Another Paris Still Knows How to Flirt
PARIS - PART II, 2026
On French luxury fashion, bourgeois upbringing, Roger Vivier, and the disciplined seduction of Saint Laurent.
I need a bulletproof vest.
Not out of existential anguish. I have never had much patience for that. Life wounds whether one trembles before it or not. Better, then, to proceed gaily and accept the occasional blow, the fleeting sting, the red imprint on the cheek.
No, I want one for the straps. To slip my hands beneath them and let them settle there in a pocket of my own warmth. It is an oddly comforting posture, not far removed from the fetal, if the fetal were made to stand up straight and face the world.
This, I notice, is also how the Republican Guard keeps watch around the Élysée. On Place Beauvau and along the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, they stand in twos and threes, relaxed in full battle dress, trading remarks among themselves and offering a pleasant bonjour to anyone who catches their eye. The ease is almost disarming. Almost. For inside the uniform are not merely handsome silhouettes of the Republic but bodies trained for swift and final violence.
In Paris, even coercion comes with posture.
My mother would have been a formidable tennis player had life left her the leisure. She had the backhand for it and the instinct to strike cleanly. Rings on every finger, which left more than a blush on my cheek when, as so often, I had failed to hear her calling from the practical world. Hers was made of customers, invoices, lunch to be cooked, a last-minute dash to the grocer next door.
Mine was elsewhere, in a book, in some town out West, deaf to everything but the page. The rude awakening was called obedience.
I thought of her the moment we entered the Leonard boutique just down the road. It was so small it felt less like retail than reception. My father bought her Leonard dresses. A small price to pay for his escapades. Its incandescent florals, somewhere between tropical exuberance and bourgeois theater, suited her perfectly. So did the red mouth.
We took her to Paris once and splashed out on a weekend at The Meurice. By then she was well into her seventies. She moved through the better arrondissements as if she had always belonged there. I have a photograph of her posing near Niki de Saint Phalle’s Stravinsky Fountain—almost obscene in its abundance of color and all the more fragile for it.
The Leonard shop closed the day after our visit. Permanently. A Japanese group had bought the brand a few years earlier and redirected it towards Asia. No one handles the export of European heritage more impeccably: every visible code perfected, every living eccentricity eradicated. It is like drinking matcha in a Left Bank café.
But across the road, another Paris still knows how to flirt.
A pink boudoir beckons, untouched by sterile rationale and devoted, par excellence, to the curve of a woman’s calves and the shapely line of her derrière. Roger Vivier understands that French luxury is never merely about the stiletto but about posture, display, and the choreography of desire.
Upstairs, the boutique becomes a private apartment: thick pink carpet underfoot, deep-red lacquered cupboards against the walls, French modernist furniture from the 1970s arranged with the confidence of a room that expects to be admired. A stage set for trying on shoes and the slow performance of elegance. One can almost picture a time when other guests drifted past with a glass of champagne, secure in their importance, upholstered in ease, and part of that post-war French world in which comfort, access, and connection mattered nearly as much as money.
Which is why so many of the other houses now feel like compromise dressed as luxury.
French fashion did not lose sophistication. It industrialized it. The codes remain, but scale, consensus, and the tyranny of data flatten the imagination. Most luxury brands no longer impress. They look alike.
Tomorrow’s products made for yesterday’s desires.
On Avenue Montaigne, Saint Laurent restores the line. Do not come here looking for intimacy. This is magnificence at scale: spacious, exacting, assured. If France were ever to recover its imperial self-confidence, it might look something like this. Not nostalgic, but commanding. Not ornamental, but composed. Everything is held together by line, discipline, and the assurance that style need not shout in order to dominate.
Yves Saint Laurent looks into the camera, timidly elegant behind his broad-rimmed glasses. At Prunier on Avenue Victor Hugo, his photo hangs among a gallery of celebrity guests against a floor-to-ceiling mirror. He wears a tailored safari jacket, fastened with a braided leather belt. Young, handsome, slightly ill at ease. He does not quite know what to do with the camera, but the camera knows exactly what to do with him. And that unmistakable French gift for making fragility look like style.
If a safari jacket can turn vulnerability into allure, what exactly is the bulletproof vest for?
THE ÆSTHETIC NOMADS BLUE BOOK: PARIS 8ÈME
HOTEL PARTICULIER
You’ll struggle to find a more intimate hotel in Paris than this five-suite mansion tucked away from the bustle of Montmartre. Once owned by the Hermès and Rothschild families, it remains eclectic, discreet, and deeply seductive. Fully booked? Go for an excellent lunch in the garden or an aperitif at the bar.
23, Avenue Junot - 75018 Paris
hotelparticulier.com
RESTAURANT PRUNIER
This Paris classic has been restored with real taste, and the menu now rises to the occasion. Yes, there is caviar if indulgence is the point. But the seafood is excellent throughout. You dine among black-and-white portraits and an elegant clientele. Christian Dior’s signature egg dish remains on the menu: soft-boiled, with veal gelée, cream, and caviar. Good food can be simple.
16, Avenue Victor Hugo - 75016 Paris
restaurant.prunier.com
SAINT LAURENT
Not merely a store, but a total expression of Parisian class. Architecture, furniture, and decoration work in concert to stage an archetype: sophisticated, detached, impeccably composed. Yet the welcome is gracious and the assistance generous, which gives the whole performance its ease.
37, Avenue Montaigne - 75008 Paris
ysl.com
ROGER VIVIER
Between writing this story and publishing it, Roger Vivier moved its Paris flagship from number 29 to number 20 on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Less boudoir than before, perhaps, but still every bit as seductive — and entirely fitting for such finely crafted stilettos.
20, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré - 75008 Paris
rogervivier.com
GALERIE PATRICK FOURTIN
Place de Valois is more than a screen set. It is also home to this specialist in 20th-century furniture and decorative arts. From an early geometric marble mantelpiece to a deep-red lacquered 1970s cabinet by Veranneman, the curation here is both exacting and eclectic.
9, Rue des Bons Enfants - 75001 Paris
galeriefourtin.com
DRIES VAN NOTEN
You don’t have to be French to understand Parisian chic. Dries Van Noten’s boutique on the Left Bank is all about intimacy, discretion, and allure. You do not so much shop here as find yourself gracefully seduced into buying.
7, Quai Malaquais - 75006 Paris
driesvannoten.com
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