Paris à la Mode

Temporary pavilions are going up in the Tuileries. All year round, these prefabs are going up in the few open spaces this city affords, and then a few days later being torn down. For now, the reason is the Pret à Porter Fashion Week. We’ve had the Haute Couture shows: they take place in more august settings. For instance, The Ritz swimming pool, a Pompeian styled double height space with a grand staircase at either end which models descend. But the fashion houses and their twice-yearly Collections are only the tip of the fashion iceberg, the show biz end of a hugely profitable industry where perfumes and cosmetics dominate and ‘Collections’ are for hyping Brand. Money is the key and as financial pressures mount on top designers, nervous breakdowns among their executives are not uncommon. When the then Editor of Harpers and Queen some years ago told me, “Fashion people are not like us,” she spoke with grim feeling.

In Pret à Porter the stakes may seem less elevated but high stress is linked to the bottom line. Getting a Collection ready to show the buyers is fraught with delayed delivery dates or production crises. A friend who works for an Haute Couture designer who also has his own Pret à Porter label has been toiling late evenings and weekends since before Christmas. He’s a perfectionist and the limited editions of his latest models must be exact to his cut or done again. He already has a big name and a vast salary in Haute Couture and his future and financial survival as a big name in Ready to Wear depend on maintaining that standard.

When Pret à Porter people flock to Paris twice a year to show or to buy, we cant avoid knowing they are here. The ready to wear mob are more practical and more numerous than their Haute Couture cousins. Many rent space in the pavilions that stretch along the Rue de Rivoli side of the Tuileries Gardens. Some take boutiques. Last autumn I passed a temporary showroom in the Palais Royal’s ‘Galerie Montpensier.’ I heard an English voice in a doorway say, “Oh so you’re showing from here. How clever of you.” Many also show in apartments on the Rue de Rivoli where, suddenly, one can be confronted by an ultra chic figure in a black trouser ensemble, coiffed and made up à la Coco for a Noel Coward play.

Fashion is theatre and fashion people are actors.  Sometimes models are snapped against the backdrop of the Louvre, the Palais Royal or the Tuileries. Last year, I saw a model shivering in a little summer number on stone steps while a snapper snapped. The background was a wall. They could have done the shoot somewhere warmer.

Buyers come more warmly clad. Some of the most fabulous furs I’ve seen, the most stylish and original designs have been on my quartier’s streets during 2011’s cold spring Fashion Week.

Sadly, Parisians no longer play a visible part in fashion. The recession has made it harder for ordinary women to dress well. Also, it’s harder to buy something original. Chains have taken over from the privately owned boutiques that made shopping in Paris a paradise. Globalization and the Euro are to blame. Not only that, but the weather and prevalent styles. Last summer one wearied of podgy little girls in denim shorts waddling along the streets. As the weather chilled, they donned opaque tights with their shorts. The alternative is leggings or jeggin’s. Few wear them with style. When I arrived here, women were enviably able to take jeans or a well cut skirt and accessorize them into seductive chic. Now, that art seems to have been lost except among older women. There is a generation gap in the dress codes but also in the sense of style. French schoolkids have it drummed into them to conform. No one wants to look ‘different’. And prevailing fashions are drab. Business women create a monotonous stream of black on the streets. One friend who lectures in fashion schools, and invariably wears bright colours, complains that “Traveling on the Metro is like going to a funeral.”

If it’s ok for younger women to dress down in torn denims and Ug boots, it’s also ok to get fat. Many French girls are built skinny, but fast food has entered the French diet and too many girls wear skin-tight jeans, leggings or shorts that accentuate their figure faults. It also takes all the sex appeal out of a short skirt when someone is showing all but their anal fissure and wearing it with flat shoes; or worse, clomping along in ultra high platforms like a cowgirl just dismounted from a fat horse. Try walking along behind them!

