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My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine
Kate Betts
By
Published: May 12, 2015
Category:
Fashion
There is no dream that’s more of a cliché than a young woman’s dream of living in Paris.
Wild parties, suave lovers, memorable encounters with giant intellects? She’s blond and beautiful, but that cliché doesn’t fit Kate Betts, 22 years old, arriving in Paris in 1986. She’s fourth generation Princeton. She’d written her college thesis on the Paris riots of l968 “and the impact of student-worker action on French political consciousness.” And she’s haunted by her parents’ divorce when she was six.
Her first smart move was getting herself to Paris, where she scrambled for entry-level jobs, missed her college boyfriend, met a sweet young Frenchman and was adopted by his charming family. And then she was hired as a features writer for M magazine and W, the biweekly society paper, both owned by John Fairchild, the publisher of Women’s Wear Daily.
John Fairchild was an odd kind of genius. He loved fashion, but he loved power more, and he loved the arbitrary exercise of power most of all. The kind word for him was “mercurial.” I knew him socially and saw something else: a Wizard of Oz who played the bully to keep people off-balance.
Kate Betts had a modest sense of personal style and even less knowledge of fashion when she started in Fairchild’s Paris office. But Fairchild had also gone to Princeton, and his ferocious attachment to that snobbish credit saved her from his random cruelty. Her ambition, which was considerable, was the more important ingredient in her ascent, and that ambition is the reason “My Paris Dream” is essential reading for any young woman who wants to become Someone. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Fairchild was obsessed with observation, preferably at the distance of inches. Details were huge for him. And atmosphere was everything. When Betts was assigned to a story in Provence, this was his advice: “Run through the lavender fields!”
The most fertile field at Fairchild, she quickly learned, was fashion, and she pushed her way into reporting on it. She stood with Fairchild at Saint Laurent’s studio, “like walking in on someone in their bedroom during an intimate moment.” Helmut Lang sketched for her. She collected another, of a Christian Lacroix lace wedding dress. She partied with then unknown Christian Louboutin. And she watched makeup artists transform models.
And here we come to the section of “My Paris Dream” that takes fashion dish and makes it something more, something grander — the section that chronicles the writer’s own transformation. This is Betts, at 26, in Paris:
I took advantage of my pet status at Fairchild. I disregarded many of my colleagues or pushed them aside, reaching for the best stories, the most bylines, the favored position. A few times I caught them whispering about my cocky, bossy attitude. But I was too young to care, blinded by ambition. I was impatient with people who couldn’t speak French as well as I did or couldn’t secure an interview with a designer. I bought into Mr. Fairchild’s games and favoritism. Deep down I harbored thoughts that perhaps fashion wasn’t a serious occupation, that it was something too frivolous to build a meaningful career on. And when these thoughts overwhelmed me, when I daydreamed about becoming a foreign correspondent, I would snap out of it quickly, reminded that fashion was now my ticket to the top.
She broke up with her French boyfriend. Had she made a mistake? “Vas retrouver ta famille,” his mother told her. “Go find your family.”
Anna Wintour spirited her back to New York. At a Vogue party, she met Chip Brown, a writer with no tendency toward bullshit. At the wedding, he read a poem he’d written: “Nothing is real that is not first imagined.” She was well on her way to becoming the Kate Betts I sort of know: a force field.
“My Paris Dream” is about imagining yourself and making it real.
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TEN QUESTIONS FOR KATE BETTS
It’s my sense that institutions — I mean shops and restaurants — tend to endure in Paris. What thrilled you in Paris in 1982 or 1986 that still thrills you? And can you go to those places without feeling nostalgia, the river of years and, always coming closer, mortality?
The food still thrills me, even though I probably shouldn’t eat as much of it! Places like Berthillon, Barthélémy cheese shop, Chez Constant, the market on the rue Cler, the fish at Le Duc restaurant, the soufflé at Atelier de Joel Robuchon. I could go on and on. The pharmacies and the family bistrots and the feeling of a small village in certain Parisian neighborhoods still thrill me. The last time I went back, I stayed with my friends Bibiane and Antoine and I was right off the plane, but jet lag didn’t stop me from going shopping for dinner, standing in line at the boulangerie, picking out cheese at the fromagerie — la Quotidienne still thrills me in Paris. There’s something about the care the French take to prepare for daily rituals that is very reassuring to me. You always know the season by the food and you know the state of the world from the conversations you hear in the market.
Your advice to a newly minted college graduate: Go to Paris — or what city?
Get lost. Go as far outside of your comfort zone as you can. Sure, you can go to the jungle or to the Himalayas, but I think getting lost in a city like Paris or Berlin or Rome is ideal because they’re foreign yet they still have distinct cultural codes, and they’re cities where you can see and experience the layers of history.
At Women’s Wear, you were taught to “discover the sense of civilization through the details.” In Paris today, what would you look for?
Look for the details — they tell the story! Look at the way the waiter at a cafe serves you, the way the cheese shop proprietor wraps up your package, the way parents talk to their children when they walk through the Luxembourg Gardens in the afternoon. The codes are everywhere in France. Everything is deliberate, everything is considered.
You write: “I was too consumed by work and ambition [at Fairchild] to contemplate the hollowness of it all, the abyss in the middle of the vanity fair.” If you had contemplated the hollowness, what would have happened to your ambition?
I would have given up and returned to New York, and I absolutely didn’t want to do that. So I forged ahead and reached higher.
If you still had the kind of access to the inner world of fashion — the previews, the interviews — what/who would you want to see now? Or has fashion become such Big Business that there’s nothing left to grab your curiosity?
I was so lucky to discover fashion at a time when talents like Galliano and McQueen and Margiela and Helmut Lang and Tom Ford were just coming onto the scene. I grew up in the business with these guys, and it’s hard for me to imagine anyone with the kind of talent and vision they had. Today it’s different: young kids coming out of fashion schools aren’t allowed to be as creative as my generation was. Today young designers have to be business-minded too and that takes a toll on their creativity. There is no room for fantasy when you’re worried about the bottom line.
You describe Fairchild’s obsession with fashion “as a carefully coded language that tells both an individual’s story and a culture’s broader history.” Let me ask you the old chat-room question: What are you wearing? And what does it say about you? About American culture, 2015?
I’m wearing cargo pants and a Uniqlo shirt designed by Ines de la Fressange and flats. Today fashion — or style, more broadly — is about movement, keeping up with busy lives, and comfort. The rise of “athleisure” is the biggest story in fashion. The fact that people wear activewear as ready to wear is a testament to the power of American culture. Dior and Chanel and Prada now sell sneakers. Need I say more?
You know – or once knew — so much about fashion. Did you ever think of walking away from the keyboard and becoming a designer?
Never. I’m a reporter, not a designer. I don’t have the skills or the vision to design.
Do you ever think: I want to live in Paris again. If not, what’s your current geographic fantasy?
Every single day I think about living in Paris. And then I flash on a memory — like the time it took three days to get a phone hooked up in Paris and I shudder. I also cannot bear their patriarchal way of doing business. In addition to My Paris Dream, I’ve also always had a California Dream….
Your Paris favorites, 2015?
This is totally crazy sounding, but… that outdoor courtyard at the Ralph Lauren restaurant on the Blvd. St. Germain.
Do you still dream in French?
No, not unless I’m in France with friends for a longer stay, like a vacation in Normandy. You have to be immersed in daily conversation to dream in another language. But I have a lot of French friends living in New York, and I speak French with them.
