There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life. And so when hats in Paris are lovely and french and everywhere then France is alright.
Gertrude Stein
I DON’T QUITE KNOW how to say this. I’d like a French manicure please? But do the French call it a French manicure? What if it’s like condoms: the English called them French letters and the French call them capotes anglaises?
I’m in the Guerlain manicure room on the ChampsÉlysées. One minute I was on the hot wide street, the next I was climbing the creaky wooden staircase to a different century, up, up and my nose twitching as I inhaled the distinctive dusty smell. Now I’m perched awkwardly on a high faded settee among stuffed chairs. Dowdy women in gilt frames are looking down their considerable noses at me. A collection of vintage Guerlain perfume bottles in a glass case adds to the historic micro-climate. Even the sunlight seems old and musty as it filters through the high windows.
Into the room walks a brusque little woman who wheels over a trolley and sets herself up in front of me. She takes her time. Only when she is quite ready does she look up and say calmly, ‘Bonjour, Madame.’
Clearly, this is no fancy Sydney salon where they wrap you in blankets and burn calming oils and play new-age music, as if you are a particularly dangerous inmate in a progressive asylum. Here in Paris, beauty isn’t therapy, it’s business.
French polish, it’s called. It takes a long time. First there’s the undercoat to cover the whole nail in pink-tinged clear varnish. Then another coat, the same. Wait for it to dry. Then there’s a fiddly bit where a hard white varnish is applied just to the crescent tip of the nail. My manicurist is clearly an expert though; she attacks the task with complete confidence. Wait while this dries. Then clear varnish the whole nail several times until it sets completely hard. So the crescent tips of your nails are whiter than white, and your cuticles are pink and healthy. The effect is one of heightened reality: everything looks natural, only much better, natural in a way that poor old nature could never hope to achieve.
Somehow this seems to me very French, and sets me wondering whether I am wise to be sporting this very hard red lipstick, a color which bears absolutely no relationship to nature.
My manicurist is coming to the end of her task. My hands are soft and smooth; my nails are shining. ‘Now you are soignée,’ she says, breathing a sigh of aesthetic relief. Les petits soins the French call it, the little attentions. In Paris, the little things matter a lot.
Possibly my favorite Hollywood film about Paris is the fifties musical Funny Face, which it’s only fair to warn you, fails as a film largely because of the miscasting of the million-year-old Fred Astaire as the love interest to the radiant Audrey Hepburn.
Discovered by famous fashion photographer Fred as she works, mouse-like, in a dark and cavernous bookshop, Audrey is whisked to Paris for a fashion shoot. At one stage she repudiates the shallow world of fashion and sneaks off to a smoky basement where a Sartrean guru holds court. She is adorably earnest in her intellectual black stovepipe pants, skivvy and ballet shoes. But we all know it won’t last. Because what she really wants to do is put on a Dior frock and twirl deliriously under the Eiffel Tower, releasing a bunch of celebratory balloons. That’s what tends to happen to bookish girls in Paris: you arrive an intellectual, you depart a fashion victim.
I head down the stairs, holding my hands carefully in front of me. They look lovely.
I was very disappointed the first time I walked down Avenue Montaigne. I thought it was too big. It’s still too big. It’s a big walk and the price tags are even bigger. This is couture row, and the signs say Christian Dior, Chanel, Emanuel Ungaro, Nina Ricci, Valentino …
Clothes are a funny business. No matter what we wear, we are saying something about ourselves to other people. If we are in fashion or out of it, expensively dressed or simply dressed, soberly or loudly or eccentrically attired – what we wear is a public message. And because we can choose what we wear in a way that we can’t choose our eye color or height, our clothes go beyond being a simple reflection of self to an active invention of public identity. As little girls we play dress-up, practicing being women. As women we still play dress-up, practicing being the women we want to be – or at least, be taken for.
The French understand this very well: in fact, clothes once played an important political role. At the court of Louis XIV, the nobles were classified by what they wore. The old nobility were known as the noblesse d’épée, the nobility of the sword. The new class of nobility was based on their juridical and administrative functions on behalf of the crown, and they were known as the noblesse de la robe. More generally, clothes were an all-purpose symbol of social status. The parties and balls of the court of Versailles were open to people of any rank, as long as they were dressed appropriately.
