024 A Paris inspiration trip

Fashion that commits, highlights from Paris, swoon encounters and the book I loved so much I took it to the Chanel show.

Recovering from dying of swoon after meeting Pierpaolo at the Ritz.

There is no season like the haute couture season in Paris. Where else can you see a Chanel client wearing top-to-toe tweed alongside her dog also in top-to-toe tweed? Or my favourite this year, a very stressed man talking into a headpiece wearing a see-through PVC blouse in the sluggish heat of Paris. I mean the man had condensation. This kind of commitment is everything I want to see at a fashion week! Especially couture. I want to see the effort! I want to see the workings. There should be an element of suffering, or at the very least feeling. Maybe it’s a shared desire - according to the Business of Fashion, sales of leggings are down and are no longer the bottoms of choice. Even at the gym! Leggings are not pants after-all, it turns out. Comfort isn’t the only choice. Just ask my PVC guy in Paris (sincerely do hope he made it through the night without expiring though). Fashion does have its limits.

“Ohhh it’s an inspiration trip,” a very nice woman I’d just met said when I tried to explain, over-explain really, why I was roaming about Paris on my own. I could have kissed her, because that’s what it was.

Coffee at the Ritz!

Not only was it inspiring because I attended a handful of haute couture shows, including the Chanel show (the last before Matthieu’s arrival!) and the Giorgio Armani show which was an ultimate lesson in elegance and three things I find quite fundamental to the kind of woman I want to be: one who wears hats, who knows how to make an exit and who owns a cigarette holder. But also in having a few precious days to watch people and roam the markets looking at vintage jewellery and reading books.

My bag is enormous because I fit a veritable tome in here. I didn’t want to waste precious reading time in Paris!

A few highlights:

Visiting the Demna retrospective at Kering HQ. A reminder of all the ways he influenced fashion and culture during his ten years at Balenciaga, and he baited and enraged us and made us think differently about the purpose of fashion. As he said in one of the (many) excellent coverlines on the magazine for the exhibition catalogue: Fashion has to be radical (otherwise it’s pointless).

Maybe especially so now.

I can’t stop thinking about the vintage tank bracelet I nearly bought from the frankly fabulous woman at the Saint Ouen flea market in Paris. I think I might regret not buying it. And also not buying a chandelier. Or this snake bracelet (in my dreams!).

The Piaget apartment for its high jewellery presentation. Apparently it was an apartment featured on The Parisian Agency (the only real estate porn show I’ve ever become obsessed with, and I have to admit I feel like speaking about real estate in French is way less awful than it is in English/Sydney?).

Briefly meeting Pierpaolo Piccioli in a corridor at The Ritz. I was with my editor who had met him several times and spoke to him in Italian while I said hello and then basically died of swooning. Then when we were both already dying over our encounter (and a coffee that I think cost approx. 30 euro) we realised Nicolas Ghesquière was sitting directly opposite us. It was fashion Christmas!

Seeing the new Celine collection from Michael Rider up close at the re-see - so many ideas on how to get dressed. I’m immediately buying a thin white turtleneck to layer under everything and all I want is a silk scarf to wear a million ways. The Celine rep taking us through said Michael Rider really thinks about how people get dressed in the real world, how they mix and match and re-wear things. He doesn’t believe in a full look policy!

I’ve never needed to know ways with a scarf more!

A croissant every morning. My ultimate breakfast, and I don’t think past me would have ‘allowed’ myself to eat exactly what I felt like every day. I just ate it, and moved on. Is this freedom? Is it happiness?

An incredible facial at the Ambassade Biologique Recherche near the Champs-Élysées. I love this brand, even though my family all screw up their noses when I use the products because they are inordinately stinky but very efficacious! I honestly felt like a new woman after the facial. Maybe it was also because I was in Paris and to quote one of my favourite books about a girl who goes to Paris (all my favourite books are about girls who go to Paris), “The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we're all going to live forever!”

Of course none of this is true and now that I am no longer young, I know just how deeply untrue this is. But in Paris you can sometimes feel like this anyway. And this is the ultimate best thing about an inspiration trip to Paris.

BOOKS

Other than eating and moving my self-imposed agreed upon acceptable time to have a glass of rosé, I read in Paris too.

I absolutely inhaled Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan and oof, what an ultimate state of the union/world/analysis of the precarious ways we build our belief systems about society, ourselves. I loved it so much I crammed it into my handbag at Chanel.

I also gobbled up Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment, which makes us question ideas of fate and if we believe it, what is preordained and what is peace. Also to make the most of our precious lives!

I didn’t love Among Friends as much as I thought it would - I normally adore a clear eyed, insidery take on class and high society but I found the writing a little overegged maybe? I did still read it in a day.

I’m also still ploughing through Princess of 72nd Street, which is appealingly weird if a little unsettling!

And I’ve just started Same As It Ever Was and know I’m going to love it.

Love,

Annie xx