Paris Times Eight (27 page)

The guard was now glaring at me, as if reading my mind. I had been thinking of ducking under his large forearm and running. And then I remembered the wolves at the Alexander McQueen show held earlier in the week at the Conciergerie. The feral beasts had been tethered to high-stepping models who pulled them along the catwalk on long chains. The animals tried to cower, terrified by the flashing lights of the photographers. When applause broke out, one of the wolves howled. Yes, fashion can be cruel, and fur was back with a vengeance that season. McQueen had made that trend palpably real. I worried that in Paris there could be more animals at the shows, and they'd send them snarling after me. And so I hesitated. Just then, as luck would have it, it started to rain, a sudden downpour. The crowd roared its displeasure. Suddenly there was a frantic push forward. I had to steady my fishnet-stockinged legs because I could feel myself being lifted by the maniacal energy of the mob. They wanted in, and out of the rain.

“Il pleut,”
I said, absentmindedly, unaware that anyone was listening.

“But
Madame
,” said the burly guard, regarding me with a bemused look on his face, “it always rains in Paris.”

The crowd pushed harder and harder. We were like a battering ram. And then I was airborne. But still I had my wits about me. Instead of settling back on my feet, I fell forward and onto my stomach, just beyond the reach of Hercules, who was busily fending off an invading horde of fashion barbarians. I was in battle position and I shimmied forward, crawling under cover into enemy lines. A fight erupted behind me. I could hear expletives and the sickening thud of flesh on flesh. I had made it, I thought. And then to my horror I saw another line of security guards inside the building. Wow. This was some hot show. I told myself not to look at them. They were big and black, and they could probably crush me beneath their combat boots. I adopted the hauteur of the Paris fashionista. I made like I owned the joint. Fashion is all about appearances, remember. I walked disdainfully past them. Lucky for me, at that moment another interloper, obviously not as smooth, had gotten himself caught between their paws. It was my chance to slip by undetected, and I did, with my heart pounding.

I thought that the hounds (human and otherwise) might still come after me, and so was careful not to look too conspicuous, and not too cowardly, either. This fashion business was a fine art. I skulked toward a dark corner and bumped right into the fashion reporter from
The Toronto
Star.
Our newspapers were supposed to be rivals. He had been keeping his distance from me the entire trip. But when he saw me, he practically fell into my arms. “Omigod,” he said. “I am
soooo
embarrassed. I sneaked in, and I am not one to sneak into any place where I am not invited, but this is supposed to be a shit-kicking show and…” I told him to relax, that I had sneaked in, too. He laughed. When the lights finally went down for the start of the Viktor & Rolf show, he stayed by my side
“en standing”
(we didn't dare try to rush an empty seat) and allowed me to hold onto his arm so that I could raise myself up on tiptoe to see the extravaganza unfolding on the runway.

That was the show to have stormed. It was magnificent, from start to finish. If what Balzac wrote is true, that dress is the expression of society, then what I saw at Viktor & Rolf suggested a communal need for escape from the ordinary, for transformation and absolution through an exaggerated means of scale. Called Black Hole, the collection of “conceptually glamorous” clothes, to quote the program handout, was both black and oversized, with blouses featuring shoulders that puffed out grotesquely like giant soufflés and dresses with bustles cut like enormous pincushions. Viktor & Rolf interpreted the mutton sleeve almost literally. The emaciated models wearing them looked like overfed creatures, freaks of their own flocks. Necklines riffed on a theme of the Elizabethan ruff. The clothes steamrollered down the runway in strict silence. Only the sound of jaws dropping at the sight of such a novel presentation could be heard.