I always laugh when I read a women’s magazine declaring that some starlet or other has an ‘individual’ or ‘unique’ style, when all she wears is a minute variation on prevailing fashions. In fact, all of us wear a modern uniform. And really, this is no bad thing. It’s a way in which we all say that we consent to live with each other; that we accept the terms of modernity. I’m like you, our clothes say to each other, I’m with you. In many respects it’s not all that different from the days of Louis XIV.
But there’s one wonderful difference. Whereas in Louis XIV’s day only the very rich could afford to wear the appropriate clothes, today mass production means most of us can afford some gesture towards the latest fashion, if we choose. Coco Chanel was the first designer to understand the democratization of fashion. She not only accepted this, she actively embraced it. She thought it was wonderful that her clothes were widely copied, that a shop girl could achieve the same look as a countess. A fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion, was Chanel’s view, and her supreme fashion insight.
When I read the various biographies of Coco Chanel, however, I learned a few things about haute couture. I discovered that it is special because it combines the art of design with the craft of tailoring. Coco Chanel would fit her clothes directly on her models so that they flowed and curved with the line of their bodies. In particular, she was obsessed with the cut of the sleeve. She would cut her dresses and jackets very high under the armpit. The effect was to give a woman a lean, long torso and slender arms. At the same time she carefully shaped the sleeve so that the woman would have maximum shoulder rotation and movement. The fit was perfect both for beauty and wearability.
After reading this I looked carefully at the photos of Chanel couture, and then at my own suit jackets. Hmm. My clothes looked like sacks by comparison. More importantly, I looked sack-ish in them. Chanel was also remarkable because she made her clothes to last. She was still wearing the same little suits thirty years after she first made them, and they still looked beautiful. She turned fashion into anti-fashion, by making it timeless. She turned fashion into style.
Looking in the windows of these elegant stores I can still see something of the fine tailoring and detailed work that makes haute couture special. And insanely expensive.
Edith Wharton only wore the finest clothes. She thought that beautiful clothes were an art form. One of the things she loved most about living in Paris was that the French agreed with her. She wrote:
The artistic integrity of the French has led them to feel from the beginning that there is no difference in kind between the curve of a woman’s hat-brim and the curve of a Rodin marble, or between the droop of an upholsterer’s curtain and that of the branches along a great avenue laid out by Le Nôtre.
Gertrude Stein went a step further. She said:
It is funny about art and literature, fashions being part of it. Two years ago everybody was saying that France was down and out, was sinking to be a second rate power, etcetera, etcetera. And I said but I do not think so because not for years not since the war have hats been as various and lovely and as french as they are now. Not only are they to be found in the good shops but everywhere there is a real milliner there is a pretty french little hat.
It has to be admitted that, even as she was writing this, Nazi Germany was about to invade France – but then, politics was never Miss Stein’s strong point.
I am not sure that high fashion can, any longer, be equated to art and literature. Today it all seems so corporatized and commercial. And yet, every now and then something magical occurs when a great artist adorns beautiful bodies with beautiful clothes. At John Galliano’s 1998 show for Christian Dior at the Opéra Garnier, people simply burst into tears because the clothes and atmosphere were so exquisite.
Nancy Mitford never bothered to analyze the social function or aesthetic value of clothes. She just adored them. Most of all, she adored Monsieur Dior, whose atelier was here, at number 30 Avenue Montaigne. Have you heard about the New Look? she wrote to Eddie Sackville-West, cousin of Vita. You pad your hips & squeeze your waist & skirts are to the ankle it is bliss. She wrote to her mother: I’ve got a beautiful Dior dress, day, which is worn over a crinoline, I feel like a Victorian lady for purposes of loo – very inconvenient! It’s so plain that I can wear it in the street & I see by the looks I get that it is a smash hit.
After a big burst of spending on the 1951 Dior Fall collections, Nancy Mitford admitted to Evelyn Waugh:
I went & ordered the plainest little wool dress you ever saw from Dior £168. It’s the last time. I humbly asked if they wouldn’t take off the 8 but no they cried you are very lucky. All the prices are going up next week. They made me feel I’d been too clever for words. But after I felt guilty – all the poor people in the world & so on. It’s terrible to love clothes as much as I do.