Is there worse to come? While fashion models have been getting skinnier for decades there is a movement to bring on so called curvaceous models. Think Monroe, Bardot, Sophia Loren, and we might say, yes, why not make curves fashionable again? But, in order to promote the idea, February’s French Elle featured a hefty female on its cover. Yes, hefty, with walloping great thighs and unbalanced proportions. Wearing a navy blue body reminiscent of grandma’s navy gym knickers, she shows a belly bigger than her breasts. English Vogue is to follow in October with plump singer Adele on its cover. She has a great voice but does she have a waist? Many fat as opposed to curvy women don’t. Corsets could become the rage once more! But today’s image is more androgyne, slim hipped, long legged, small breasted. It reflects the changed role of women as providers not nourishers.

I’ve always thought fashion and good figures were about pleasing the eye, but it seems we’ve lost all sense of the beauty of a woman’s shape if the only alternative on offer to the anorexic bodies that lazy photographers and fashion designers find so easy to use in place of coat hangers, is some lumpen lass who makes one wish she would wear a burka—or lay off fries.

My ideal female model is in the Tuileries. She’s a statue of Diana the Huntress: and aesthetically pleasing.  If you visit Paris, take a look at this classical image of female beauty by Louis Auguste Leveque, and imagine her dressed by Saint Laurent. Yves, you should be with us at this hour.

Paris in Love

All over the world St Valentines is a commercial opportunity to sell flowers, chocolates, or saucy undies.   In Paris, love is a round the clock, round the year event. On every corner, and sometimes on one or two specific corners one may see them, the couples who have nowhere else to go-- because both are married, perhaps, or because one is married and the other lives with parents or friends. One can’t avoid seeing them. No matter what weather, they are there, entwined on park benches, welded together on street corners. There is one couple I see each time I approach the doors to my swimming pool. They are, perhaps, sheltering from the cold. But there are others who brave the cold and I see them, legs wrapped around torsos on benches in the Tuileries, kissing deeply while snow flakes fall around them like petals of some blown white virgin rose.

How hard it must be to be lovers who have nowhere to go and no time in which to be together outside their legitimate relationships. And there are increasing numbers of those as separation and divorce becomes more common and easy to obtain (the rate in France has risen to 40% during the past decade) but affordable housing is in short supply. The law caters for it with Gallic efficiency. Children become back packers, spending alternate weeks with father or mother. In one case I know, a father of seven married a mother of three. Thus ten children have to divide their time between two homes: the house of the second marriage is a Grand Central Station for them all. Despite these fearful consequences of such new married love, there is no shortage of bonding between the newly single. More and more couples are however opting to live separately in their own apartments. Will this mean fewer passionate pairs entwined along streets and in parks? Or do the French prefer to share their intimate moments? Paris is exceptional in this. I have lived in many cities but I have never seen this clinging together of couples whose aspect is that of love at the end of the world. However ephemeral their passion, it seems real and intense. Love is now. A stranger can sweep you into his arms on a street corner.

The romantic behaviour of Frenchmen is in their blood and in their mythology. I was having a St Valentines lunch with my French lover who has long displayed his romantic instincts as well as his fervent passion. He buys me underwear so that I now view him as my corsetiere: and he is becoming better and better at choosing the bra styles and remembering the sizes.

Our Valentine lunch was at the Café Ruc, a couple of blocks from my apartment and I was not surprised when he ordered his favourite steak tartar with pommes allumettes. There is something invitingly naughty about stealing your lover’s frites from his dish. Not as naughty as having your knickers stolen if you go off to the loo and he follows you with such intent. My concern is he doesn’t end up at home with my knickers in his pocket.

However, St Valentine's is also important for married couples. I saw some neighbours from my building sitting down to lunch around the time my lover and I were ending our own dejeuner. They are elderly, but sans dout their love is still worthy of celebration. The husband is one of the most handsome men in my quartier. Although white haired and becoming frail, he is clearly a lifelong lady killer. He invariably bows to me as we pass and gives a lingering look from under his brows, a lifetime habit, I feel. His wife, a tiny mouse of a woman who has probably been fighting off attacks from predatory females for decades, never greets me. No wonder they are never apart. As they were shown to their table I was touched at the way M’sieu was gently helping his wife shed her coat and making sure that she was at her ease. He was gallantry and courtesy personified. But he belongs to another generation: and another world of courtesies.