Augmenting the performance-art aspect of the show was the fact that the faces of the models were painted completely black. The thick inky mask of makeup highlighted the principal hue of the collection itself. Later some American fashion journalists, perhaps sensitive to their country's slave-trading past, said in print that the Viktor & Rolf show was in poor taste. They believed that the blackened faces were a comment on minstrelsy. But I thought that the blackening was about eliminating the personality of the wearer to draw increased attention to the clothes, in particular the heft of their silhouette. The distortion of human scale suggested to me a promise of endless possibilities, while black implied wiping the slate clean. It was the beginning of the new millennium. Over the past year, people around the world had been venting their doomsday fears in the media. Black was also a funereal color. Were the designers, a Dutch duo with a background in visual art and theater, also lending expression to the inevitability of death? And yet the stateliness of the procession, the air of quiet dignity, not to mention the impeccable tailoring, made me feel uplifted by the clothes, as if they were acts of faith.

Black represented the end and the beginning of all things. The gargantuan dimensions of the clothes suggested something otherworldly, something bigger than me and this whole crazy Paris scene. I left Viktor & Rolf finally knowing my theme.

I had unearthed
the
trend of the season, and it was black. All the colors I had seen over the past week and a half had, in the recesses of my exhausted brain, bled into one dark-as-night hue. There had been black at Chanel and at Yves Saint Laurent, at Issey Miyake and Comme des Garçons. It was a rich metaphor to play with, and I found that I could apply it to many ideas that I had had about the collections in general. Black was night. Black was sin. Black was the obliteration of all rules that had previously dictated what constituted fashionable dressing. Black was mystery. Black veils suggested piety. Black leather made you think of kinky sex. I thought of the French obsession with film noir. There had been gangster looks on the runway and Mafia molls in the audience. Quentin Tarantino, the postmodern American cinéaste, was then a popular topic in French intellectual circles, discussed also in the Paris newspapers. His film
Reservoir
Dogs,
in which the entire male cast was dressed in black, was then being rereleased in France. I drew a connection between his latest movie,
Pulp Fiction,
a noir-ish brew of a mixed-metaphor film, and the mixed messages offered up by the Paris shows. In the end I called the Paris collections for fall
2001
“Pulp Fashion.”

I thought it clever at the time. But after my laptop crashed in the middle of the night following a power outage, and I had to frantically rewrite the article on the backs of napkins in a late-night brasserie located next to my hotel, fearing I would forget what I had just said, I felt vanquished by my own inability to rise to the occasion. Paris fashion, for all the tomfoolery of the last ten days, was still a kind of ideal. It symbolized the unrivalled artifice of Paris, what had long held me in thrall. I had wanted to do it justice. But I felt frustrated by my efforts. Once more Paris made me feel that I didn't quite reach the mark, that I wasn't good enough, that I needed to try harder. I worried that I hadn't adequately described Paris fashion as a mirror of life's vacillating elements, its essentially changing nature. I felt disappointed in myself.

After I rewrote and emailed my story at about four in the morning Paris time, I collapsed into my bed, and fell into a fitful sleep. I dreamed that the wolves had found me hiding under a silk-wrapped chair at one of the by-invitation-only shows. A bodyguard dressed like a member of the gestapo, head to toe in Hugo Boss, hauled me out by the scruff of my neck. I would be publicly punished, forced to walk the runway and kiss Claude Montana fully on his liver-colored lips. I did so, and then he slapped me, calling me an idiot. “Dunt you know anysing?” he shouted in accented English. “It goes like zis!” And then he shoved his tongue down my throat, almost suffocating me.

I woke with a start, thinking that I needed to get out of Paris before I, too, toppled out a window. Because I had filed my story, I didn't feel a need to go to any more shows. I had two days left before I returned to Toronto. I thought I would go shopping, hunt down some of those bewitching ensembles I had seen on the runway. Most wouldn't be in the stores until the fall. But I had had a sneak preview of what would be “in,” and I thought I could find some pieces that would enable me to replicate some of the styles for myself on the cheap. I was quickly discouraged. I had been living in such a make-believe world these past ten days that I had lost sight of the fact that all this so-called interpretive chic actually cost a fortune to create and maintain. In Paris a ruched dress such as I saw on the runway at Cacharel cost upwards of $
3
,
000
. I was beginning to think that I had written the wrong article. I had become seduced by the image of French fashion and hadn't noted how out of touch it was with the reality of most women's lives. Who wears the million-dollar jewel-encrusted jeans I saw on the runway, anyway? A distributor told me they were popular among princesses and other consorts living in the oil-rich Arab countries. I swallowed hard. I was no princess, but at the Paris shows I had lived the illusion. It was time to crash back down to earth.

