It's OK for intellectual feminists to like fashion

April 25th 2013

Is maje trying to bridge the Paris-province fashion gap?

Growing up in Nevers, a city with a population of 43,000, 260 kilometres away from Paris, Fashion Carrousel and I often resented the Paris-province fashion divide.

It wasn’t just that fashion shows took place in Paris but that, from reading magazines, we felt that the best stores and all the cool fashion-related events were in the capital.

Brands have picked up on this general provincial fashion frustration. They are trying to cancel out the Paris province inequality thanks to a smart us of their website.

Today, French womenswear brand maje invited its entire database to an evening of shopping and pampering, in association with L’Oréal Professionnel and essie, in six of its Paris stores.

“Maje doesn’t forget any of its customers” promises the brand. For clients not living in the capital or unable to attend the event, it is offering a bright yellow passport cover, luggage tag and essie nail polish to the first 150 people who make a purchase on its digital commerce website.

The two offers aren’t quite equivalent, especially in terms of reach. However, I welcome the initiative and hope it will lead to an ongoing use of the digital space by maje so that no matter where you live, you can benefit from its commercial initiatives.

Next step: segmenting the database so that subscribers only receive invitations to events that are geographically-relevant - ensuring they don’t suffer from needless fashion event envy.

Posted at 7:35pm and tagged with: Best practice, email marketing, MAJE, france,.

December 29th 2012

TV series: What was the point of Camille Mettier on The Hour?

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* Please note this article contains potential spoilers for series 2 of The Hour.

“And this is my wife”. Camille Mettier (Lizzie Brocheré), French wife of journalist, TV anchor and general show hero Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) is introduced at the end of the first episode of series 2 of The Hour, the Abi Morgan miniseries on the behind-the-scenes of a 1950s TV show.

The clues were there but they only fall into place at the last minute, leaving the viewers as shocked and saddened as Bel Rowley (Romola Garai), Lyon’s British producer, best friend and love interest.

The season (and possibly the show) is now over, yet Mettier’s role is still unclear. Trouble-maker for viewers meant to root for a Lyon/Rowley happy ending, Mettier is young, pretty and very Nouvelle Vague meets Beatnik. She has a Jean Seberg crop, swears in French when angry, says “oui” rather than “yes”, “can’t help flirting”, rarely wears pants and always wears her husband’s jumpers and shirts. When she goes out, it’s always in black: black turtleneck, little black dress, black coat.

Mettier is the cliché Anglo-Saxon take on the gamine and androgynous French woman, in sharp contrast with the British woman exemplified by Rowley, who lives for her story and her career.

Although both characters are typecast late 1950s women, their contrasting personalities filter through their fashion and beauty choices: Mettier’s loose, dark clothes to Rowley’s colourful, nipped-in suits, her dark crop to her wavy blond hair.

Both are women of their time, exercising their gender’s newfound freedom their own ways: Mettier sitting at home reading books and planning the next revolution and anti-nuclear war protest with her leftist friends is merely a study on how only Rowley, who understands and shares Lyon’s ambition and life goals, is best suited for him.

Posted at 7:59am and tagged with: Mad Men, TV series, bbc two, france, Classy film,.

December 27th 2012

Christine Lagarde’s career advice

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A middle-class teenager who’s raised to running one of the biggest law firms in the world before joining the French government and heading the IMF through hard work, dedication, rigour and talent, Christine Lagarde has long been one of my role models.

Reading through French journalists Cyrille Lachèvre and Marie Tisot’s biography Enquête sur la femme la plus puissante du monde in one sitting on Christmas day, it was impossible not to notice strong trends as to how she’s lead her career and life.

She sticks to form Lagarde was the Eurozone’s favourite Finance minister, not to mention the French government’s, when she ran for head of the IMF, yet she humbly sent the organisation a CV and cover letter.

She’s true to her style. When Lagarde started as French Finance minister, there was an uproar over the ostentatious jewellery she liked wearing. She gave in a few times, appearing on TV without them, but eventually decided against it since it made her feel naked. She’s always refused to dye her white hair. Lagarde’s tendency to include English words in French conversations annoyed politicians until Nicolas Sarkozy noticed having a Finance minister speaking fluent English was a decisive advantage.

She’s a meeting master. During one of the many all-nighters she had to pull to save Dexia, Lagarde kicked out of the room every person who didn’t hold decision power. When France ran the Ecofin, Lagarde sent the other European Finance ministers rules on how to behave during meetings, including “not reading the press while others speak”, “keeping speeches short” and “smiling”. Her time at Baker & McKenzie taught her to handle strong personalities and to always bring a back up to the negotiating table.

