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First published in French as à Paris by Bernard Grasset 2017

First published in this edition 2018

Copyright © Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, 2017

Translation copyright © Georgina Collins, 2018

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

Published by special arrangement with Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle in conjuction with their duly appointed agent

2 Seas Literary Agency

Map designed by Michael A. Hill

Text design by Francisca Monteiro

based on Matthieu Rocolle’s original concept

ISBN: 978-0-241-35169-7

To our city,
with love.

Foreword

The idea for this book first came about in April 2016. We had this dream of travelling all over Paris to meet the city’s most inspiring ladies. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong sang about April in Paris, and the city was just like the song: there were chestnut trees in blossom, a sparkling River Seine and Parisiennes shivering in their soft, light knitwear, handbags brimming over beneath tables at café Aux Deux Amis on rue Oberkampf. It was a typical spring in Paris. But then again, it was unlike any that had come before. The capital was still in shock. Six months earlier, in November 2015, our city had been devastated by gunshots exploding in places where Parisians dance and celebrate. Many young and carefree lives were destroyed. Parisians had spent the winter doing what they do best: drinking, chatting, loving each other, but with underlying anxiety, often glancing over their shoulders. Everyone grieved in their own way, and Paris began to wake up again, cheerfully; bruised, but proud. You could feel all of that outside café Aux Deux Amis that day.

After our initial meeting, we began our tour of Paris. Between April and December 2016, we roamed the city, but we felt strange. Not sad or bitter. Quite the opposite. Joyful. We wanted to hug people sitting outside bars and restaurants, kiss fellow travellers on the métro. We’ve always been crazy in love with this city, but even more so now, after the tragic events of November 2015. We love its arrogance, its clumsiness, its simplicity. And especially the women who live here … after all, according to Jack Kerouac, ‘Paris is a woman’!

Anyway, let’s go back to the table outside the very Parisian café Aux Deux Amis, where we sat smoking cigarettes over a glass of Pouilly-Fumé. Both of us were ridiculously faithful to the Parisienne stereotype, the woman who has mastered the art of creating an outfit from next to nothing: combining ripped jeans with a cashmere sweater, knotting a trench coat over a floaty dress, rolling up the sleeves of her blazer, slipping on worn-out ballet pumps to go dancing. All the characteristics contributing to the allure of the mythical Parisienne have already been largely, sometimes perfectly, depicted. Others before us have explored the Parisienne’s charming moodiness, her confidence and her quirks: the way she raises her middle finger at a driver beeping his horn at her refusal to use the zebra crossing and how she ignores a phone call she’s been expecting for fifteen months. In short, her indifference.

We often have fun spotting some of the characteristics of this contemporary heroine in ourselves. But we also often say that the Parisienne is not the idealized woman that’s sometimes portrayed. She’s not just this girl with a great look and crazy intensity. Parisiennes are more than that. Because, as we said to each other that day, we know many kinds of Parisiennes. A Parisienne will create her own start-up in Aubervilliers, raise three children near place de la Bastille, thrust her fist in the air as she protests in place de la République, dance to hip-hop near place d’Italie, collect trinkets in Belleville, open a restaurant on rue de Paradis, direct films near Jardin du Luxembourg. We have never met a single stereotypical Parisienne who lives with her cat on boulevard Saint-Germain and spends the day lounging around on a sofa while browsing a collection of short stories by Simone de Beauvoir. It’s not that we want to set the record straight or even deny the existence of this archetypal Parisienne. The Parisienne exists, and we know she does because we’ve met her twenty times for this book. But if there’s one thing that defines the Parisienne, a common denominator that goes beyond the way she dresses or speaks, it has to be, first and foremost, her approach to living in the city.

This book was born of a desire to go out and meet authentic Parisiennes from different backgrounds and walks of life. We wanted to discover their many different qualities and create an impressionist portrait of the Parisian woman. We had no intention of shattering the aforementioned stereotype, but instead we wanted to bring the myth to life by interviewing twenty women on the way they choose to live in Paris and their relationship with the city.