My lover leaped up to pay the bill discreetly, taking his coat and apparently abandoning me, his scarf and his briefcase. I had to follow him with these items. Before pouncing at my nearby apartment, he had to check his Blackberry then switch it off. He had a lot of concentrated passion to get through before getting back to the office.

He had already given me some delightful lingerie, plus black stockings trimmed with red satin bows at their tops and a big box of champagne to keep us going over a number of passionate visits. He is absolutely gorgeous and very, very smart.

A Frenchman can be all a girl really needs. If he’s the right Frenchman. Purrrrrrrrrrrrrr….

Petty France

Oh dear, what a bore, I have to write another blog about this bally euro biz. The reason is the irrational attack coming from the Elysee Palace and the Bank of France, following Great Britain’s stand at the last summit in Brussels. One might add that Britain standing alone at this event was reminiscent of WW2 where, faced with Fascist dictators to the south and Nazi invasions to the north, the only country to remain free and to fight the Beast, was Great Britain.

But the problem now is not WW2, but, as I discussed in my last blog, WW3. This time it’s not a Hitler or a military confrontation that is the problem but the insane rush to spread the use of a common currency among nations that have not yet moved far enough along the path of economic, political and fiscal convergence to enable them to manage their economies in the straight jacket of a common interest and exchange rate. The situation is made worse by a panicking little tyrant who is terrified that he is going to lose his position as President of France in the next Presidential elections scheduled for April/May 2012.

His determined support for the euro and for the policies intended to prop up that currency are based on his desire to remain in power as French President, or if not that, then to get a plumb job in Europe after he leaves office. It is clear that EU jobs for sacked senior politicians in Europe are based on the degree to which those politicians have sustained policies that support the EU and its bunch of unelected plutocrats; the Commissioners and their huge staff of overpaid lackeys.

Sarko is in a dilemma. If he loses the elections, and it looks as if he will, (my private sources tell me his usual supporters are veering towards other candidates in droves) then he will probably also lose his rich wife (who everyone says was only ever there for the ride). When the photo-opportunities cease, we are told, she will dump him. Without her financial support and without his Elysee stipend, he is desperate to get a job in Europe. Like Tony Blair, Sarko knows that dropping out of high political office means one needs ‘friends’ in the international political job market. The soon to be ex-President of France may be desperate to seek other forms of remuneration. But since he has been treating his friends with a little less than friendship, (Gaddaffi, and Ben Ali of Tunisia were both Sarko ‘friends’) then one may expect he will have problems. Many of his other friends control the French media. They will do their best for him until the chances of his remaining President of France diminish to the point of no return. And there are only three months to go before that happens.

That’s why he is attacking the UK in every way he can out of sheer spite. The attack by the Bank of France on the British economy and AAA status is just one example of this. Sarkozy’s grand plan to position himself for the eventual Presidency of Europe has been foiled by the British veto. Perhaps D. Cameron was one of the recent Sarko friends who saw that he was being deceived by the ego-centred little guy in high heels whose determination to impose undemocratic controls on the budgets of all EU countries is only a plot intended to pave his way for a new job after May 6^th 2012.

One may well ask, ‘Does such a person merit the chance to govern a leading European nation? Let alone aspire to play a role in the direction of the EU?”

Is This World War 3?

In Paris, from where I am watching the European drama unfold, the Eurozone crisis is causing an underlying hysteria. Comment has been that without the Euro, France would have been in poor shape. We now have the hideous possibility that the Euro will crash and everything will revert to the former currencies. They can then be picked off one by one by the markets. The Euro has been the Euro Forte. And there are huge political overtones and undertones to this. We go back again to WW2.

Remember the story about the little princess who was cursed in her cradle by a nasty witch who turned up at her Christening? She was supposed to prick her finger on a needle and fall asleep for 100 years. She was locked away in a castle, far from sewing needles. But guess what! She managed to find an old crone somewhere in the upper rooms of the castle who was sewing. And guess what, again, thanks to Fate, she managed to prick her finger and fell asleep for 100 years.

