Fashionable Paris
Alexandra Shulman mixes couture and culture in the City of Light Paris was the first capital city outside London that I ever visited. My mother and godmother took me and Suzi, my godmother’s daughter, for a girls’ weekend when we were about 11. We ate in Le Procope and La Coupole, we visited the Tuileries and the Louvre. It was a bright, sparkling May when Paris looked as beautiful as it ever could.
Four years later I visited again, with my schoolfriend Caroline Crowther our first trip abroad unaccompanied by adults. The weekend before we left we were picked up on the King’s Road by a man who seemed quite ancient, but I realise now must have been in his late twenties, who took us for a coffee. Having learnt that we were planning this expedition, he called me later that night to say that, funnily enough, he had a great friend in Paris whom he would be visiting when we were there, and they would like to take us out to dinner. I am not sure that either Caroline or I had been taken out to dinner before, so we happily accepted. He called a day later to say that his friend had booked La Tour d’Argent, the most expensive restaurant in the city, and would we not wear jeans.
We travelled by train and ferry and stayed in a fleapit. A limousine arrived on the Saturday night to pick us up, the friend turning out to be the playboy son of a big department store owner in London. They fed us our first duck and fraise des bois and then took us to Regine’s. After an hour I got wobbly about how things were going. Realising that dinner was probably not all they had in mind, I hauled Caroline out of the nightclub and we ran back to the fleapit.
I never saw them again until this July, when I visited the couture shows in Paris. As I alighted from Eurostar a grey-haired man approached me and asked me if I was who I am. Did I remember, he asked, ‘a dinner many years ago at La Tour d’Argent’? I said that of course I did, and that I had dined out many times on the tale of the two of them preying on us innocents.
He looked embarrassed, said it was amazing how young we were that night, and vanished into the crowd.
Now I journey frequently to Paris for the fashion shows and stay at the Hotel Lancaster, from where I stroll in seconds to the Champs Elysées’s Virgin Megastore, which has a very good stock of Indy CDs at prices cheaper than the UK.
Although the city is filled with restau rants, somehow those in the fashion indus try all end up at the same ones. My favourite is Chez George (Rue de Canettes), where you sit on banquettes in a mirror-lined room and eat steak and frites. We hold big dinners there with the French designers and everybody drinks gallons of red wine. The last time I visited I had an altercation with a German man who objected to my smoking, despite the fact that cigarettes were lit at every other table. The restaurant was entertained by a charming cigar-smoking Cuban gentleman who came to my defence, offered to punch the German on my behalf, and then paid my bill.
To dilute the intense diet of fashion I try to visit one gallery each trip. In July I went to the newly opened Musée Branly, with a controversial design by Jean Nouvel. One of the beauties of the city is the way they mesh the modern and the old — it’s wonderful to go to a Louis Vuitton show in the glass blocks of the Parc André Citroën and then maybe to a Chloe show in the grandeur of the Opéra.
My perfect day would be in autumn, with a visit to the Porte de Vanves flea market, then lunch in some little brasserie. I might take in a few shops like Hédiard (Place de la Madeleine), where the packaging of spices and teas in their red tins is gorgeous, but in general I find the shopping less interesting than in London.
I would stroll back to the hotel along the bridges of the Seine as the sky turns pink at dusk and the lights of the city start to twinkle. A snooze and then dinner at Chez George or Le Voltaire with my boyfriend and maybe some friends, in the knowledge that there was no reason to get up early the next morning.
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