Jeanne was born and raised in the eleventh arrondissement, and still lives there in a top-floor apartment overlooking square Maurice Gardette. She describes herself first and foremost as the daughter of a locally renowned restaurateur who ran the fabulous Le Square Trousseau restaurant. She lugs her shopping basket around Aligre market every Saturday and on Sunday she’ll hunt for pre-loved ceramic vases which she’ll use to haphazardly display armfuls of wild flowers. I’m Lauren, the one writing these words, and I’ve just celebrated twelve years in the ninth arrondissement. I push a state-of-the-art buggy down rue des Martyrs, buy tons of left-wing papers and magazines at the weekend and eat organic salads in health-food cafés. If there’s something that makes us Parisiennes, it’s primarily this: the way we construct our daily life in the city. This was the idea that emerged one evening in April at café Aux Deux Amis, and we decided to put it into practice in the most Parisian of ways: by roaming all over the city.

So, notebook in hand and Olympus camera over the shoulder, we set off to meet our Parisiennes. We chose our interviewees intuitively, with no ulterior motive. We stumbled upon one while scrolling through Instagram, fell in love with another when having a drink one evening in a bar. We consulted friends of friends, mothers of friends, grandmothers of friends, women we admire.

We haven’t attempted to create a comprehensive sample group; we’re not anthropologists or sociologists. The Parisiennes featured in this book all belong, as we do, to the world of fashion, media, culture and art. At the end of the day, they’re just our Parisiennes. Those we’ve been fortunate enough to meet during the nine months it took to research this book.

Each encounter provided new information, including some surprises. Our Parisiennes helped us understand the individual features of women’s lives in Paris and inspired much of the additional information on the city that we’ve included between chapters. Our Parisiennes have challenged many of our beliefs and confirmed a number of our suspicions. They may live in an attic room, on a barge, on the fourteenth floor of a tower block or hidden in a little courtyard. They come from all walks of life, all social backgrounds, all cultures. But one thing unites them all: the confidence they have to be themselves. We chose these specific Parisiennes because they have what Jeanne often describes as a ‘little something extra’, that could be the ‘it’ in ‘it girl’. Each of them has invited us to take a walk in her shoes. They’ve shown us that Parisian women are at one with their city. And at the end of our grand tour, we realized that together we had painted a portrait of Paris. Nothing surprising about that. For the only true Parisienne is Paris herself.

Lauren Bastide and Jeanne Damas,
in Paris, 30 May 2017

Rue de Lappe
with Amélie Pichard

A kitchen garden

Two cats

Pamela Anderson

A handful of chia seeds

Most Parisiennes and fashion-lovers know Amélie Pichard. Since she launched her eponymous fashion label in 2010, her brand and identity have taken off. Her candy-pink shearling court shoes helped to establish her reputation, further promoted by the sparkly fringed mules she created with Pamela Anderson and the label’s adverts that feature red-headed models roaming countryside lanes. Everything Amélie Pichard creates looks very Amélie Pichard, so we were keen to see her apartment. And one morning in June, we ended up in one of the most typically Parisian quartiers, within the labyrinth of cobbled backstreets that frame place de la Bastille. It was all there: the building’s half-timbered hallway, the wonky stairwell. We worked our way up the three floors leading to her little hideaway where she greeted us with a cheerful hello, her red hair flowing down to her vintage T-shirt tucked into very skinny 501s. That’s Amélie Pichard to a T.

One art in particular is very Parisian: the art of expressing your taste through the way you dress or the way you decorate your apartment. Although it could be said that ‘decorating’ is a rather poor word to describe the energy many Parisiennes use to turn their home into a cosy, unique little hideaway that they’ll struggle to abandon for more than two hours in a row. Amélie is an expert on this. We could easily paint her portrait without asking her any questions at all, but instead taking a peek into all the nooks and crannies of her apartment. Her living room is filled with objects evoking 1960s America, as she draws much of her inspiration from this era. And taking centre stage on a wall near her front door, there’s a really old artificial leg, a reminder of the time when she learnt the art of making shoes from a genuine orthopaedist in the Quartier Ledru-Rollin in the twelfth arrondissement.

