They’ve Got le Look
The French are convinced that they are the sexiest people on earth, apart perhaps from the odd Hollywood hunk or Brazilian beach babe. As proof, they will say that their haute couture is the most stylish in the world. Though this is rather like saying that the Koreans are the best drivers on earth because that’s where so many cars are made. The truth is that the French mostly dress like frumps.
There are, of course, some incredibly sexy people walking the streets (and especially the beaches) of France. But this has more to do with their relative lack of obesity and an ability to resist the temptation to ruin their skin and hair with gallons of make-up and blond dye. When people write books about French women, they go on about style, taste and class. What they seem to mean is arch-conservatism. If you look at film divas like Sophie Marceau, Juliette Binoche or Carole Bouquet, you hardly notice their clothes. It’s what is inside that counts. The clothes are usually as classic (a polite word for unadventurous) as you can get.
The average French person totally ignores the existence of French haute couture. Partly because haute couture is not really meant to be worn at all, of course – the catwalk designs are simply there to get photos into magazines. Partly also because even the prêt à porter stuff by Dior, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent et al costs a fortune. But mainly because most French people prefer to dress like their mums and dads did, and fit into the traditional bourgeois mould.
French teenagers come in three basic models – the denim classic, the seventies hippy/fake Rasta and the sporty Bronx rapper/ho. When they cross over into adult life, though, they dispense with any daring elements and start dressing like their parents. As soon as male office workers hit their mid-twenties, they begin wearing ties that seem to have died of boredom. Meanwhile, their female colleagues will often dress as if looking for sympathy. Individual style is almost non-existent – it’s as if no one wants to stand out from the crowd. Go to a party in Paris thrown by anyone over twenty-five and the likelihood is that most people in the room will be in jeans or dressed in black. The worst thing anyone in Paris can do is appear uncool, and wearing jeans or black is totally safe. If the clothes in question have a discreet French designer label, all the better, but the important thing is not to stand out in the crowd.
Yes, sorry, France. Apart from a few chic exceptions, you may dress to kill, but to kill with classicism.
And if the French are so stylish, how come the top French fashion houses employ British designers like Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, or Germans like Karl Lagerfeld?
Prozac of the People
In July 2004, the head of France’s biggest commercial television channel, TF1, said that his programmes existed to sell Coca-Cola. Patrick Le Lay gave an interview declaring that TF1’s programmes ‘had a vocation to entertain the viewers and relax them between two commercial breaks’. And the astonishing thing is that despite this cynicism, his channel remained the most popular in the country, which says a lot about the discernment of the average French téléspectateur.
This flagrant desire to sell advertising space means that prime-time television in France is as exciting and varied as a nuns’ shoe shop.
At eight o’clock in the evening, the two main channels, TF1 and France 2, have their evening news. At around eighty forty p.m., the news finishes and an endless series of ads, broken up by weather, lottery results and the like, begins. Meanwhile, the other main channels, which air their news at different times so as not to compete, will have caught up and will be ready to begin the big prime-time show. At ten to nine or so, this main attraction begins, and won’t end until ten or ten thirty. If the viewers are lucky, it will be a movie, telefilm or documentary. More frequently, it will be either a reality TV show or some kind of panel game on which ageing stars and witless presenters will be given enormous microphones and told to laugh at each other’s anecdotes or old TV clips.
In France, the big handheld microphone is much more than a phallic symbol – it is a badge that tells the viewer, ‘I’m on TV and you’re not, peasant.’ The French do have lapel mics, but these are considered too small to be effective on the prime-time chat shows. Only if you are brandishing a silver cucumber will the viewer understand that you are a TV star and therefore by definition intelligent, witty and beautiful.
The French make good documentaries (which are, of course, on-screen opportunities to prove how right you are about something) and reasonable telefilms, especially detective stories that give them a chance to perpetuate the myth that their police are good at solving crimes. On the other hand, French TV producers do not understand the sitcom. They do make them, but they are more sit than com. This is mainly because they think TV is not a noble medium, but just a pale imitation of a cinema screen, a bit like a postcard of the Mona Lisa. Why ‘waste’ good writers and actors on something so short and frivolous?
But this attitude is just like France’s relationship with the hamburger – it’s not noble cuisine, but the French secretly binge on it whenever they can. At the time of writing there are three TV channels showing constant reruns of Friends, sometimes two or three episodes back to back, to fill the yawning gap left by the lack of decent French programmes.
You Can Judge a Livre by
Its Couverture
French literary books have the most boring covers since Moses carved the commandments on to bare stone. Even then, Moses probably chose a nice shade
