Paris Fashion Week is less than a month away! Let’s say you’re in Paris around September 22nd or so – how will you know it’s Fashion Week? And what do you do next?
First, you must go to the Right Bank (Rive Droit). Hang out around the Place Vendome. While you’re there, pay your respects to the statue and pedestal commemorating Napoleon’s many victories. With the statue in front of you, look to your right. The diamonds, rubies, emeralds, gold, platinum, and fantasy on display will dazzle from across the Place. Van Cleef & Arpels, Bulgari, and many others display their most opulent and amazing creations, from the classic emerald-and-diamond Elizabeth-Taylor-style necklaces to bracelets that look like frozen, ice-covered vines and twigs from Storybrook. Yes, there are cameras and security guards.
Alternative medicine recommends “crystal healing”; just remember, diamonds are crystallized carbon, so window shopping (or buying if one is so fortunate) is actually for medicinal purposes. At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Ok – deep breath, focus, and look around.
You know it’s Fashion Week when:
1. Everyone is looking down to see who’s wearing whose shoes. And the shoes are amazing.
2. You suddenly have a referent for “street style”.
3. You see a 6’ model in a 3 foot (if that) dress, a mane of perfectly waved, high-lighted and low-lighted hair, and thigh-high, black, glove leather, stiletto-heeled boots and no one else seems to find her unusual. And then you look around and, behold, you are the only one in normcore.
4. You are blinded by flashes and surrounded by journalists, photographers, vloggers, bloggers, and their partners in the enterprise and glory that is fashion.
5. You see the most gorgeous girl (see #3 above) on the arm of a 5’3” man with gray hair, a gold lame levi’s jacket, camo pants, and untied combat boots and he’s the one everyone is staring at.
6. You walk into Colette, where the t-shirt commemorating the robbery costs more than your daily or perhaps weekly income, and see what surely must be a curated display of leopard-pattern shoes and boots, and booties, in all styles and heel heights, from stilettos and kitten heels to wedges and flats, trimmed in purple, soled in red, in leather, silk, calf-hair, and who knows what, in a carefully-constructed sculpture in the center of the store. Visitors (nothing so mundane as “shoppers”) murmuring and strolling around, as if previewing a Sotheby’s fine art auction.
7. You stroll down the Champs-Elysees and encounter a spotlit showcase displaying one pair of black leatherstiletto booties, completely covered in spikes, and looking like an art display from the Louvre. And his user-unfriendly novelty item for the wealthy is priced at nearly 7,000 euros.
And everywhere, in every window, inspiring displays of fantasy, creativity, and luxury.
Paris Fashion Week. Soon, my pretties, soon.