Amélie Pichard has also mastered the art of effortlessly and warmly welcoming guests into her home, even at ten o’clock in the morning. A few minutes after entering her apartment, there we both are, curled up, barefoot, on her velvet sofa, calves caressed by two large Persian cats that live there half of the time (Amélie and their father have joint custody). The designer rules her world with self-confidence and exuberance, and her world extends to the building’s little cobbled courtyard covered in moss. ‘I’ve just created a kitchen garden out there. I’ve planted tomatoes, aromatic herbs, strawberries. And I’m soon going to set up a compost bin,’ she tells us proudly. ‘Just ten years ago, there was still a goat and chicken down there.’ The maisonette attached to the courtyard had previously been home to a concierge, but then one day it became available. Amélie decided to rent the place and transformed it into a workshop, relieving her little apartment of a considerable number of shoeboxes at the same time. Some months later, she met her boyfriend there. He was a director who’d come to film her business. ‘I’m like a bear, I stay in my den, lying low, and things come to me,’ she boasts.

If things come to her, that’s because Amélie manages to find a way of organizing her life so everything takes place in a confined area close to her home. For example, she has recently opened her first boutique on rue de Lappe, just around the corner. Two years ago, before she laid her hands on the maisonette, one room of her apartment was fitted out as a workshop where she designed the prototypes for shoes. She still uses the room as an office and creative space. Her next collection is taking shape on inspiration boards where photos of David Lynch and Guy Bourdin as well as portraits of Bettie Page are pinned. Although she trained as a clothes designer, Amélie found her path in life when she realized that she enjoyed creating objects instead, something she thinks is a more ‘masculine’ penchant. Amélie Pichard decided to swim against the tide of fast fashion, instead coming up with a very Parisian way to be a successful designer.

While chain-smoking cigarettes and smiling continuously, she begins telling us about her life. Like the large majority of Parisian women, she didn’t grow up in the capital. Her home town is Chartres, a couple of hours from Paris. She spent every Wednesday and school holidays on her father’s farm, before he passed away when she was still a little girl. She spent the rest of the time with her mother and younger sister. She hated school and used to draw figures of women in the margins of her exercise books. When she was fourteen, she worshipped French popstar Ophélie Winter and Pamela Anderson, who she would later meet and with whom she would create her famous collection of vegan footwear. Like many of us, she experienced the mad impulses of teenage angst, which in her case drove her to bleach her hair platinum blonde; she then had to cut it really short to appease her mother. ‘I started feeling happy when I arrived in Paris at the age of twenty,’ she remarks.

When we ask her to reveal a Parisienne’s most prized possession, she says it’s her address book. Amélie herself never puts a step outside the small and well-defined area that lies between La Bastille, rue de Charonne and boulevard Ledru-Rollin. Within this area, there’s her local café where she goes every morning to knock back a black coffee after devouring her breakfast (porridge oats with almond milk, kiwi, banana and chia seeds), her florist, stationer’s and newspaper kiosk. ‘It’s my provincial side coming out,’ she says, smiling coyly, when actually there’s nothing more typically Parisian than thinking of your quartier as a small town in its own right, sighing when you need to walk an extra block because your usual pharmacy is closed, making a point of not buying bread in any other boulangerie than the one on your own street corner and being able to name all the shops within the ten streets closest to yours. These are all signs that you’re very Parisian.

It could be that Amélie is so attached to her quartier because she’s primarily a sedentary person, as she says so herself. For her, just crossing the Seine to go to ‘l’autre rive’ (the other bank) feels like an expedition. And what’s the point? Parisians (the ones we know at any rate) have the most fun when they’re at a friend’s place dancing around a turntable or a speaker, taking breaks from time to time to smoke cigarettes and philosophize, eight squeezed on to the balcony. True to her principle of making everyone come to her, Amélie now entertains a lot at home. When she invites guests over, she orders cases and cases of champagne. She brings together friends from all areas of her life, and they all mix very happily. Her soirées have a reputation for being some of the most fun-filled, crazy parties in the whole quartier. And, miraculously, her neighbours never complain about the noise, something that’s as important for Parisian apartment-hunters as a view over the Seine. So her speakers blast out playlists featuring the Beach Boys, Blondie and Beyoncé until the early hours of the morning.