Well, it took a mighty prince to hack his way through the forest and enter the castle to awaken her with a kiss. I’m not sure the same thing will happen to the European Union. It’s pricked its finger all right and it’s been fast asleep and dreaming for decades. It’s almost 100 years since World War 1 began. World War 1 led directly to World War 2. Shall we take a closer look at the historical scenario?

The political developments before and after World War 2 have been to try to avoid, at all costs, the possibility of any other conflict in Europe based on nationalist rivalries. Hence, and see my recent blog, ‘A Walk in the Woods,’ the altruistic attempts during the 1930’s and post war by Jean Monet to begin a long term diplomacy for a European Union. At that stage no one, except Winston Churchill, said they intended to bring about a United States of Europe. The aim was only to prevent further wars.

So, back to the fairy tale: the little princess, Europa, was put away in a tower in Brussels where no one could possibly let her get hold of a needle with which to prick her finger. But Fate, took a hand. Somehow, she did prick her finger and fell asleep for 54 years. Meanwhile the EU became more and more powerful, more and more burocratic and sucked in more and more money from its vassal states. Countries queued up to join the super state, which soon launched the common currency, the Euro and member states rushed to surrender their own currencies to become part of the Eurozone.

With all the desperate attempts of certain nations, Germany and France in particular, dedicated to the prevention of the collapse of the Euro, that lynchpin of the European Union as a State and its ticket to becoming a Super State controlling fiscal, monetary and budgetary policy in its vassals, the Euro has fallen into the hands of a big and nasty dragon. It’s called Reality.

To take a step away from the fairy story, let’s say the Euro drama, or Eurogeddon as some are now calling the present global financial horror based on unrealistic financial planning by several nations, is beginning to look like Fate. The creation of the EU and all the attempts to avoid another world war starting in Europe, have, like some wicked fairy prediction, produced the very conditions for a global war that it was intended to prevent.

The war is not, at present, one involving armaments but one involving the financial underpinnings of the State of Europe, as some Eurocrats would like it to be.

Once again, we have to ask about the Reality Principle involved in this mess.

The spectre of a European financial meltdown involving mega-debt default by governments and widespread banking collapse followed by liquidity crises, company bankruptcies, unemployment on a scale hitherto never envisaged, riots, economic and structural collapse, can never for a moment resemble the catastrophies of World War 1 or World War 2. Or can it ?

So much for a dream. I am afraid the worst may be upon us. We are only half way through the long sleep. The Treaty of Rome was signed on March 25^th 1957, just under forty years after the end of World War 1 in 1918. 2014 will mark the 100 years’ anniversary since the start of World War 1 in 1914. Are we into fairy stories here?

Wake up Princess Europa. Your Prince is not the IMF, not other European countries, not China or the Arab States, certainly not the US which is in even more horrific deficit than any European state, not Magic Money that makes gargantuan national debts go away. The Prince is actually the Dragon called Reality.

If the so called democratic nations who depend on capitalism for their survival, really understand the principles at stake, they will stop sucking all the money in the marketplace into their state spending sprees and leave the vast proportion of global funds to the free enterprise system.

Capitalism will only work when the State has withered away; and democracy will only work when the State has relinquished its hold on spending.  Karl Marx did mention the fact that the State must wither away. That goes as much for free enterprise as for socialism, And that goes especially for the European Super State that is seeking more and more powers to control the taxation and budgets of democratically elected national governments.

Maybe the World War 3 of the Euro’s demise would be worth the trauma if the lesson is learned that super states and super-currencies can’t work unless they are truly democratic in every way. And that includes their public spending programmes.

Democracy has a long way to go. But the war in Europe will continue until these ultimate lessons are learnt.