She’s generous. Lachèvre and Visot tell multiple anecdotes of collaborators who received gifts for no particular reason: she once bought her coworkers egg cups during a trip to the Netherlands because she liked them, purchased chocolate for everyone in Belgium and had a cake delivered to a journalist’s hotel room on his birthday. The meetings she runs always involve incredible food.

She has a very regimented lifestyle. Lagarde gets up before 6am everyday, usually to do some yoga, sometimes cycles to work. Photos of her discreetly exercising her abs during a meeting went viral in France. Lagarde doesn’t eat meat, hardly drinks any alcohol, doesn’t really go out late. Milk chocolate seems to be her only sin, sometimes eaten for lunch with litres of green tea.

She’s lead her career according to athletic principles. In her teens, Lagarde was part of the French synchronised swimming team, and you can find atheltic principles in her whole life, including eating carbs before a night of negotiations and believing in team work.

She doesn’t badmouth, nor does she spread gossip. Not about her collaborators, not about other politicians, not even about the Left when she was part of a right-wing government. This would go too much against her team-work ethic. Her loyalty lead her to introduce Red Bull in France, as per Prime Minister François Fillon’s wish and to never complain or comment when Sarkozy’s overcommunication tendency lead to additional financial difficulties for France.

She’s a relentless worker. Lagarde has a reputation for knowing her cases backwards, for turning up herself when others would send mere collaborators, for being able to ingest a large quantity of information really quickly and for making decisions even more quickly.

Posted at 11:01am and tagged with: career, france, politics,.

November 12th 2012

The Stripy T-shirt As A Political Symbol Of The French Industry

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Can you imagine Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business, innovation and skills posing for the cover of the Sunday Times magazine wearing a bowler hat and an umbrella in defence of the British industry? Arnaud Montebourg, the man with the slightly communist title of Ministre du Redressement Productif, minister of Industrial renewal, did just so for Le Parisien Magazine in the French equivalent of the clichéd British outfit: an Armor.Lux stripy t-shirt.

In the accompanying editorial, Montebourg wears other products of the French fashion industry such as Caulaincourt shoes and a Bérengère Claire shirt. His acknowledged aim is to prove the French industry is still going strong, producing quality products, and to encourage his fellow citizens to buy things made in France.

The French industry can’t bounce back without exports, including clothing ones, which accounted for 7.2 billion euros in 2011. Armor.Lux, Saint James and Petit Bateau are three of the French brands succeeding in France and abroad thanks to their high-quality nautical style.

It’s therefore fitting that, even though Montebourg’s cover t-shirt was French, the styling decision was anything but, adopting the codes of what is perceived as French outside the borders, rather than what the French people really wear.

A recent staple of the French wardrobe, first used by la Marine (the Navy) the stripy t-shirt was popularized over the past century by designers such as Coco Chanel and Jean Paul Gaultier. Fashion is one of France’s strongest soft powers, and the sailor jersey has become a symbol of Frenchness abroad. No French-inspired editorial is complete without it, and American magazine TIME used the item to cover its issue on The death of French culture.

The stripy t-shirt sells well because it sells the French way of life and the Gallic romanticism foreigners still buy into. Montebourg is not just wearing a t-shirt, he’s wearing the millions of tourists who come to Paris for the food and the philosophical conversations in cafés, for the nonchalant cigarette and l’amour libre. He’s wearing a garment which innovation, ignoring colour and cut versions, is stuck somewhere on a 1920s Deauville beach. Is this loop of heritage and cliché really what the French industry is condemned to?

Posted at 7:45pm and tagged with: france, petit bateau, politics, chanel, Stripe,.

November 4th 2012

Book review: Crushing on Delphine de Vigan’s Writing

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The blonde woman on the cover “wears a black turtleneck jumper, holds a cigarette in her left hand, she seems to be looking at someone or something, but likely isn’t looking at anything, her smile dark and sweet”*. The black and white woman immediately drew me to Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit, displayed between other recently published novels in a French train station in the middle of nowhere. For some reason, I was convinced she was the book author, Delphine de Vigan. I say for some reason, since nothing else about the cover, especially not the summary explaining the story was about her family and her mother, Lucile, suggested so.

I read Rien before all other Vigan novels, in between a Eurostar journey and my daily commute. The book stayed with me on the platform and working at my computer, it was the last thing I saw at night and the first thing I read in the morning. For a week, Lucile’s troubled world became mine, Vigan’s words impossible to shrug off. I didn’t know yet that Vigan’s foremost gift as a writer is to find the exact word to describe the anguish and torment of the human soul, but also the hope in bottomless darkness. Even reading her in George Miller English translations, you feel that the original verb had to be precise, lucid to allow such a seamless flow of sentences.

