Paris Times Eight (25 page)

But that was the view from afar. Being in Paris to cover the shows was another story. Just because my publication had ordered me to cover the collections and was willing to cover the cost of a transatlantic flight and ten days in a three-star Paris hotel, about a $
5
,
000
expenditure, didn't mean I could. Before I even stepped onto an airplane that would take me to the
2001
–
02
fall/winter ready-to-wear collections, staged throughout Paris in February of that year, I had to engage in months of pre-arrival preparations. First I had several forms to fill out, forms identifying my organization and me, forms that needed to be signed by me, my editor, my editor's editor, the editor-in-chief, and finally the publisher himself. If I had clippings demonstrating coverage of past collections, I was urged to send them along, as this could favorably influence the Féderation française de la couture, the trade group that is the mafia of French fashion. It would be the one to stamp
oui
or
non
on my application. After several weeks' wait, fraught with uncertainty, I finally got word that I was a
oui.
I was accredited. I was off to Paris to see the shows. Or so I thought.

Even accredited, I couldn't get into the collections unless personally invited by the designer or members of his or her entourage. They had to want me to be at their individual shows, each lasting an average of fifteen minutes and costing upward of $
1
million to stage. It was all part of a Paris institution I hadn't been aware of before,
la liste.
If you weren't on it, your only hope of reporting on Paris fashion was out on the street. Or so I learned on my first day as a fashion reporter in Paris, spent tediously dialling the numbers of snooty press attachés to ask them, in my very best French, if they would grant me the honor of an invitation to one of their theatrical fashion spectacles.

One in particular belonged to Viktor & Rolf, the Dutch design duo who were then considered the last word in avant-garde fashion. Very wow. I had never heard of them, but everyone was talking about how edgy they were. And so, sitting inside my Left Bank hotel, a converted monastery girded by large brick walls dating back to the Middle Ages, I rang up the rep to ask for an invite.

“But I dunt know yu,” said the woman on the other end of the phone, breaking into English, a sign that my French was bad.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“We dunt 'ave a relationship,” she responded.

“And how do we have a relationship?” I asked.

“You cum to ze showroom to look at ze clothes, and I look at you looking at zem, to know if I will give you an invitation for next year.”

“But I don't want an invitation for next year, I want an invitation for this year, I am in Paris now,” I said, frustration mounting in my voice.

“But zis is ze situation,” she replied. I could feel her shrug of Gallic indifference at the other end of the phone line.

Ce n'est pas un jeu, Madame,
this is not a game,” I said, “starting to shout, “My newspaper has spent a lot of money sending me to Paris. I must get into the show this week.”

“But zis is not
mon problème,
” she said. And hung up on me.

I sat in that expensive boutique hotel room, big as a walk-in closet, and stared at my reflection in a wall mirror. My hair was lank, my eyes hollow. I looked tired. I hadn't even attended my first show, but already Paris fashion felt like
Les Misèrables
come to life. I was trying to storm the barricades of French arrogance, to no avail. I would have to grovel before I could penetrate the city's fabled gardens of beauty. Clearly I had much to learn. I tried explaining to the fashion editor, the one left sorely behind in Toronto, that I was having a bit of difficulty gaining access to the shows. “Hey,” she barked, cutting me off. “It's Paris, not a war zone. Stop complaining.” She was right. It wasn't a war zone. At least in a war you know who the enemy is. This was subterfuge. The point in denying the press access was to create an air of exclusivity around a particular fashion brand. It was also designed to whip up a feeling of frenzy among the fashion disenfranchised. Certainly that was the sensation being roused in me. The more they didn't let me in, the more determined I was to get in. I opened my suitcase and pulled out a new red dress, purchased especially for the trip. I would beat the Parisians at their own game, I thought. I would dress to kill. I was forty years old. I didn't need to put up with this shit.