Will the Euro collapse? I’ve a feeling some lovely Fairy Godmother may turn up right at the end of the story and the poor old Reality Dragon may have to go back into its cave for another long wait. Hmmmm…

Praise the Dead

In France we have just passed through two weeks of mourning. That is between November 1st and November 11th.
This is a heavy period. November 1st, “All Saints Day” is for remembering your personal dead and a pall of grief hangs over the country. People buy chrysanthemums in pots or in cut bunches to place on graves. I was, in my first year in France reprimanded by a florist when I asked for potted chrysanthemums at a different season: in London one bought them to decorate the house during the winter months. I remember their distinctive scent in my drawing room. I did not associate it with death. But I live in a country where such symbolism is not transmutable. Chrysanthemums mean remembrance of the dead.
November 11th is quite different. The dead are the dead of history. Whereas in the UK this day is a moment to pause with pride to remember the victorious dead, with poppies, in France it is a moment of terrible grief. There are no poppy sellers in the streets of Paris.
To know the difference between the suffering of France and the UK of WW1 for which November 11th is the Armistice Day one need only take a long walk around parts of rural Normandy where every hamlet has its War Memorial. This is also true in the UK, but somehow it has never had the emotional impact for me to read a list of war dead in the UK compared to reading such a list on an isolated cenotaph in the heart of rural Normandy. Why? This gives one pause for thought. Is it worse if the war took place on your own nation’s soil? The terrible losses for France in that war and the fact that the blood of the slain, yes and English blood also, soaked the soil of northern France, changed her history for the decades that followed. In France Germany and elsewhere in Europe, it was the source and cause of the political errors that led to WW2. France was not alone in making the political misjudgments that allowed Hitler to build a powerful army. The British government was equally to blame. But then, when WW2 came, Britain is protected by the Channel, and this gave time to rearm. Too quickly, France could only capitulate. Would a powerfully armed France with strong political leadership have been able to resist the Nazi invasion? If only: but the realities were otherwise. I have read what Antoine St Exupery wrote when he was a pilot in those early days before De Gaulle went into exile in England, the days in late 1939 and early 1940 when French pilots were flying against the Luftwaffe in Eastern France. He wrote that their calamitous attempts, in terms of casualties, to stem the Lufftwaffe’s onslaught was “like trying to throw a glass of water on a forest fire.”
This history is also behind the terribly poignant sadness of November 11th here in France. It is also behind the desperate attempts being made by France and Germany, especially Germany, to save the Euro and with it the European Union that is the phoenix arisen from the ashes of these two terrible wars.
I can only say that the terrible sadness of the losses of WW1 and the Nazi occupation in WW2 still lingers in the hearts of French people, handed on from one generation to the next: that and a terrible sense of defeat. On November 11th, I find it hard to hold back my tears at the thought of those tragic years and their historical consequences. November is a sad month in Paris.
I prefer to think of November 1st as the Celtic New Year, the beginning of life after the disquieting night of Halloween when the earthbound dead walk abroad. And as a part Celt, that is how I celebrate that day. Death passes into history. Life is reborn.

Just Another Business Deal or How I Met Ghaddafi

So the boys with the briefcases are being urged to get back into Libya as fast as they can. Is this their finest hour? Or is it NATO’s?

I have been in doubt, since the first French Mirages entered Libyan airspace on their mission of mercy, about the validity of NATO’s participation in Libya’s tribal struggle. To create a ‘no fly zone’ to protect the civilian population wasn’t it? That has seemed a transparent excuse for getting into this fight. Clearly NATO forces were fighting against Ghaddafi’s superior weaponry, and civilians were being as much injured and killed by the rebels and by NATO as by the dictator’s army.

Now that Ghaddafi is dead, I am in even greater doubt about NATO’s intervention. Clearly without it the rebels would have failed to gain any advantage. They lacked the firepower and organisation of Ghaddafi’s forces. I have not watched the apparently horrific visuals of war in this conflict. But I have become more and more disturbed by the involvement of NATO in this civil war. I have thought that the Western powers had no idea what they were getting into and I am now even more sure that they did not know it: or even that they know it now.

When Obama backed off, no doubt on the advice of the CIA, and his opinion pollsters he left the field open to Cameron and Sarkozy. The latter appeared to be pursuing a private revenge against Ghaddafi. The former seemed to believe he was doing something noble. But now Cameron urges the briefcase brigade to do their stuff among the ruins.

Of course, Ghaddafi was a legitimate target thanks to his involvement in terrorism—the IRA and Lockerbie. He was an individual target, an enemy and a nuisance. Much better to let other Libyans kill him, and to help them do it, than to use assassins.

