobbing about in warm tubs of sea water. They have regular pedicures and eyebrow pluckings and weekly ‘brushing’ sessions at the hairdressers. Men are expected to pay close attention to their appearances as well.
The loaded phrase ‘
se mettre en valeur’
is used all the time. It means ‘to make the most of yourself’. This is not something the French do when they feel like it: they do it every day. Sloppiness in appearance is considered a fatal disease. Once it takes hold, you’re on an irreversible downhill slide. You’ve committed the unforgivable.
You’ve let yourself go.

Faced with my laxity, Frédéric has resorted to pleading refrains. ‘Can’t you brush the hair at the back of your head?’ he says every morning, pointing to the triangle of tangles and tight curls which somehow my brush always misses. (This is a general habit—I only worry about the bits I can see.) Or, ‘Your feet are like leather!’ to which I invariably reply, ‘Good’, because doesn’t he know that leathery soles are very handy when you’re barefoot on burning bitumen and hot sandy beaches? A giant pumice stone arrives one day in the bathroom—apparently all by itself, because, despite all evidence to the contrary, Frédéric denies buying it. But revenge is sweet when my aunt Joan was in Paris and noticed his silky feet: ‘They’re disgusting Freddo, you should toughen them up!’.

I’d arrived in Paris with a pared-down wardrobe stuffed into my backpack: jeans, T-shirts, tracksuit pants, a couple of jumpers, summer sandals, black Doc Marten’s and one ‘good’ outfit—black trousers, two decent shirts and a black jacket. One week into that first summer holiday, Frédéric was offering—more like insisting—to buy me some new clothes. We traipsed from the Agnes b. boutique to Et Vous, to Tara Jarmon and then in desperation to the fail-proof department store selections at Printemps and Galeries Lafayette. And we couldn’t agree on anything.

‘What about this?’ he’d said holding up a petite dress which stopped mid-thigh. I pulled a face. ‘Or this?’ It was a skimpy skirt—very cute but not my taste.

‘This is nice,’ I enthused, showing him a long sarong style skirt with a casual, slightly hippy look that appealed to me. Frédéric frowned.

‘What about something more
structured
.’

Flick, flick, flick. Our fingers rifled through more racks of clothes searching for The Outfit that would please both of us.

‘I like these,’ I’d said at last, holding up a pair of tailored, bootleg trousers.

‘Black?’ He looked baffled. ‘But it’s summer—no-one wears black!’

The shopping expedition ended, unsuccessful.

To get an idea of what Paris style is all about, you only need to go to London. London fashion is everything that Paris isn’t. One November, as we’ve done many times, we went there for a weekend and as usual it took me a while to get over the shock. It was a Friday night and after disembarking the Eurostar at Waterloo station, we headed straight to Soho to meet some friends. I couldn’t believe what I saw. Noisy crowds spilling out of pubs with pints. Noisy, happy,
drunk
crowds partying in the street! The only drunks you see in Paris are
clochards
—people like Pierre in our
quartier
who live on the street. It wasn’t just the drinking that seemed surreal compared to Paris. ‘Look at what they’re wearing!’ I exclaimed to Frédéric. There were vintage skirts mixed with silver S & M-style belts and shrivelled T-shirts which looked as though they’d been dragged from the bottom of wash baskets. Tatty trousers with lacy designer tops and tattooed arms. Sleek black leather teamed with clumpy trainers in shocking pink or purple. Every eclectic combination, every clashing colour exuded attitude. The latest trashy trends were worn with confidence. Compared to the city I’d left a few hours ago, London seemed like another planet.

In Paris there is no such edginess. Paris fashion is not about blindly following trends irrespective of whether they suit your body shape. It’s no coincidence that movements like punk and grunge never really took off here. How unattractive. The French don’t dress to make political statements. They don’t like wild innovation or irony when it comes to their appearance. They don’t want to stand out for looking funny or different or eccentric.

Take a look at your average
Parisienne
. No matter how long the skirts are on the international fashion runways,
hers will always be short
. She will wear a beautifully tailored jacket, suggestive of the curves it covers. A snug Petit Bateau T-shirt shows why spending pay packets on padded, push-up bras is an investment. Her colours match, her choice of clothes is coherent. Petite, with lovely shapely legs, she wears very little makeup because she doesn’t need it. Just a smear of lip gloss, faint colour in her cheeks and naked dark eyes. Her look is brilliantly balanced—
soignée
but natural, sexy without being tarty.

