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| Spot the cat! |
After a van breakdown on the perilous A4, a twelve-hour driving stretch including burrowing under the scary Mont Blanc tunnel and charging through central France, your bed-and-breakfast falling through, a night-time unloading of an entire summer collection and staggering about with boxes/racks/hats, the discovery that your hotel is like a tiny pre-fab caravan and the downstairs McDonalds - you are too tired to take
one step further - closes its doors in your face and you go to bed foodless...well... that's when you tend to look at the good things around you.
YOU ARE IN PARIS, something that excites you every time.
There is free champagne for exhibitors for four days.
There is a great Turkish thing going on outside on the main strip.
You get to wear great clothes and shoes for four days.
You eat wonderful food after work and tear across central Paris in a taxi yawning after midnight.
Bliss. Even that rainy walk to work every morning. Such a change from story submissions and revisions and disappointments piling up. And trying to keep the wisteria in check which is more fruitful than your imagination.
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| Blue Mosque - polaroid-style |
You all know I work at fashion week in Paris twice a year and it is a blast. Not that I see a single clothes shop or museum or view of the Seine or trendy nightclub... We go to bed like tired chickens each night, fighting off the alarm and dragging ourselves to the shower. Matchsticks keeping apart eyelids at breakfast.
What do I wear today??
I don't care! Wear anything!
Whose idea was it to drink five glasses of champagne??
Yours!
Yours!
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| Turkish tea bags |
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| The Bubble Card!!! |
And the next day in between taking orders you are back again, an addict queueing up, sticking out your pink bubble card, listening to conversations behind and in front of you, watching an old French perv chat up a sweet young thing with glorious eyes, watching the super-tanned gay guy selling ripped dresses in his Ray Bans and bandana, watching the Indians eating food from home and the Japanese in sharp clusters, watching the giraffe-like models glide about in flowing gowns leaving men and women gobsmacked in their wake.
Fashion, baby. I'll take six glasses..