Rien is an abnormality in Vigan’s ten year writing career: it is double the size of her biggest previous novel, and, an acknowledged biography of her family with autobiographical forays, holds the key to her previous work. Having read Rien, you know Laure’s anorexia in Jours Sans Faim is hers, that Laure’s crazy mother is hers too. Lou’s family’s anguish after losing a child in No and Me mirrors her family’s and Mathilde’s misery at work in Underground Time was inspired by her own.

Vigan’s writing is to the point with a sense for surprise. Although craziness and untimely death are recurrent themes, her stories always took me to places I hadn’t expected. The ending of the first Les Jolis Garçons short story was my first literary surprise in weeks. Vigan’s talent for weaving inconspicuous details through a plot constantly keeps the reader alert, aware that although easy to read, her books demand attention and command introspection.

*Delphine de Vigan, Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit (JC Lattès, 2011), p.436 translation my own.

Posted at 5:53pm and tagged with: book review, literature, france,.

October 31st 2012

Lanvin’s Surrealist Tribute To Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet

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French luxury brand Lanvin messaged its Les Yeux d’Elsa brooches for Halloween. Made of a right and a left eye, red lips and black hands, the brooches come together in an email visual the Surrealists wouldn’t have rejected. Luckily really, considering Louis Aragon, the man who wrote the poem Les Yeux d’Elsa, Elsa’s Eyes, which inspired the design, was one of the three founders of the French literary Surrealist movement in 1919.

An ode to Elsa Triolet, the love of his life, Les Yeux d’Elsa was written during the Second World War. The poem references the blueness of her eyes and their tumultuous love (“you make big eyes perhaps it means you lie”, “violent amours”) as well as Aragon’s opposition to the War (“it happened one fine night the universe/foundered”) and heartbreak following the Occupation (“O the wet brightness seven-sorrowed mother/The colour-prism pierced by seven broadswords”). The Lanvin brooches, embellished with Swarovski crystals, have the brilliance of Elsa’s eyes: “I’m tangled in the net of shooting stars”, “I won this radium”. Pity they’re not blue.

Photos: Lavin email 30 October 2012, Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet from the Maison Elsa Triolet-Aragon

Poem translation by Timothy Adès

Posted at 5:48am and tagged with: literature, email marketing, france,.

October 14th 2012

The Inherent Sexism of the Valérie Trierweiler Debate

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Yesterday, the Huffington Post asked whether Valérie Trierweiler was “France’s least popular First Lady ever”. The question stemmed from the latest unauthorised biography of François Hollande’s partner, La Frondeuse (The Troublemaker), which attributes her a string of concomitant lovers, while her marriage to journalist Denis Trierweiler was still ongoing.

Right-wing politician Patrick Devedjian and left-wing politician Hollande are named as the lovers (Spoiler: both Devedjian and Trierweiler are suing for slander, sorry Hollywood). A man in each camp! Clearly she wasn’t taking any chance! She obviously wanted power! She used her feminine wiles to get ahead!

Trierweiler is a classic case of the double standard society holds female sexuality to. No one has ever claimed Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who in between his three wives married into wealth and networks above his own, slept his way to the top, possibly because by now we know he’s fucked his way to the bottom (or what many people would consider a decent in-between), something it took France years to face. Little has been made of the fact the Trierweiler-Hollande affair allegedly started when he was still with Segolène Royale, while Royale was running for President, and that the Parti Socialiste he was leading likely didn’t support her as much as it should have as a consequence of their unraveling marriage, hindering her presidential hopes and propelling him towards his.

France’s position towards public figure mistresses, like so many things, is inherited from its monarchy days. Kings had (multiple) mistresses and popular psyche started considering infidelity as a proof of power, integrating it into culture. Le Roi a fait battre tambour, a 1750 song still on the French literary curriculum, tells the story of a king who gathers “all the ladies of his kingdom” and chooses a marquis’ wife for her beauty. As a reward, the sovereign names him “a handsome Marshall of France”. At the end of the song, the queen “has a bouquet made/Of beautiful lilies/And the scent of this bouquet/Causes the Marquise to die”.

A few regime changes on, we’re still judging women according to a homemaker or temptress dichotomy and Trierweiler has been cast as the latter. Yet nothing she’s done means she deserves to be called a skank or a harlot over dinner by people who have never met her and whose opinion is based on a few newspaper articles and the fact she isn’t married to Hollande. Poor morality by lack of marriage certificate seems to be her crime. In years of yore, the public opinion trial she’s been undergoing since May would have ended up at the stake.

