CLASH OF CULTURES

Walking the streets of Paris with my sister and husband last week I shouldn’t have been too surprised to discover that French girls are ethereal creatures. I don’t think a long prologue here is necessary to explain what I mean: over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time in this visually inspiring city (my family lives there), walking and people watching enthusiastically until slightly dizzy, slowly building up a passionate friendship with its atmosphere. This post should be a mere progress report of my personal immediacy with Paris and its trends but I’ve realized that the intensity of my sentiments has grown. Until a few days ago, and despite numerous extensive stays in the capital, I always felt that French girls embraced a traditional style, unable to create images that are fresh and original. This fact seemed so clearly inevitable and obvious that I had almost stopped looking for interesting looks having already categorized Parisian girls except for a few occasional flashes of loveliness. It never occurred to me that I may be wrong. I think that being half French and half English myself, my own challenge has always been to pick the best of both cultures, more than often preferring London aesthetics and excesses over safer French alternatives. But things can change rapidly (well, it took a few years) and I now realize that a whole new generation of girls have stripped away the traditionalism which I had come to accept as normal. Last week in Paris I saw girls wearing clothes with more humour than before, with the necessary amount of “cool” and an approach to style which surprisingly could rival any trendy Londoner. Their view on clothes is undeniably less repetitive and more stylised while maintaining a typically French hint of sophistication. So not only do they now choreograph braver and more experimental looks, leaving magazine mirror images behind, but they also continue to seduce us with their astonishingly natural physical and mythical beauty.

All pictures from Purple Diary - http://www.purple-diary.com/