Strangely enough, I didn’t eat particularly well in Paris, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t the food that fueled me. It was the city itself. Strolling into a pop-up shop on Rue Volta, I met Tania Tuka, a Ukrainian designer and journalist who showed me that the space was filled with Ukrainian brands. We talked about our work, and her family, and how fashion had sustained her as Ukraine was invaded and terrorized. I bought a perfect knit matching set by a brand called Chalety and a blouse with billowing, embroidered purple sleeves (the tag says, in script, Embroidered Gems). We name-gamed and figured out that Tania happened to know my Vogue colleague, Liana Satenstein. I believed Tania when she said that Paris was small, and I felt in meeting her that its magic was real.
That night, my new editor and publicist friends rallied for a post-dinner jaunt out—at midnight—to Lapérouse, a historic, romantic restaurant-cum-lounge filled with nooks and crannies of gilt rooms, the ghosts of Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert and a DJ spinning downstairs. I can’t remember the last time I went out at midnight—maybe in Ibiza, during a summer abroad in college? I am typically in bed in the 10 p.m. hour, but with my new friends, in my new leather skirt, I danced to the late-’90s rap of my teenhood til three in the morning, and realized that while I may be a married mother, it doesn’t necessarily mean I have to settle down.
The next day, I was alone again. In the 17 years I lived in New York, I almost never felt alone, because of the thrum, the energy, the people—so many of us alone together. I felt the same in Paris. Meandering more, I bumped into Emily in Paris star Kate Walsh—also alone at an Agua Bendita showroom—and almost asked her to hang out. Instead, I stocked up on pads and double-sided pencils at the charming stationer Papier Tigre, went back to my jewel box hotel room at Pavillion de la Reine, where I posted up for an extra night once work ended, and wrote and wrote. I felt light, unbridled, creative—like I belonged here. On a break, I unhooked the little window in the bathroom, looked down at the street, and nearly cried with joy, my heart bursting at the beauty of it all.
For all the latest fasion News Click Here