I’ve written in the past about how stupid I thought Trierweiler supporting left-wing candidate Olivier Falorni over Royale during an election was. She’d chosen to express her opinion over a national issue on the most public of forums, Twitter, and I had no problem writing up my thoughts on the matter. I am however in no way entitled to judge her private life and what goes on in her bedroom. Magazines and dailies have been publishing articles on the subject under the self-fulfilling pretense that it is in the public interest and might affect the presidency (a similar argument was used to justify the publication of half-naked pictures of the duchess of Cambridge). If it does, it’s not Trierweiler’s sexuality that should be judged, but Hollande’s inability to separate the personal from the professional and the presidential.

France is facing its bigot demons at the moment, between an unmarried President and the possibility of a law allowing same-sex marriage. This is the 21st century in a country whose culture has been feasting over libertinage for centuries, yet for a still-too-significant and vocal part of the French population, when it comes to sex, we’ll stone the adulterous woman and take nothing less than a blessed union between a man and a woman, thank you very much.

Posted at 5:08pm and tagged with: france, politics,.

September 24th 2012

Brand communication: Why The French Accent, Juicy Couture?

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France might have dropped off the top 20 most competitive countries in the world, according to the World Economic Forum, but the French language still holds its own when it comes to shifting fragrances. Proof is, Juicy Couture’s TV ad for its latest fragrance, La Fleur, told with an accent as French as its name.

Yet Juicy Couture is one of the least French brands in fashion. Born in Los Angeles in 1997, it made its name with Gothic bum writing on velours tracksuits before being bought by Liz Clairborne, an American fashion group, with its fragrance licensing operation ran by Elizabeth Arden. The company tagline, “Made in the glamorous USA” proclaims its American roots.

You won’t find French either in the La Fleur fragrance, beyond its name (La happens to be the acronym for Los Angeles as well as a French article). Russian model Sasha Pivovarova fronts the campaigns “depicting the mischievous, the fun-loving side” of the Juicy girl, according to LeAnn Nealz, Juicy’s president and chief creative officer. To describe the new juice, Nealz calls on words which have been used in the past à propos French style, including “romantic” and “ever-chic”, but they have been so overused by now they barely have a nationality. This is a purely marketing French accent which doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the brand image.

Posted at 3:00pm and tagged with: Brand communication, Perfume, france,.

September 11th 2012

LVMH and PPR Battle Out On The Libération Cover

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Left-leaning French daily Libération got itself a lot of free publicity on its home turf and abroad by launching a campaign against LVMH COE Bernard Arnault’s decision to seek Belgian nationality.

Today’s self-congratulating front page headline, “Bernard if you come back I’ll cancel everything”, a direct reference, as was yesterday’s cover (“Get lost, rich jerk”) to some of Nicolas Sarkozy’s most famous soundbites, is illustrated by a campaign banner of YSL’s latest fragrance, Manifesto. YSL happens to be one of the main three brands of LVMH rival PPR.

I don’t believe there is a link between the two but if I was Libé, I would have pulled the ad to avoid suspicion. And if I was YSL, I would have pulled it to avoid being thrown into a controversy threatening to engulf the whole luxury sector. Yet Libé’s finances probably couldn’t afford it and YSL (which likely had no idea of the upcoming headline, advertising is booked well ahead of time) is guaranteed a bigger than ever reach, not only in terms of circulation but also in terms of number of times the cover will be reproduced in other media.

Posted at 1:23pm and tagged with: LVMH, PPR, france, media,.

August 12th 2012

Vogue UK is catching up on the London French community

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If Vogue is talking about it, it’s definitely a trend. In its August issue, the magazine is picking up on the growing size of the French community in London and its possible growth following François Hollande’s election.

This type of article comes back cyclically, supported by a combination of anti-European feeling, fascination for French ways and any French news affecting Britain in some way (unless you’re the Daily Mail, in which case the threat of a French invasion always sells).

As writer Kathleen Baird-Murray points out, the strength of the London French community is nothing knew. On my second day in London as a scared, 17 year-old coming to a big city and a big school, I was immediately told by the French lycée headmaster that South Kensington was dubbed “the frog valley” because of the number of French citizens living there.

Hollande’s elections and his threat of higher taxes, is the first reason Baird-Murray gives for the number of French people living in the UK, followed by professional relocation (diplomats, French companies executives), appreciating London’s “more tolerant environment”, the British attitude to success and failure and the entrepreneurial opportunities.

Baird-Murray doesn’t mention the most recent advantage: with the current exchange rate, if you’re paid in pounds, your euros go further. With the Eurostar, and direct flights to most big French cities available at decent prices, the French go back often to stock up on food, pharmaceuticals and clothes, especially during the sales periods. Why wouldn’t they? A £160 Maje skirt costs £125 in Paris, a £69.50 Petit Bateau jumper £55. Even with bank charges, you win.

Posted at 10:12am and tagged with: france, politics, Vogue,.