Today, even with my perfectly painted fingernails, I am too frightened to try and enter Dior. I fear some unpredictable humiliation inflicted by a shop assistant. This is unfair, as normally I find French shop assistants to be extremely courteous in their remote way, although Nancy Mitford once wrote gleefully about the time two English duchesses were turned away from this very shop because the people at the entrance considered them too dowdy to be admitted. Clothes shopping in general is a problem for me in Paris as I am 166 centimeters tall and have hips. And breasts. French women – and the clothes designed for them – are generally petite, slim-hipped and flat-chested. The clothes are beautiful, but not for me. Now the Italians, they know how to make clothes for women with curves.
In the midst of all the grand couture windows is a tiny boutique on a sunny corner. A single rococo chandelier twinkles over the room. It’s Parfums Caron. I peer in the window at the amber-filled glass flasks lined up like so many magic potions. Rachel told me that she was once asked as a favor to a friend to purchase some perfume here. She stood in front of these bottles: their names were like wishes: N’aimez que moi (Love no one but me!) and French can can. She looked at the slip of paper in her purse and indicated to the assistant, who languidly held a minuscule bottle under a tap. They watched together as tiny drops of golden syrup, Tabac Blond, leached into the bottle. The assistant then blandly quoted the cost. It was so unbelievably expensive that Rachel’s blood began to drain from her head, only at a much faster rate than the dropping elixir. Afterwards she had to repair to the nearby Plaza Athénée for a reviving champagne. She kept checking her bag to make sure the lid of the little perfume bottle was firmly secured.
Different cultures approach the idea of personal decoration and adornment in different ways. Paris is still the center of the Western cultural ideal of feminine beauty. Women from all over the world come to Paris headquarters for a femininity infusion. Here we are all reminded of the global standard and here we undertake the necessary remedial tasks to bring ourselves back up to it: a new dress, an intake of beautiful art, long walks along the Seine, watching and being watched in a sidewalk café. Ah, yes, that’s right, this is what being a woman is all about.
For an Australian woman there’s another dimension to this essential Paris experience. When Australia was colonized, the notion of an ornamental woman – a woman of wit, pleasure, society – was a luxury the white colonizers couldn’t afford. Women were brought to Australia as convicts and later servants. In 1800, while Napoleon’s Josephine was running up dressmakers’ bills and planting roses at Malmaison, and Germaine de Staël was juggling husband and lover and hosting the most influential salon in Paris, white Australian women, like the horses, and the cattle, were working and struggling just to survive.
And here’s something else, something curious. Sydney today is one of the world capitals of transvestism, of men dressing extravagantly, glamorously, theatrically – and yes, monstrously – as women. My apartment complex is one of the key preparation sites for Sydney’s gay and lesbian Mardi Gras: it’s quite something to observe fifteen men in wigs and pink tutus posing for photographers at the end of your swimming pool. And the only Australian I know who really understands the power of makeup is a six-foot-three tranny with a skin problem. Kylie Minogue once said, witty as hell, that she thought of herself as a tall drag queen in a short woman’s body. It’s as if we Australian women missed our chance to be the decorative sex in Australia – and the men have mounted a takeover.
Shakespeare’s women, wonderful creatures like Portia and Rosalind, dressed up as men to make men wiser, to teach them something. Like Portia revealing the quality of mercy. And this made me think in a different way about the Australian drag scene. And about Dame Edna Everage, Barry Humphries’s grotesque and compelling alter-ego. And even about Patrick White, whose late work The Twyborn Affair is not just about transvestism, but a poetic exploration of the relationship between our external appearance and our internal identity. Perhaps it’s not too far-fetched to wonder if Australian men dress as women to teach women something?
I quite enjoy my ruminating walk down Avenue Montaigne, but to me it’s not really about the essence of French femininity. The fashionable women I see along the street are mostly foreigners. There is a slightly desperate look about their wobbling ankles. The really nice thing about French style is that many French women aren’t competing in the impossible and expensive race that is modern fashion. They tend to avoid the dramatic ups and downs of hemlines, the ins and outs of pant widths, the fads for stilettos or acid green or torn sleeves or corset belts.
