LA BELLE

Hello patient readers.

Apologies for my absence. Spring has come. And my first posting is a rather lighthearted look at the French and style. Glad to be back.

Having just got back from the Paris fashion shows, I’m once again contemplating the many marvels embedded within the tenets of French style. There is seeing Jack Lang, erstwhile Minister of Culture, arriving in all solemnity to watch an Yves Saint Laurent show. In France haute fashion is emphatically haute culture, not the misunderstood burlesque joke it is here. There is the marvel of sitting next to the editor of Le Point (a political magazine) at a dinner and being able to engage in an informed discussion about the new designer at Rochas. There is the marvel of knowing that one’s first lady, Mme Chirac, will never embarrass her nation by turning up in a shalwar kameez or experimenting with white leggings that make her bum look the size of Algiers.
And there is the marvel of limping into a French pharmacy, as I once did, having spent a week on a boat turning the skin on my feet into something resembling a 20-year-old camembert casing and thinking “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they stocked something as specific as Cream for Extra Dry Feet?”, only to discover that, naturellement, they had 20, alongside the obligatory 400 treatments for cellulite. Of course they do. This is the nation that invented style — or the nation with the good sense to bother claiming to have invented style. The English language hasn’t even got a word for chic. So the greatest marvel of all is why the nation as a whole exhibits so little of either.
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The French love irony, but might not be amused by this instance because style, along with smoking and feeling pity for Americans, is at the core of their identity. France gave us Chanel (who looked to the British aristocracy and its sporting clothes for much of her inspiration), the New Look (which Dior borrowed from Winterhalter) and those adorable truncated fringes that look good only on a certain kind of French woman (actually, one French woman: Audrey Tautou). It is a nation where self-respect and feeling bien dans sa peau are intertwined: at once a duty, a birthright and a way of living that is tied up with a mature awareness of the effects on others of one’s appearance (France may be unique in its medical assessments of female toddlers, which take their grace into account). Being bien dans sa peau, a gift handed down from mother to daughter, is not the haphazard thing that, say, British quirkiness is. More a science than an art, it is bound up with knowing where to buy those industrial-strength knickers that hold your stomach in yet don’t show through your slim knee-length skirt, how many suppositories one needs to keep one’s weight below 9st (57kg) and the best way to care for cashmere. It is, frankly, something from which the Brits could benefit. But it does not, on its own, amount to stylishness.
I’m not being hasty. Like all English women (probably women everywhere) I was raised with the certainty that French women were the most stylish, and that if I could only get them to stop scowling at me, they would share the secret. At 16 I fell madly in love with Paris, and on the basis that even the concièrges would look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade went to live there three years later. Big mistake. The concièrges did not look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. In fact, no one looked like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. This is probably because Hepburn was a woman of Dutch/Anglo-Irish heritage working in America. The real French looked like Japanese tourists with bad Burberry habits. I realise now, of course, that upping sticks to Paris at 19 was as misconceived a plan as entering Celebrity Big Brother to disseminate one’s political beliefs about Saddam Hussein. No one should take up residence in Paris before the age of 40 — it is such an innately bourgeois city that you cannot truly appreciate it (nor it you) until you are sufficiently established and well heeled to acquire your own Burberry habit, plus an Hermès Birkin, after which le snottiness extraordinaire, which all the best Parisian sales assistants go to sales-assistant school to master, becomes easier to quell.
Burberry has been reborn as a very chic commodity. French dress sense has not. Like so much in France, it dwells in a glorious past. It still consists, as it did 25 years ago, of sensible skirts, sensible, air-hostess shoes, bulky jackets, chunky unattractive gold jewellery, numerous “tasteful” standbys such as a tan leather belt, a silk scarf knotted at the throat, a black trouser suit that doesn’t waste its time being shapely and (ye gods) the padded velvet hair band, plus any number of “serviceable” objects such as the quilted shapeless jacket and those nasty nylon handbags that the rest of us moved on from long ago. For the rich there are also bulky fur coats and helmet hair. When even Claire Chazal, a newsreader and French insititution, features so highly on the fashion radar, you know this is a nation with risk issues.
Am I missing something? Not for want of trying. I’ve scoured streets for girls who look like Amélie, with her chic bob and slightly off-centre, faux-prim style and general je ne sais quoi, which was how I thought French women should look. As it turns out, not even Amélie (or rather Audrey Tautou, who played her) looks like Amélie. Too busy growing out her bob and wearing Zac Posen.
I’ve listened captivated to Kristin Scott Thomas and tried to see only the good in le style français. A staunch (and spectacularly beautiful, stylish) Francophile, Scott Thomas has nothing but praise for her adopted homeland’s dress sense. According to her, French women have infinitely more flair than the Brits, infinitely better tailoring and infinitely more wisdom in that they would never (and I quote) “wear pearly-pink lipstick. It simply doesn’t exist in France. Or maybe it does, but women don’t wear great swaths of it, like they do in England. That’s the very height of vulgarity.” Hmm, until that last point, I was with Kristin, but as I write, Bourjois, that emblem of savvy, French chic, is advertising the ghastliest of frosted pink lipsticks on prime time UK TV. Don’t tell me it’s not marketing this merde in France, too. And by the way, a cool, youthful brand called Bourjois? I rest my case.