I have long taken and interest in Ghadaffi, since the day in August 1969 when I met a Libyan diplomat on a train and was invited to meet him again later for a drink with some of his friends in a Grosvenor Square hotel bar. I was a very young journalist. The group I met were all young Libyan officers and our host was the managing director of an important British arms manufacturer. I was also in politics as a Liberal Parliamentary candidate and I may have mentioned this. I think the arms salesman spotted me for the trouble I might cause. Anyway, I did not see my train buddy again, but two weeks later, on September 1^st, I heard that King Idris of Libya had been deposed in a bloodless coup and that a group of young officers led by Muhammar Gaddafi had taken over the country.

The penny dropped. The MD of the British armaments company had been making the necessary hardware available to the young officers for their coup. Was Gaddaffi among the group? Yes, as a lissom 27 year old Major. But the British arms salesman, a well-fed forty something with a jolly laugh, was just another man with a briefcase.

Somehow, the wheel has come full circle.

A Walk in The Woods

A Walk in the Woods

Shortly before Christmas in 2004 I was walking in the woods on the fringes of the Forest of Rambouillet, west of Paris. It was beginning to get dark and I realized that I was lost. I took a narrow path in the direction of the fading Western sky and found a large sign, which directed me to the house of Jean Monet.

The house lay in a hollow on the side of a road. An L shaped manor, it is since Monet’s death. a museum, but as it was now past 4.30pm I was not able to visit it. I took directions from the caretaker and walked back along the road to the house of friends where I was staying. But the next day, I returned to Jean Monet’s house and visited the museum. Monet, the son of Monet the painter had a romantic history and love story but his greatest claim to fame lies in his role as the idealistic founder of the European community.

I walked through the house, not a large one, but a charming place. I saw letters that moved me, from De Gaulle, and from Winston Churchill, who at that time advocated a union of France and Great Britain. I’m rather glad that never took place: the war would in any case have made it impossible to pursue.

The political developments after WW2 among those nations who wanted to avoid any such catastrophe in the future have led to the present predicament, namely, the European Union, a monster of burocracy without effective democratic controls.

As someone who was a candidate in the first Parliamentary Elections to that European Union and a believer in European democracy, I am now disheartened.

But I have been disheartened for many years. The EU has become a mega-catastrophe. The democratic element is pathetic. The rapid enlargement is causing enormous problems and the expansion of the Eurozone may turn out to be fatal, not only to Europe but to the entire world.

The creation of multiple billion funds to bail out overspending governments is one thing, but when those proposed bail out funds reach the multiple trillions, we must know that so much capital is being withdrawn form the global market place that enterprises must become the poorer for it. Enterprises must also suffer from lack of investment. So must the Third World and so must the individuals who want to borrow to buy a place to live at today’s exorbitant prices.

This past weekend the G20 finance ministers met in Paris. One heard barely a squeak from their deliberations.

Harking back to the previous meeting in February, this is what Reuters reported:

‘The ministers stated in February that they wanted to see medium term fiscal consolidation plans that are differentiated according to national circumstances, the pursuit of appropriate monetary policy and the enhancement of exchange rate flexibility, sustained global demand, increased potential growth, job creation, global rebalancing and measures "to reduce excessive imbalances and maintain current account imbalances at sustainable levels by strengthening multilateral cooperation." They agreed on a set of indicators for focusing on persistently large imbalances that require policy actions. Work continues on indicative guidelines against which each of the indicators will be assessed. They want the guidelines to take into account national or regional circumstances, including large commodity producers’

OK. This makes mega-sense. While there are pressures inside the EU to make Eurozone countries part of a fiscal and political union, this communiqué does not suggest that the disparate economies of European nations should be subjected to tight surgical conformity. Would it not be even wiser to admit that a community of individual nations with widely differing economic and political structures and goals should not belong to a single currency block that limits their use of such devices as Exchange rate flexibility?

Clearly, the Eurozone must face these issues and those governments whose leaders are desperate for their own survival should be dissuaded from trying to persuade the others that political and fiscal uniformity are the solution to irresponsible economic  mismanagement.

Jean Monet, I apologize, but your ideals have hit the reality rocks.