It was the last day of Paris Fashion Week. The day had started at 5am. I’d finished my last show, the champagne was wearing off and found myself standing in Nation with nowhere in particular to be. Zoning out at my own reflection in a shop window with the mid afternoon sunlight bouncing up from the wet pavement, I zoned back in and noticed I was staring at an estate agent’s window. Full of Paris properties. Then it dawned on me…
I was supposed to go back to London that evening and then start looking for a flat. Standing there, I realised I was already looking for a flat, not in London… In Paris!
The inventory in full:
- ¾ of a German A-level
- £50 survival money.
- A week’s hostel booked.
- A few contacts.
- A wing.
- A prayer.
[TK-link] I went to tell Eugene my new plans later that afternoon.
By this point I’d been to Paris with Eugene a handful of times between early ’97 and mid ’99. So the city wasn’t such an unknown quantity to me anymore. In fact, from day one, I’d felt like I knew my way around automatically, as if I’d been born with a Plan de Paris preinstalled in my mind’s GPS. That was particularly handy because at the time my highly advanced communication device was a Pager Swatch with a teeny tiny number display – mobile phones could just about display letters. It would be another 10 years before I could download Nokia maps on my phone.
Going it alone was also strangely comfortable for me. Writing this now I’m starting to appreciate how very independent I have always been. It makes me think of the times when I was 16 and used to hitchhike back down to Cornwall from Guildford… Anyway, on with this story…
Marion was on Eugene’s team. I had written her number in my blue address book along with any other Parisians I’d meet backstage, which was not many. Marion was the only one who pulled through. Oh, it would be so good to look at that address book! I’m sure it’s in a box somewhere. So yeh, I was already beginning to create myself a network and Paris was waiting to welcome me ‘home’, oddly Paris has always felt like home since those days. I’ve been back more-or-less every couple of years since.
French turned out simply to be English minus German delivered in voice of René Artois from ‘Allo ‘Allo. My A-level got me further than I expected.
When the cash ran low, random opportunities followed. Waiting tables in an all night American bar. Testing computer games for a French computer games studio for the American market. Mainly though, assisting Marion on her Longchamp shoots, and a week or so in a very chic salon on Avenue George V. Soon I found myself blow-drying Christophe Robin’s clients in his newly opened colour only studio, walking his little dog around the Tuileries. It was either a chihuahua or a dachshund, I can’t remember which — but boy oh boy did I feel like I blended in!
When the cash ran low, random opportunities followed. Waiting tables in an all night American bar. Testing computer games for a French computer games studio for the American market. Mainly though, assisting Marion on her Longchamp shoots, and a week or so in a very chic salon on Avenue George V.
Soon I found myself blow-drying Christophe Robin’s clients in his newly opened colour-only studio, walking his little dog around the Tuileries whenever nature called.
It was either a chihuahua or a dachshund, I can’t remember which but boy oh boy did I feel like I blended in!
In retrospect, I firmly believe we create our own luck, or more precisely we create the circumstances for luck to find us.