I am just back from France with an answer to Freud’s most famous question: couture. Parisian couture is what women want and we want it ferociously. Perhaps more accurately, Parisian couture is what we’ll settle for—we want absolutely everything we see in any store in the 7th arrondissement or the St. Germain des Prés district. Okay, further refinement—I’ll speak only for myself: I want everything I saw in Paris..
Women in Paris are uniformly gorgeous. Their skin is flawless; their hair is styled; their clothes are elegant and smell of perfume. I want to look like that. Women in the United States have given up. They have surrendered to elastic waist bands, scrunchies, and flats. Not one woman in Paris would ever wear flats. Even the very old, the elderly women totter along in heels bearing not a single scuff mark; walking their small, white dogs they wear belts and carry handbags. When a young woman of Paris wears jeans, you better believe they are skin tight and designed to draw the eye down to a pair of heels, either shoes or boots, because the women of Paris need at least six inches and I don’t mean tube steak. I mean a half-foot of precarious stiletto on the uneven cobblestones of Roman streets while going at a pace that would qualify as speed walking under the rules of any competition.
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I went to Europe determined to give these Paris bitches a run for their money. Before leaving the USA, I got my hair blonded up and my teeth whitened, bought clothes despite being unemployed (in direct defiance of any logic, I quit my job in the worst economy of our life time to go to Paris and spend like a happy drunk), I took not one pair of comfortable shoes. Still, I lost on the first day. Parisian women leave the house only when they are completely put together. They wear skirts and hose; belts that match their shoes. Their handbags are sensible, not their shoes—you will never, neh-hev-er see women marching down the street lightly swinging handbags the size of a small cottage such as are routinely advertised in Vogue or Elle. Only American women would do that to themselves. The dresses are age appropriate with the young women in skirts that would be considered belts in any other country; middle aged women in smartly tailored day wear of luscious fabric; old women in enough suede and leather to have their own bar in the Castro.
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I won’t even mention the men—the men who dress so gorgeously, who are unafraid of color and style; men who actually accessorize. The men who sweep their long hair back from massive foreheads of gleaming, perfect skin. The men who wear scarves wrapped around their necks and smoke Gauloises. The men who, in the United States, would be beaten and left for dead on the street with ‘fag’ spray-painted on their heads. The men who stop mid-day to sip an espresso from a dainty white cup that clinks so charmingly when returned to its matching saucer on the zinc top of a high, round café table under an awning on the sidewalk; these men who smile and say hello and call a woman ‘madam.’
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I loved Paris every moment.