I left the subdued elegance of the Hôtel de l'Abbaye on Rue Cassette and headed for the nearby Rue de Rennes, puffed like a revolutionary, eager to put the tiny heads of my fashion foes on the spiky end of a pole. I strode across Boulevard Saint-Germain, oblivious to the motorcycles that swerved to avoid hitting me. I crossed the Seine, kicking at the pigeons pecking at crumbs on the bridge. I wanted to push through anything in my way, especially the barricades of snobbery that Paris had erected to guard the sanctity of its fashion shows from the likes of uncouth North Americans like myself.

Most of the shows were held inside the Louvre within the subterranean Carrousel pedestrian mall. I rode down the escalators into the bowels of the museum and saw uniformed security guards. They weren't there for the artwork. They were there for the fashion, protecting it from intruders. I saw metal detectors and X-ray machines such as you'd encounter at the airport. In Paris, fashion was serious business. You didn't just bust in unannounced.

I had my press pass, and with a nod of his head a guard with a holster on his hip granted me access to the media lounge. It was a white-leather and chrome oasis, pulsating with disco music. Sundry journalists sat on überchic plastic bar stools, quaffing bottles of Evian. I didn't know anyone. But fashion being a perk-laden beat, the drinks were free, the food was free, and so was the hairstyling and makeup application by the professional team from L'Oréal, the main sponsor of the show. It was set up to make anyone who entered feel part of an ersatz tribe. I was in need of belonging. A team of young women with dazzlingly white smiles approached and, like Sirens, called to me to try out all the wonders of their beauty-charged world. It was such a reversal from the Nazi
PR
people I had been fighting with all morning over the phone. One had informed me point blank that the reason I wouldn't be getting an invitation to the Christian Dior show was because I was a Canadian. “And
le Canada
is not
exactement
a fashion country,
non?
” He had elaborated on the national stereotype by telling me that no matter how adulatory I might be of the show, I wouldn't be helpful in selling much Christian Dior product. Canada was not known for being a nation of luxury fashion spenders. “So why should we let you in?” His words had annoyed me. Until that point I had prided myself on being a journalist who was above caring about commercial interests. I was an independent, a champion of the underdog. The truth will out, and all that. But fashion was a new world. It wasn't just about appearances, it was about money. To momentarily forget about the ugly underbelly of Paris fashion, I allowed myself to be enchanted by all the gratuitous opportunities for self-improvement, and tried them all, starting with a free glass of French champagne.

Over the next few days I returned frequently to the Louvre, my “office,” and became a veritable Hoover of all the free stuff that befell me at the fashion shows—the graft. Most of the big designers decorated the chairs of the press with little goody bags in which were eyeliners and lip pencils, real French perfume, or sunglasses. It was meant to buy you, buy your precious objective soul. For the most part it worked. Overnight, I became a fashion victim. I imagined that Valentino himself had personally placed gifts in my path, and this made me feel like an intimate, a member of the fashion elite. I believed that I was suddenly oh-so-fabulous, too. And so the fashion world sucked me in and sprinkled me with fairy dust. Soon I was getting my hair blown out daily and buying $
100
orange leather booties for my toddler at the deluxe department store Bon Marché. I walked down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré wearing a new purple coat edged in marabou. If my mother could see me now, I thought, catching my reflection in the window of the Hermès boutique.

I stood in line to get inside the next fashion show of the day, glad for the distraction of work. It was Celine. Or was it Lanvin? It was all beginning to blur. I needed to focus. I was in Paris, after all, in search of the Trend. It was all about the Trend. And that season, it looked like a purse.

A bone-handled clutch by Yves Saint Laurent, to be precise. Absolutely de rigueur. One woman, Carine Roitfeld, the highly influential editor-in-chief of Paris
Vogue,
was responsible for branding it into the collective fashion consciousness as the accessory du jour, carrying it with her all the time, like a shield. Muse to Tom Ford, the chief designer of Yves Saint Laurent as well as Gucci in Milan, fashion's Amazon queen was a regular at the shows. When she entered the tents where the events took place, the paparazzi flew after her, cameras flashing. Sometimes she arrived with her pretty daughter on her arm. I found myself wondering about their relationship. Did they share each other's clothes? That was something mothers and daughters often did. I used to borrow my mother's, but not anymore.

