Rock and Hard Places: Travels to Backstages, Frontlines and Assorted Sideshows by Andrew Mueller

Author:Andrew Mueller
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Travel, Music, General
ISBN: 9780980790412
Publisher: Affirm Press
Published: 2010-10-01T01:20:05.863090+00:00

WERE THE POLLSTERS of Family Fortunes to ask a hundred randomly selected riffraff what they most associate with Paris, the odds are the Mona Lisa to a 2CV that the greatest percentage would imagine a scene like this. In a hysterically baroque theatre near the Arc de Triomphe, a fashion show: next year’s clothes hung on young women built like broomsticks, so excruciatingly thin they must have to move around in the shower to get wet, and on the brieze-block shoulders of swaggering, flawless young men with unfeasible jawlines, punchably smug. At the end of the catwalk, a battery of photographers, firing flashguns into the whites of eyes that never blink.

The clothes are by Jean Colonna, the occasion one of the umpteen catwalk shows of Paris Fashion Week. Colonna is not as big a name as Gaultier, and he hasn’t attracted as many riot police to his opening as Armani did, nor is he as big a deal as McQueen, McCartney or any of the young British designers who have recently taken the helms at some of France’s biggest labels, but he’s pulled a decent enough crowd, some of whom are wearing their sunglasses inside with a shamelessness sufficient to suggest that they’re in some way important or famous. I wouldn’t know—what I know, or care, about fashion, could be carved onto foie gras with a chisel. But I think the knee-length tartan coat is quite smart, and I’m as gratified as anyone would be to see the Paris of popular imagination made flesh, however in need of a decent feed some of that flesh looks.

Outside, in the grey chill of an early spring morning, another Paris is sleeping off another day of living up to another sort of magnificent cliché.

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