I am too timid to enter Mr Dior’s shop, and the truth is I don’t particularly want to, though I am glad to know it’s there. I’m rather like Gertrude Stein, who, judging by the photos, wore a tent for twenty years, but still admired fashion as an art form. Fashion, she said, is the real thing in abstraction.
The French also understand that clothes aren’t everything. Josephine Baker arrived in Paris from the poorest southern region of the U.S., via bit parts in vaudeville on Broadway. She came to Paris armed only with her magnificent ebony body, a comic genius and the very good advice of the French waiters she met in New York: Be chic and make them laugh! they counselled the young performer.
Josephine Baker made her entry right here at 15 Avenue Montaigne, the theater of the Comédie des Champs-Élysées. She was a minor player in a novelty show called La Revue Nègre in 1925. She appeared on stage entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs. Her body, her comical gestures, her beauty were sublime. The crowd went berserk and she became instantly famous.
Baker was another of those women who adopted Paris because Paris welcomed her. In America she was abused, reviled and discriminated against. In Paris she was worshipped as a stage goddess, sex symbol and a genuine artist. I have two loves, sang Josephine Baker, my country and Paris! They couldn’t have been more different, yet it’s nice to think that Gertrude Stein also said, America is my country and Paris is my home town.
At the end of Avenue Montaigne is Pont de l’Alma, underneath which the English Princess Diana met her death. Rachel and I disagree about Diana. Rachel thinks she was a shallow publicity-seeking Sloane Ranger. I loved her, and still do. I cried when she died.
Sometimes I think of Princess Diana’s last night on earth, and quite frankly, who could have had a better one? She was on holiday, having cruised around the Mediterranean on a beautiful yacht. She had just been taken to dinner at the Hôtel Ritz by a fabulously wealthy and attractive man who adored her. He had given her an enormous diamond ring as a gift. There must be many worse ways to go.
I’m at it again. I shouldn’t be doing this; I know it’s a weakness. But I submit to this guilty pleasure each time I come to Paris. Why? It’s not as if I haven’t been taught a few lessons. I have a drawer full of evidence at home in Sydney that reminds me: Lucinda, you can’t wear scarves the way French women do. But here I am in a boutique in Place des Vosges and the old romance is reasserting itself. Oh, but this is Paris, where being a woman is special. Oh, and these scarves are works of art, richly textured and beautifully made. They are heirlooms, treasures.
The elegantly elongated saleswoman gently selects a scarf and brings it close to me. It’s among the most daring; pale green silk backing an oblong of red velvet, brocade and silk. It’s dramatic, almost heraldic. She carefully ties it for me, draping it across my body with strong, thin fingers.
‘Comme c’est chic,’ she says solemnly, standing back to appraise her handiwork. I can’t help it, I preen a little.
As I hurry along the colonnades I can feel the soft weight of the scarf in its elegant shopping bag, and I already foresee its double future. In one version, I too possess that easy French elegance. I take the scarf out of the drawer and drape it across my shoulders. Even in my regulation black suit, I am lifted, lightened and irradiated. In the other future, I fling and heave, I crush and crinkle, and what looks so silken and sinuous when tied upon me by a Parisienne merely looks lumpen when adjusted by me. So it appears destined to return, carefully folded, to my drawer, where it will nestle against the other scarves I have proudly brought home from Paris. Now I see myself, standing in front of the mirror, a soulless creature in a black suit, devoid of heraldic glamor.
I don’t really understand how they do it, but French women still manage to convey the impression that they’ve got some indefinable ‘it’ factor.
Consider Colette. Colette oozed a particularly French brand of feminine power. Now it needs to be understood: Colette had never been stylish. She was far too bohemian. She loved food too much to stay slim, so she got fat. She refused to wear shoes and wore sturdy leather sandals. She permed her hair so hard it stuck out from her head in a purple fizz. At one stage, mistaking her interest for expertise, Colette opened a beauty shop with the help of some rich supporters. As proprietor, Colette insisted that all her clients adopt her own distinctive look. Some of Paris’s most famous blonde beauties emerged from Colette’s salon aged immeasurably with rings of dark kohl around their eyes and fiercely blackened eyebrows. The business folded soon after.
