French Mantra of the Month

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Au Louvre (or Grands Magasins du Louvre) was one of Paris’s great historic department stores, founded in the 1850s and closed in 1974. Like other grands magasins of the period, it sold fashion and household goods and became known for extending its brand into everyday decorative objects— like this charming advertising ashtray / catch-all from 1925.

To be a Bouzingo was to be a part of a counter-culture group that wouldn’t go down in history, but would give birth to bohemianism as we know it. A mere footnote of the Belle Epoque, and yet this group of young and wild creatives of late 19th century Paris defined and changed the avant-garde art for good, building up the inspiration for many a movement and bohemian rebels to come.

Long before the 20th century punks gave us studs and spiked Mohawks during the social unrest of the late Seventies, the post French Revolutionaries of 1793 gave us blood chokers, ripped corsets and cropped, tangled locks, all aimed at symbolising the horror of the guillotine and ridiculing the very foundations of the post-revolutionary society.

Over half a century ago, change was brewing in Paris. Right outside my window in the Latin Quarter, from where I write this post to you, violent street battles were turning the city upside down and bringing the country to a standstill. They joke about how the French love to protest and go on strike as if it were a part-time hobby, but in May 1968, there was nothing to joke about when a series of initially peaceful student protests nearly started a French civil war.

We love a fashion moment wrapped in a mystery, which is precisely what happened when fate, or chance, or whatever, first brought us to our dream handbag. There, in the sea musty bins at the Brooklyn Flea, it glimmered: a purse made up of cream coloured coils...dare we say, telephone cords?

The Années Folles in Paris — a time for jazz, literature of the Lost Generation, and a little-known fetish fashion boom. Spearheaded by a husband and wife team largely forgotten by history, Nativa Richard and her husband L. Richard, were the dynamic duo behind a groundbreaking brand called Yva Richard, and opened the world’s first known fetish boutique in Paris. The Richards were busy stitching dreams—or nightmares, depending on your perspective – one leather corset at a time. While the world was dealing with the prelude to World War I, the Richards were creating costumes, hats, shoes, and high-class lingerie. Their boutique was a haven for the fashion-forward and the faintly risqué. But oh, how things escalated.

A real literary club that inspired a collection with the French heritage shirtmakers.