Paris Was Ours Read Online Free Page A

Longchamp, Delsey, and every other saddler had them in leather; Monoprix had them in plastic.
    The question for me was, how did
le tout Paris
know, at thesame moment, to buy a bag like this? I read
Elle
and
Madame Figaro
like everyone else, but I hadn’t noticed that my regular black leather bag was hopeless. When I go back to California for the summer, people will say “How French you look” for about two weeks, after which, I guess, I stop looking it. In France, I know I still stand out as a clueless American. At least, unlike us, they have cultural consensus. Perhaps this explains the strange predilection the French have for clothes and purses with the name or logo of the maker on them. We would never do that, or at least I wouldn’t, and I’ve never seen T-shirts reading “Isabel Toledo” or “Marc Jacobs” on a San Francisco street, either.
    The French do have a different attitude toward individuality and eccentricity. They keep personal idiosyncrasies hidden, if they exist, behind the comfortable uniform facade of fashion or, one could say, of timelessness. The Chanel suit, jeans, the trench coat, never go out of style, and such clothes form the core of everyone’s wardrobe, no matter what age. At first I had a certain Anglo-Saxon scorn for this conformity, but I eventually came to see that for them it is liberating, like school uniforms. You put on your little suit, with its knee-length skirt and fitted jacket, scarf, and midheels, and that’s the end of thinking about it.
    In San Francisco, you can’t but be struck, walking down, say, Union Street, by the number of shops that are clearly intended for the young, and no one over twenty would be caught dead in a miniskirt with rhinestones and so forth. In France, women seem not to have any idea of age-appropriate clothes. Frenchwomen of all ages have the figures of their teenage daughters, and they all wear the same styles. There’s a sartorial middleground where girls wear ladylike clothes their mothers could wear, and their mothers wear the sleeveless dresses and short skirts we have been deeply programmed to avoid after a certain age. My English friend Hilary recently remarked that she had given up wearing jeans because one of her sons had commented, “Mutton dressed as lamb.” Does this mean that jeans, in England, are only for the young, or for arty or delinquent people of any age? Anyhow, this irritating remark brought to mind still other national differences. I don’t think many Frenchmen would feel that their mothers should dress like Whistler’s mother, and I also think they would refrain from using that unfortunate figure of speech based on meat.
    It almost seems that Frenchmen like women better than English or American men do. Frenchmen seem to admire what women do, and will participate in discussions about curtains and recipes. You see them looking at fashions in store windows and even reading women’s magazines, whereas, as has often been remarked, Anglo-Saxon men seem to prefer the company of one another. It was fun to see
The Voysey Inheritance
at the National Theatre in London a few years back, but the status of the women in the big Voysey family of prosperous Victorians made clear a set of attitudes, condescending and protective, that may not have changed that much. All the important scenes take place with the mother and sisters out of the room.
    My basic point is, Frenchmen are pretty uniformly gallant and approving of female appearance, and the result is more important than one might think. Since Frenchwomen are as capable as any of us, and maybe more capable, of getting themselves into misjudged outfits, it’s necessary to look more deeply into the secrets of their chic, and looking more deeply onefinds that the secret is confidence. Their men are cooperative and supportive. Tact, maybe even genuine goodwill, seems to prevail and give them the confidence never even to think they might look “wrong.”
    French compatibility between