From New York to Paris

Here I am again in France, poor poor me. Seriously, it’s for work (I teach French at an American university that runs its own off-campus programs.) Before heading to Paris, I stopped in New York City to check in on my parents and daughter Clara who is a freshman at the New School. She has decided to wear lipstick, and incarnate a 1920s persona. Wearing an old hat of mine and a pair of shoes that were custom made for me in Lyon back in the 1990s, she greeted me with her usual thrifted assemblage.

We met up with her friend Ada who also wears funky thrifted things. I don’t have a photo of her from NY, but I do have one from Edinburgh where Clara and she became friends, at the Fringe Festival. In New York, she was carrying a beautiful leather briefcaselike bag that she had found in Italy. I wish I had a photo of it.

After a couple of days in New York City, I flew to Paris where I met up with my friend Elsa who had herself just flown back from Los Angeles where she had been doing research on a Fullbright grant. And done plenty of thrifting herself. Yesterday in Paris, she was wearing clothes she had found in LA thrift stores.

We met at the store Antoine et Lili Déco, which sells home decoration items made from recycled materials and fair trade. Her friend Sonia was there too, furnishing her apartment. She too likes thrifting, and she was wearing an Hermès scarf that was given to her by her mom who had herself found it in a thrift store.

All these young women who are shopping at second hand stores. They go there because it’s fun, you can find something unique to wear, it’s environmentally correct … and it’s cheap. It’s really odd the contrast between those obsessive new store shoppers, crowding the sidewalks of Soho in New York and rue de Rennes in Paris, and the more trendy ones who tend to migrate to more working class districts to shop, which results in gentrifying the neighborhood really. Because they not only shop for clothes, they also stop at a café for a drink or a meal. The all male working class bars are fast becoming trendy as well. Having a waiter rudely tell you that they only have croque monsieur and a couple of beers on tap (not artisanal, please) makes the experience even more authentic.

What I found today as I headed to the department store Le Bon Marché to look at the windows that Persepolis author and illustrator Marjane Satrapi had designed was a street taken over by little TJ Maxxes. A very chic and bourgeois street was turning into a bargain place to shop. The irony is that Emile Zola, in The Ladies’ Paradise, a novel based on the founding of Le Bon Marché, had predicted the demise of the small shops. Instead, department stores are now closing their doors and being replaced by multi floored Zaras and H and Ms, or the FNAC, the record and electronics store that also happens to sell books (for how much longer, lord only knows). And small shops are thriving, getting rid of last year's unwanted models. *** The streets of Paris are filled with androgynous looking males and females, nannies and young student aged women pushing strollers and entertaining the children of the bourgeoisie, bourgeois women fighting boredom.

I was on a halfhearted quest. To go with my new mustard corduroy Gap pants, my only purchase so far this trip, I needed a belt. I was looking for a cheap leather belt that was in good condition. I didn’t find one, but I did have a nice chat with a woman who runs a vintage store on rue Sainte Placide.

This trip, I feel like I have all the clothes I need. It’s about time I reached the feeling of saturation.