Because despite all the globalization in its shopping streets, Paris is still a capitale de la mode, and home to most of the top surviving haute couture houses. And it’s not only the models who come here wanting a slice of this fashion cake. A large proportion of visitors to the city are willing to spend a small fortune to take home something with a genuine Parisian brand stamped, sewn, engraved or welded on to it. They could just as easily buy it online, but only in Paris can they experience the thrill of going to the shop, founded perhaps by the creator of the brand, and staffed by people so beautiful that it is almost sexually exciting to be mistreated by them.
The most intense clothes-related sado-masochism goes on in a part of Paris called the triangle d’or (golden triangle), a section of the 8th arrondissement just to the southwest of the Champs-Élysées. Here, along the tree-lined avenue Montaigne, French fashion houses like Dior (at no. 30), Nina Ricci (no. 39), Chanel (no. 42—presumably numbers 5 and 19 were already taken), and Chloé (no. 44) have their showcase Paris stores, housed in some très chic apartment buildings. Casually littering the street, double or triple-parked, there are often Ferraris or top-range 4WDs, apparently abandoned or strategically positioned as décor to heighten the ambiance of luxury (though in fact these have usually been left this way by provocative valet parkers).
The fashion stores themselves are often set back slightly from the pavement, as if to give shoppers a chance to stop and take in some oxygen after the shock of reading the numbers on the credit-card machine—and, of course, to recover from the breathless thrill of taking part in Paris’s permanent fashion show.
The experience is similar over on the other side of the Champs-Élysées, near Concorde. The same brands and more sit nose-to-tail along the much narrower rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which offers Paris’s best chance of being bundled off the pavement by a sublimely dressed and coiffed Parisienne rushing to find a taxi after buying the perfect shoes for her lunch date. Here, the atmosphere of luxury is heightened not by valet parking but by limos ferrying diplomats and politicians to and from embassies and the Élysée Palace down the street.
Yes, Paris’s fashion industry is at the heart of the city’s establishment, as it has always been …
Kings and queens of the fashion world
It is often said these days that most of us live under a kind of fashion tyranny, dressing as the magazines order us to, or the department stores allow us to. But it wasn’t much different in centuries past, when anyone who could afford it had to emulate their rulers or be excluded from high society.
This was especially true during the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715), who believed almost literally that the sun shone out of his royal posterior, and wanted everything that clothed it to be suitably divine. He therefore summoned the best tailors from all over Europe to his court to make baroque outfits for him and his nobles. Lace and ribbon-covered culottes, shoes decorated with roses, bouffant blouses, pheasant-feather hats—and that was just the men. Women wore tight corsets, low-cut dresses, and trains that got longer as the lady rose up the social ladder (which she often did by taking all her clothes off).
The magnificence of this non-stop preening influenced not only the rest of France, but most of Europe, except those countries under the yolk of Puritanism, of course, where the merest buckle was regarded as a temptation sent by Satan.
Although Louis and his successors managed to bankrupt France with their unsuccessful wars and botched colonialism, Paris hung on to its luxury tailoring industry, and the city became a popular shopping spot for European aristocrats. Anyone with some money to spend could find a tailor capable of making an outfit that would be the talk of the town back home.
All this could have been called Parisian haute couture, but it took an Englishman to pin the concept down and turn the tailor from a craftsman indulging the whims of the noble customer into the tyrant of taste that is today’s styliste.
Worth his weight in chintz
Charles Worth was born in Lincolnshire in 1825 and went to London as a teenager to become an apprentice draper (a merchant selling cloth and sewing materials). He apparently spent most of his time bookkeeping, but developed a passion for dress design. So when his apprenticeship finished, he immediately left for Paris to work for a textile merchant who also sold ready-made clothing. Here, Worth began to make dresses that won prizes at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 and the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle. Soon, he had enough private customers to set up a company of his own in the rue de la Paix, a new, chic street built on the site of a monastery that had been demolished after the Revolution.
It was at this point, in 1858, that Worth created the business model that made Paris the fashion capital it is today, and he did this by introducing three revolutionary concepts.
First, by his sheer self-confidence and by sewing in labels saying ‘Worth, 7 rue de la Paix’, he convinced everyone that his dresses were not just clothing but works of art. Secondly, he showed potential customers how magnificent they could look by modelling the dresses on real women rather than simply draping his creations over a tailor’s dummy. And thirdly, he held fashion shows, dictating to women what they would be wearing the following season.
This was not yet a democratization of fashion—the dresses were handmade and richly decorated, and would be individually tailored to fit the rich clientes. But Worth got the royals to come to him rather than vice-versa. First Princess Metternich, wife