I shook my head clear it, to concentrate on Madame Roitfeld. What made her tick? What was her allure? To me, she was an enigma, the sphinx of the fashion shows. She rimmed her sunken eyes with inky kohl, making her look like a raccoon. Every day she persisted in wearing the same clothes, as if brazenly repudiating the fashion merry-go-round swirling around us, in which each
20
-minute show typically showcased up to
130
different looks at a time. It was as if she was saying, why bother? She had found her uniform of chic. That season it consisted of a black shawl, a black midcalf skirt, and, despite the fact that it was February and still chilly outside, a pair of black, open-toe, wraparound, stacked-heel sandals, the shoe destined to become
the
shoe of the summer of
2001
, and all because
she
wore it.

I looked closer. She was rail thin, and her hair was a bird's nest. Whispers followed in her wake. She was said to be the progenitor of heroin chic. She was said to be like Colette, culling lovers from both sexes. But she wasn't what you'd call good-looking. Instead, she epitomized what at the beginning of the new millennium was being recast as the new glamor—a quirky individuality that mixed summer sandals with winter shawls, plastic bracelets with gold earrings as big as basketball hoops. Some of Paris's money ed matrons also sat in the front row of the fashion shows, sternly eyeing Madame Roitfeld. Their handbags were small and color-coded to match their outfits. They looked staid in comparison to Madame Roitfeld. She emerged the winner. I learned more about Paris's enduring reputation as the incubator of new fashion by observing her than by watching ten full days of shows. She represented a whole new topsy-turvy sense of what it meant to be in style. If there had been rules about what it meant to be well dressed, she tossed them out the window. I glanced again at Madame Roitfeld and sighed. She made me feel impossibly bereft. I had the wrong clothes. I wondered if I would ever be a
parisienne.

The right clothes marched down the runway on the bodies of models who high-stepped their way to the fashion photographers crammed together at the opposite end of the catwalk. Nicknamed the Grapparazzi for all the libations they typically imbibed in the morning to get them through the exhausting pace of the day, the photographers were a bastion of maleness in a world where females stealthily judged each other's grasp of style. The women were subtle. The men were not. Sexist and loud, the shooters routinely shouted,
à poil!
—French for “take it all off,” to a model they wanted a second look from. It was a cat-and-mouse game, a blood sport at the center of a pretentious forum paved with expensive designer duds. It was also part of the camp entertainment offered up by the shows. You could determine the character of a girl by the way she handled the catcalls. Britain's Stella Tennant, aristocratic by birth, gave them the haughty stare. Canada's Tasha Tilberg, originally from small-town British Columbia, looked vacantly through them, frightened by the scorching attention or else just too young to know what to do. Denmark's sexy Helena Christensen licked her finger and slowly raised it in a rude salute to the animals screaming to see her tits.

The audience sat stonily observing the models, the clothes, and, in particular, each other. The Paris collections were as much about the fashions as the personalities who gathered twice yearly to pass judgment on them. Over there was the pre-op transsexual, standing monstrously taller than the rest of the stiletto-heeled crowd, flailing his manicured hands in a show of delirium over the latest John Galliano. Over here was the aging former editor of an Italian fashion magazine, rouged and plucked, a hat that looked like a tower of shellacked
CD
s topping her silver head of hair, and a pirate patch over one heavily made-up eye. She was short and squat, a toadlike fashion-show fixture. Next to her was the photographer of the moment, boy toy of
Vanity Fair,
legs spread wide open to show off the crown jewels bulging through his skintight designer jeans. A former American supermodel, then an overly Botoxed drunk, had just written her memoirs of sex on the catwalk and other cocaine-sprinkled capers. She was everywhere at the shows that season, having clawed her way in after the guards outside had tried to keep her from entering. At that moment she careened in a photographer's direction. He had a Polaroid camera at the ready. They air-kissed, then pretended to talk to each other, all the while eyeing the other people eyeing them.