Elderly
Parisiennes
are more excessive. The city is full of formidably glamorous grannies. They sweep into places such as the gilded Paris tea-room, Ladurée, on spiky heels, with trailing fur coats and fairy-floss hair that has been coloured a deep mahogany. Eyebrows are pencilled into dark crescents, mouths accentuated by lip liner. Twig legs poke from skirts. The occasional flamboyant accessory shows individual flair—a thin leopard print belt or a red felt hat tipped at just the right angle with a caramel plume tucked under the band. Fancy leather leads stretch like umbilical cords to dainty terriers who sit on seats. These women are awesome.

The essence of French style can be summed up in two words, which linked together are loaded with meaning:
bongoût.
Good taste. The concept has far more to do with the dazzling court of Versailles than this season’s trends. It emerged during the seventeenth century, when Louis XIV built a culture of beauty, etiquette and elegance which still dictates almost every detail of French life, from the exquisitely decorated Paris shop windows to
l’art de la table
. In France, the expressions ‘
bon goût’
and ‘
mauvais goût’
and ‘
erreur de goût’
are used a lot. Said about your apartment, your outfit, your anything, the former is the ultimate compliment. Being told something is ‘bad taste’ or an ‘error of taste’ is a savage insult.

It isn’t until I interview the fashion designer Inès de La Fressange that I truly understand Frédéric’s abhorrence of tracksuit pants. A magazine has asked me to write an article on French style and it seems logical to speak to her—a former muse of Karl Lagerfeld, she is
bon goût
in living breathing colour. As the end of my second year in France approaches, increasingly journalism leads me into interesting areas of French life and culture that would otherwise be inaccessible. Some interviews turn out to be epiphanies, offering insights and helping solve mysteries. This is one of them.

When I arrive at her studio, the place is teeming with polished PR people, models and dressmakers, but Inès is easy to spot. From her name-brand sunglasses pushed on top of her head, down to her leather moccasins, she oozes casual chic. Although in her early forties her creamy skin is incredibly youthful. Sliding cheekbones conjure up images of Coco; the dark pixie crop is reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn. She epitomises the look French women aspire to: a mix of aristocratic beauty spiced with a dash of modern mum. Magazines run photo spreads of Inès in her covetable classics—white shirts with trailing cuffs teamed with tailored jackets; slim
trousers suits worn with snug turtlenecks. Cradling a cigarette and a tar-black espresso, today she is wearing camel-coloured suede pants. Her long legs coil neatly under her chair. Five minutes later, in one illuminating breath, she has inadvertently highlighted the three guiding principles of the Gallic dress code.

‘I think it’s really bad taste to be too obsessed with looking wealthy,’ she tells me. ‘And totally good taste is too conventional. It puts your husband to sleep—you know, you’re like a nun. You need accessories, different things. I try to make women elegant, but not boring.’

Discrétion. Séduction. Elégance.

Later, I come to the question which most baffles me.

‘Do you find that it’s, you know, an
effort
trying to look good all the time?’

Inès inhales on her cigarette (the secret to her thinness?) before replying. She speaks English perfectly, but with a French accent that’s so cute you can’t help wondering whether it’s put on. Charmingly, she tells me that of course she has good days and bad days just like everybody else. Then she says:

‘To stay the whole day neat and impeccable is much more comfortable than looking like you’re in your pyjamas.’ Then she says, ‘You see, these women with tight leggings and huge sweaters, they imagine that because they are a little round it’s better if they wear something big. But they just look worse. It is much more comfortable to wear a jacket that is well cut in a nice fabric than it is to look awful.’

She pronounces this last word ‘offal’. And suddenly it’s quite clear to me that I’ve spent a good part of my life looking offal. Fifteen minutes with Inès and I’ve mentally chucked out all my baggy jumpers for those nights in front of the telly.
When she coolly announces you don’t need a lot of clothes, you need the
right
clothes it’s obvious I have to start my wardrobe from scratch. Buy less, pay more, she advises, and so I vow to spend hugely, extravagantly. Never wear shorts in Paris, they’re only for tourists, she declares. I cringe, recalling how I’d arrived at the airport for that first summer holiday wearing shorts. What was I thinking? ‘When it’s very ’ot, it’s better to wear long pants in linen or cotton. You would feel more ’appy, and we would be more ’appy too.’