And so I made the dreaded call to Toronto, the one in which I would have to supplicate myself before a stiff-backed editor on the other end of the line. I imagined the lecture awaiting me, reminding me that so much money had been spent on me and that I hadn't delivered. She would tell me that Paris fashion was a “soft” story, beneath her contempt, really. She would tell me to rewrite it all, find a new angle, and that upon my return I would be named the radio reporter, doomed to cover the
CBC
. While she no doubt would be shouting at me, I'd be scrupulous in not mentioning that the weather in Paris had been uncharacteristically delightful, with freshly blossomed flowers sprouting everywhere. I would not talk about the champagne, either. Or the beauty treatments, and the free stuff.

But such is the self-delusory world of the writer. You think you have been good, and then an editor tells you have been bad. You think you have been bad, and then an editor tells you, surprise, not only have you been good, but great, worthy of the expense of sending you to Paris.

That was what, to my astonishment, I heard when I called Toronto. I got praise, genuine acclaim. My usual editor had come down with the flu, so hadn't been around to handle my copy when it came in. Another editor, a man with no claims on the fashion beat, had that day taken her place. He was a transplanted Brit and he loved what I wrote. He told me that colleagues had jostled with each other to read my copy before it went to press. “It was that good.” He laughed. “I've never had so much fun reading fashion before. Well done. You captured Paris.”

He would have no idea what his words meant to me. He had lifted me out of my slump—that was the immediate effect his praise had on me. But more significantly, he made me feel that I had somehow accomplished a long-held goal about Paris. I had fathomed its depths.

I dressed in my finery that day and took a walk through the Jardin du Luxembourg. Those who have experienced Paris have the advantage over those who haven't. We are the ones who have glimpsed a little bit of heaven, down here on earth.

EIGHT

Mother
·
2007
·

I TOOK MY
two children for an impromptu visit to Paris in the soggy weeks preceding Christmas
2007
. It was supposed to be a miniholiday, just the three of us, with a little reporting on the side. I was now
The Globe and Mail'
s general assignment reporter for the new weekly Toronto section, but still occasionally contributed to other parts of the paper—style, travel, real estate, and life. I lost the fashion beat after being absent from work for an extended period following the birth of my daughter in
2003
. A life-threatening illness crippled me when she was just six months old. It was something totally befuddling and unpredictable, and frustrating to all the experts. I couldn't walk or bathe myself, let alone hold or nurse my newborn. My yearlong maternity leave stretched into a three-year disability leave, during which I was treated with a mighty arsenal of drugs that made me bloated, manic, out of control. While the medications didn't kill the disease, they subdued it to the point that in January
2006
I was able to walk, on my own steam, back into my workplace, only to discover I had been reassigned.

But work was still allowing me to return to Paris. This time I was in the city to research a couple of travel articles, focused on kids and the City of Light. A good fit, or not? I wasn't sure what the outcome would be. I had only once before been in Paris with children—and they had belonged to other people. That was a long time ago, and my memory was of a city where children were mostly not seen or heard, confined as they were to city parks whose iron gates were locked at night, forbidding fun of the family variety after dark. True, the traffic in Paris was too dangerous for children to play unsupervised out on narrow cobblestone streets. And so I understood the necessity of keeping them sequestered within leafy oases boasting pony rides, puppet shows, or, as is the case at the Parc Zoologique just outside Paris at Vincennes, flocks of pink flamingoes. But beyond those confines? Could Paris, city of lovers, work its magic also on the school-age set? The journalist in me wanted to find out. But the mother in me harbored a deeper purpose. I wanted to expose my offspring early to the city that had for so long played inside the shelter of my own imagination. Perhaps I wanted them to get to know me better so that after I was dead and buried and they looked back at their life with me, they wouldn't focus on the mistakes but remember the beautiful obsession I had wanted to share with them, in hopes of firing their own imaginations to face the future.