Saturday 7 October 2006

Warning -- Shallow Post Below

So I headed to Paris Fashion Week Wednesday with only enough outfits for the shows I planned to attend. For once I decided not to schlep extra pairs of fabulous shoes and vintage handbags and jewelry and the little black dress, because frankly, my feet practically still hurt from standing around for hours in heels in London and Milan. And because I got home at 2 a.m. Wednesday morning from what last year was an incredibly boring music industry dinner I left early but this year was let’s-stay-‘till-the-end-and-even-move-on-for-another-drink fun. And because I had no post-show parties I had to attend in Paris – and because the fashion pack isn’t exactly welcoming or spontaneous (if you are not Anna Wintour or similar, you start requesting invitations to shows three months beforehand, though of course they tell you about a week before if you’ve gotten them), there was no reason to expect the unexpected.

Clearly the crazy peach drink I had at Trader Vic’s sometime in the early hours of Wednesday had made me crazy. If ever there were an excuse not to pack light, it is Paris Fashion Week.

And of course several hours after I arrived in Paris I was invited to a Scary Fashion Party commencing at one ridiculously trendy locale and then moving on to several others. A fashion nightmare, frankly. And I was facing it without a black dress and with only two pairs of shoes: ballet flats (unacceptable to fashionistas in evening unless worn with skinny jeans, which, um, In My Dreams) and black patent Via Spiga stacked heel loafers (no. Just… no).

At my current size, it is hard enough to find the perfect outfit (or really, a passable outfit) in a city whose shops you know well – and whose scene you know well enough to calibrate the exact amount of dressed up or dressed down you need to be to feel as inconspicuous as possible. Finding something in just a couple of hours in Paris was hopeless – I knew. I debated not going to the party. I debated heading to Galeries Lafayette and spending whatever it took.

I wandered around Galeries Lafayette, seeing nothing appealing. I hunted for black trousers, a difficult enough task when you're not under pressure. I prowled the shoe department, struggling to buy going out shoes – yes, me, practically forced to buy shoes and yet unable to do it. There were beautiful ones, of course, but they didn’t go with any of the clothing I had. And then there were ones so similar to ones I had at home that I couldn’t justify the three hundred euro pricetag. On my walk from Galeries Lafayette toward the Rue St Honore, I spied a Zara -- but they had no shoes in my size at all.

Then I gave up. I bought the tiniest Louis Vuitton handbag there is – cost: not much more than your average night out in London, actually – practiced my “there’s nothing wrong with my outfit” face (well, not really), reminded myself that patent leather actually is in this season (well, it is!), and decided what the heck. I was going to feel uncomfortable no matter what I wore. It was surprisingly freeing to admit that.

As for the party, like many of the ones I dread the most it was not worth the dread. It was fine – fun, even. I spent much of the evening chatting with an American girl and her British boyfriend of three weeks who was still wearing a wedding ring from the marriage (not to American Girl) he is apparently not even close to out of. Yes, she knows about it.

Later we ended up at the VIP Room, a branch of the same tacky Paris-Hilton-loves-it club I'd been in in St. Tropez earlier this summer (in fact, at a party Paris herself was throwing there). As the journalist I'd worked with in St. Tropez put it when I blackberried her the Paris tale: "If you ended up at the VIP Room where did you START?"

Quite.

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