But none of this mattered. Colette was the essential woman; she was the ultra-femme. Everyone who met her knew the legendary story of the lithe, gamine Colette whose husband, Willy, locked her in a room and urged her to write the saucy Claudine stories. Or the time she caused a riot by kissing her female lover on stage. And everyone had read the scandalous, captivating stories: about love between an old courtesan and a gigolo, opium dens and faked orgasms, strange ménages à trois and sad, cross-dressing lesbians.
When Colette was asked for guidance by aspiring writers, she always gave the same advice: Look for a long time at what pleases you, and longer still at what pains you. What Colette liked most was to look at women, herself included. She was a tireless and pitiless observer of the process – the business, even – of being a woman. And her observations make inspiring and sometimes excruciating reading. In Chéri one retired courtesan murmurs to another:‘ Heavens, how good you smell. Have you noticed that as the skin gets less firm the scent sinks in better and lasts much longer? It’s really very nice.’ Ouch.
Nancy Mitford greatly admired Colette. So when she was asked to translate Colette’s Chéri for the stage, it gave her the rare opportunity to spend one hour with the great writer, who was by then a frail seventy-nine-year-old. I imagine Nancy Mitford standing in the quadrangle of the Palais Royal, smoothing down the padded skirts of her Dior day dress. She fully expects to be scrutinized by those wide, slanting, ever-observant eyes. And, of course, she wants to please Colette’s eyes, to receive her feminine stamp of approval. So Nancy Mitford mounts the wooden steps, perhaps carrying her copy of Chéri for the great writer to sign.
Colette receives Nancy Mitford from her high divan bed pushed up against the window in the Palais Royal, in what Colette called the heart, the very heart, of Paris. The walls are covered in dark red silk. The shelves of the room are lined with books and busts and her collection of brightly colored glass paperweights. There’s a bunch of flowers sent by an admirer. The bed is red, and a fur blanket covers Colette’s arthritic and useless legs. Under the blanket, her toenails are painted scarlet. A trolley carries her work-bench with its blue lamp and pages of sky-blue paper to write on, a phone, pens, bowls of colored sweets.
Colette herself – even old, fat and infirm – is a proud lioness, with her mane of hair, her eyes rimmed with kohl, her lips stained red. And as always, she wears a patterned scarf around her neck. It’s not that she is more stylish or more beautiful or more feminine than Nancy Mitford, it’s that over the course of her life, she has accumulated her femininity, analyzed and endorsed it, embraced it.
The two women spend an hour together. How I wish I knew what they said to each other, the sensual bohemian and the witty aristocrat. All we know of their conversation is derived from a few brief lines that Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh after her meeting with Colette. Of the translation work, Nancy said little, and in the end nothing came of it. But she was overwhelmed by the privilege of meeting Colette whom I admire more than anybody – any woman at least. And possibly she was intimidated, a little daunted by the great dame: I felt very shy, she recalled. Then she added these revealing, tell-tale words: But she admired my clothes so that was nice. Such was the extraordinary authority of Colette, and the mystical power of the French woman.
Colette was not only charming; she understood the uses of charm. Her flattery similarly disarmed American author Anita Loos. In 1951 Loos visited Colette to talk about the stage adaptation of Gigi. Colette met Anita in Le Grand Véfour: Anita had prepared a little speech in tribute to the great author. She was just warming up when Colette brushed her comments aside with her hand. Where had Anita found those adorable shoes? Anita, of course, raced home to note down the compliment.
Thinking on these things, on the pitfalls of being in Paris and trying to wear clothes in the French manner, my confidence plummets. I privately vow not to wear my scarf in Paris, but wait until I get home to Sydney.
Then another thought: perhaps it’s wisest if non-French women don’t wear scarves at all. One, after all, killed American Isadora Duncan. After years of living in Paris, one day the avant-garde dancer hopped into her sportscar on the Riviera, wound a long chiffon scarf around her neck and cried, I go to my glory! as she sped off. Then the scarf caught in the car wheel and she strangled herself.