Last Sunday I started a new book, Paris Hangover by Kirsten Lobe (highly recommend!), that I have only put down for Desperate Housewives and my husband ... ah, and ... well, this blog. (Guilty as charged.) The main character, Klein, is sophisticated, classy, and despite her also being from my native Wisconsin, she embodies everything that I’ve ever thought when I see an amazingly chic Parisian walking down the street: “yep, I’ll never be that.” S’OK though, I’m going to the country house this weekend for my own personal top-chef contest with a bunch of fabulous people, so I’m not about to start complaining.
Point is, while reading the marvelously amusing Paris Hangover, I didn’t dip a toe in the déjà vu lagoon, I stripped butt-nako, kart-wheeled to the edge, dove in head-first and paddled to the bottom of the memory pool until my fingers grazed its scratchy concrete. I vividly remembered the thought that hit me like a pie to the visage when I first arrived in the city: “OMG people ... are looking at me, and not in a good way.” (It wasn’t even the city, really ... it was the suburbs and I still felt like a style-challenged-hobo-empress.)
I’ve never felt so self-aware as these last (almost five) years in the city of fashionistas. I was naive enough to be caught off-guard by the stiletto-clad-divas horrified eyes, locked like tractor-beams on my jogging shoes. I learned, and from then on, their only exit was to carry me to the gym. When I go back to the states, it’s like exhaling when I pull out my tank-tops, and sneakers again, allowing myself a knowing smile ... no one will ever notice me, and I love it.
But apparel was just the tip of the awareness iceberg. Before the big move, I never had to think about my image. I never wondered how people saw me or what my place in society was. (Sometimes ignorance is bliss—I fully realized this when Ashleigh took me to Gucci.)
I am the better for it though, and dare say I’ve gained in femininity, and at times, feministity. I’m pretty grateful to this urban paradise; she’s a brutal but efficient teacher. Tough love, ya know, how I like’em.
Enter this week’s Friday Feature question:
What are you? Hipster? Girly-Girl? Feminist? Fashion Victim? Impossible to label? Has living in Paris changed the way you view yourself as a woman? Has it made you more of a feminist? More fashion conscious? Do you think that this change would’ve happened naturally, or did living in Paris force it out of you?
French women = Je Ne Sais Quoi, Me = Je Ne Sais Rien—Rebecca Leffler
I try every day of my life to be French hipster. (Literally, as I down my peanut butter toasts in the morning I say “How can I be more bobo chic today?”) But it’s to no avail. I can put on a baggy t-shirt, tight jeans and a large scarf and, instead of looking like Cléménce Poésy, I look like a street beggar who was stretched out, run over by an American Apparel truck and attacked by a large scarf. French women definitely have that cliché “je ne sais quoi.” I instead have a “je ne sais rien.”
That said, after five years in France, I can now de-ice a refrigerator, climb eighty-one steps in under thirty-eight seconds, jump through closing metro doors without injuring myself, fill out a French tax form and describe in detail in a foreign language how many ways a toilet can malfunction—if that doesn’t say “independent woman” then I don’t know what does.
“I wore a shirt from a children’s clothing shop, complete with embroidered ponies and horseshoes ...”—I Heart Paris
My name is Kim and I am a fashion victim. I confess that I am capable of spending more than a month’s rent on an item of clothing and that only yesterday, I wore a shirt from a children’s clothing shop, complete with embroidered ponies and horseshoes, simply because it was designed by Stella McCartney. But, back home in London, the land of the mini-skirted beheeled cleavage-bearers, I was even worse because you can get away with what you like there. In Paris you get death stares if you look like you’ve tried to hard and so gradually I have discarded anything too wacky and/or revealing and have introduced lots of subtle pieces instead: the effortless chic of Parisian designers like Vanessa Bruno and Isabel Marant has become my inspiration. But every now and then, the latent fashion victim in me rears its ugly head and I end up wearing something like a kid’s top decorated with fricking horses.
