The world of style is a very strange place to be these days. Production costs are up, stores are buying less, and the public, blitzed by the glamour of supermodels and designer names, wants to buy into the “dream” for as little money as possible. Over the past couple of years there have been increasing numbers of bankruptcies, buy-outs, crippling economy measures and apathetic markets. Moreover, according to reports in Women’s Wear Daily, things are going to get a lot worse, with more retail closings, before they level out. Yet, curiously enough, fashion continues to attract young people with high hopes of making it big in an ever shrinking industry. According to the Syndicate Nationale des Stylistes, as many as 3,000 designers are trying to work in France alone, and major fashion schools here continue to draw a healthy number of students from all over the world. Continue reading “Fashion’s Young Upstarts Brave Storm”
Visting Barbizon
At first, Barbizon does not seem an obvious choice as an artistic center. After all, this picturesque village to the southeast of Paris is more or less made up of a single street. Yet, between 1830 and 1875, over 60 artists flocked to what was then a modest woodcutters’ village and the movement that grew up around them was later to be called the Barbizon school. Continue reading “Visting Barbizon”
For the love of pearls
Style, February 1996
When I was 12, my mother presented me with my first pearls: a small pendant in the form of a tiny cluster of creamy white “grapes” topped with two gold leaves. Mesmerized by the iridescent luster of my first piece of fine jewelry, I immediately developed a fondness for pearls that has never faded. For me, they are the symbol of grace, elegance and beauty in its simplest state. Warm to the touch, tender to the eye, they do not sparkle, they glow. Continue reading “For the love of pearls”
Bilan for the New Year
Commentary, February 1996
A year – the unit of time – in France is seamless. And, aptly, February is both a time to finish up farewells to the past calendar and begin to think about the new year’s “grand vacances,” only six months down the road, at the foothills of “la rentrée.” Christmas will be on us again in a wink. Oysters and foie gras and salmon fumé, blinis, Champagne. In February you eat the last of these things to close down the season, to squeeze out the last traces of “fête,” like skiing those last runs in the late late spring. “Adieu” collides into “bienvenue.” Continue reading “Bilan for the New Year”
Moved in With a Charming Frenchman
A couple of years ago I met and moved in with a charming Frenchman who was finishing up a stint with a US company, and we returned to France together when he was transferred back. Although his friends and family seem to have accepted me, and we talk a lot about a future together, I find him very different from the way he was back home. My biggest complaint is that he criticizes me constantly, even for the most insignificant things, and when I react to this, he accuses me of being oversensitive. How can I make him understand that his behavior is really eating away at the relationship?
Thalassotherapy – Relaxing in the Mud
The rail weekender feature has been resolutely urban so far, but everyone needs to rusticate now and then, and where better than by the sea? The French, firm believers in the restorative powers of a seaside stay, have elevated the principle to a quasi-science called thalassotherapy, from the Greek for “sea treatment.”
Metz for the Holidays
You needn’t leave the country to find the holiday bustle and cheery atmosphere of a traditional German Christmas market. Just go to the ex-German part of France. While the Alsatian markets are probably the best known, Strasbourg and Kaysersberg are a bit far for a rail weekend. But Metz, the capital of Lorraine, also has a Christmas market – and celebrates the official arrival of St. Nicolas in a big way. Continue reading “Metz for the Holidays”
Josephine Baker’s Hungry Heart
Think of Paris in the ’20s, and Josephine Baker clad in a belt of bananas and a few beads leaps to the mind’s eye: an exotic image of the legendary Josephine, who somehow managed to be not only a star of stage, screen and music hall, but also the recipient of the Croix de Guerre for her work in the French Resistance. What else do we know of her? Perhaps that she was as kind and talented as she was bad-tempered and ambitious; and that she was the adoptive mother of the “Rainbow Tribe,” a multiracial group of abandoned children that she amassed after the war.
Julia Child Returns to Paris
Julia Child, the American ambassador of French cooking, recently returned to Paris, where she received her formal culinary training at the Cordon Bleu in 1948. America has watched her on television for 32 years. Her signature closing, with her familiar voice bidding us “bon appétit” as she poured herself a glass of wine, sent a generation of us on our way with the confidence to prepare a perfect gourmet meal.
Wayne Shorter’s High Life
At recent Paris concerts Benny Golson, Geri Allen and Chico Freeman all identified the composer of numbers they’d just performed as “the great Wayne Shorter.” Given his historic role in contemporary music, the adjective is fully deserved. A longtime member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Miles Davis’ extraordinary second quintet, saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter also took part in the classic Blue Note recording sessions and co-founded the rock-fusion band Weather Report with Joe Zawinul. Shorter was in Paris last month to promote an exceptional two-concert gig, November 8 at New Morning and his first CD with Verve. I caught up with him in his suite at the Ritz, an appropriate setting since his new record’s entitled “High Life.” Continue reading “Wayne Shorter’s High Life”
Joan Baez, Paris Interview
What turns a pop music star into a legend? A decade or two of hit songs? A distinctive vocal style? An outrageous hairstyle? Whatever the criteria may be, few performers pass the threshold from star to legend on talent alone, and fewer still are women. Continue reading “Joan Baez, Paris Interview”