66 Clickety-Click

Sixty-six steps to the top.

We live on the 4th floor - sans acenseur (no lift).

The Misfits

We have moved from Port Vila, where you’d leave the house wearing a shirt full of holes, a ripped pair of pants and a grotty pair of thongs and feel pretty good about yourself.  “Dressing up” meant matching your dress to your havaianas and poking a flower in your hair.  You felt completely overdressed if you wore heels or anything slinky and it got warm enough to contemplate jeans and maybe a long-sleeved top about 3 days a year.

We now live in Le Marais, the best dressed suburb in Paris, the best dressed city in Europe.

Suddenly I am embarrassingly aware of every stain, rip and greasy smudge from my brekky croissant.  And things need to match!  It is all such an effort.  And It’s hard not to feel self-conscious when people-watching seems to be every Parisian’s favourite pastime –streets teem with people perched in cafes, keeping one eye closely on the parade of outfits filing past.  When you pass someone in the street, almost without fail there will be a very quick flick of the eyes from your head to toe as they assess your get-up, their expression too cool to give anything away.

But I’m starting to realise that it is really not what you wear, but how you wear it.  You do not slink sheepishly down the footpath feeling utterly self conscious about the fact that your belt doesn’t match your bag, or that you aren’t wearing black stockings, but rather three-quarter leggings with black socks pulled up to the knees, made to look like stockings (a ha – fooled you all!).  You adopt the Parisian stride.  Eyes fixed straight ahead, chin up, and “et quoi ? ? ” written on your face.  And it really works.  Even enough for me to walk back from the pool today with wet hair, massive goggle marks and a ridiculous outfit cobbled together of stuff that wasn’t in the washing machine, and not feel like too much of a freak.

I brought some pretty ‘!crazy!’ island print dresses from Vila that I was planning to frolick along the boulevards in, but I’ll really have to work hard on my Parisian stride to pull them off (but do steely expressions and Chew Store fabric work well together?).  Time is against me though, because it is starting to get chilly...

Despite our semi-attempt to dress smartly, we did feel a bit scruffy at the opening of a Marilyn Monroe photography exhibition the other night.  We didn’t have to ‘stride’ very far because the exhibition was on the bottom floor of our building (which yes, sigh, was the only reason we were invited) – a very happening space called La Galerie de L’Instant.  Our scruffiness might have been accentuated because Marilyn Monroe was an amazingly glamorous person and her visage gleamed down at us from every nook and cranny, or rather because, unlike most people in the crowd, we were not seriously contemplating handing over $15 000 for one of the prints.  Of course, we pretended we were though. 

Paris Fashion Week starts this week (yay?).  I can only imagine the eye-flicking and pedestrian gawking will intensify.

My hot prediction is that goggle marks will be totally ‘in’ this winter.

Paris

We're here!  Sort of.

View from our bedroom window on the first night in town.