Evidence suggests that it is this bourgeois DNA, combined with a willingness to elevate style to the very highest cultural plateaux, that suffocates style on a national level. French women may have more underwear shops per capita than anyone else on the planet. They may triumph when it comes to sourcing the “perfect” trench, the “perfect” court shoes (yes, they’re still wearing them) and the ultimate Birkin rip-off (French fashion is all about perfection and getting something on the cheap). And all right, they don’t get that fat. They’re among the few people on Earth who can wear Balenciaga drainpipes. But they don’t, bar a dozen or so fashion editrixes who look as if they’ve just stepped off a Helmut Newton set. Lou Doillon, the daughter of Jane Birkin and Jacques Doillon, is the other Parisian everyone invokes when they want to cite someone who embodies hip French style.
It is surely one of life’s great ironies, and utter wastes, that the cradle of fashion, and magnet for the world’s top designers, is a city in which you can’t find anyone prepared to wear the stuff. It’s as if their ability to intellectualise fashion and discuss it in the abstract — taxi drivers in Paris can give you an up-to-date resumé of Karl Lagerfeld or hold forth on the relative merits of Gaultier or McQueen — excuses them from actually having to follow anything as foolish and Anglo-Saxon as a trend. Fashion is distinct from style, of course, but without change there is stagnancy, and stagnancy is not stylish. It is stultifying and dull and leads to a nation that dresses less like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour and more like timid, provincial town hall employees. I’ve seen more verve in Ann Widdecombe’s little finger — especially when she’s just had a manicure.
One fashion consultant who represents up-and-coming designers and lives in Paris during the week believes that this risk aversion is part of a general crisis of confidence. “Paris is the hardest city in the world for a new designer to crack. The French like very old, established and, in the main, French labels. It’s seen as cultural arrogance, but the reverse is probably true.” It’s also true that apart from Zara (a Spanish import), the French don ’t have a high street anything like as vibrant as Britain’s. Instead it has chains such as Gerard Darel and Et Vous: goldmines for yet more perfect trenches and decently cut (inexpensive) trousers and tops, but deserts when it comes to the directional, up-to-the-minute catwalk interpretations you see in Topshop, River Island, New Look, Dorothy Perkins and — now — Wallis and Principles. Obviously this spares them the more arresting sights one sees blotting the British landscape, a list of which would be both invidious and time-consuming, but it also equals staid predictability. And don’t think that predictability precludes tackiness: the French are as conflicted about, and influenced by, their trashy celebrities as we are. Since this is the land where trends never die, the influence is, arguably, that bit more pernicious.
Of course, there are exceptions: Carole Bouquet, Inès de La Fressange, Camille Miceli (the scarily stylish PR at Louis Vuitton) or Ségolène Royal, the dark, gamin bright light of the Socialist Party; when they get it right, it’s perfect. But en masse the French are not as individual as the British, as groomed as the Americans or as affluently dressed as the Russians. Yet even before Marie Antoinette (and look where being stylish got her), France’s reputation of superiority in matters of style was entrenched. By the 19th century, when Paris was the world’s literary and artistic centre, wealthy foreign women flocked there for their clothes (though Frederick Worth, the leading “Parisian” couturier of the time, hailed from Lincolnshire). After the Second World War, when shabby Britain was gripped by austerity, we gazed even more hungrily across the Channel for signs of civilised luxury, spurred by Robert Doisneau’s romantic images of Paris and its chic inhabitants.
Perhaps the notion of French style was always a bit mythic, something we needed to believe in when life here was so humdrum. In 1949 Nancy Mitford, another avid Francophile living in Paris, wrote: “English visitors here often complain to me that there are no well-dressed women in Paris.” Her explanation was that les elegants, “of whom there are dozens . . .never actually set foot in the street”. How ineffably French. Yet four years later she noted that “the English have a touching, if often misplaced, faith in the excellence of French taste”.
But Hollywood has done more than anything to mythologise the idea of French style. An American in Paris, with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron; Paris when it Sizzles, with Audrey Hepburn; Gigi; Cole Porter’s I love Paris; Henry James, Edith Wharton . . . there is a venerable tradition of Americans sexing up all things French. The Americans in Paris exhibition now on at the National Gallery and featuring rose-tinted views of the city, and of Americans in the city by, among others, Whistler and John Singer Sergeant, suggests that they’ve been doing it since at least 1860. That’s an irony the French should enjoy.
‘In France, women are obsessed with good taste’
Apart from a handful of super-stylish actresses, celebrities or chic Parisians, it is fair to say that the average Frenchwoman dresses in a classic, conservative and safe way. This approach of choosing rather dull colours and dowdy shapes can be attributed largely to the emerging bourgeois classes of the 19th century — the days of Maupassant and Zola, which are actually not so long ago. It’s this enduring legacy of 19th-century social diktats, of dressing with substance, integrity and not trying to appear too showy (very nouveau riche) that makes Ségolène Royal (a politician), Bernadette Chirac and Claire Chazal such aspirational icons. (Indeed, Chazal is promoted as being perfect daughter-in-law material). Frenchwomen are not educated to spend a lot of money on their appearance.
The average English woman is a little more adventurous. But then, she also has a very fashion-forward high street to play with. She references different eras and looks at things with more confidence. It doesn’t always boil down to how tasteful you look: in England, it’s about having that energy or flair. In France, women are obsessed with good taste and not stepping outside the boundaries of what is sartorially acceptable.
Parisians, though, are another story. They are a little more “undone”. Their hair isn’t always perfect, they aren’t 110 per cent groomed — but that is a lot sexier.