Two chick stories: one about the supposed chic French, and one about being a NYC blonde

1. Très chic? Mais non!
By Lisa Armstrong
Contrary to popular belief, French women are not paragons of style

Having just got back from the Paris fashion shows, I’m once again contemplating the many marvels embedded within the tenets of French style. There is seeing Jack Lang, erstwhile Minister of Culture, arriving in all solemnity to watch an Yves Saint Laurent show. In France haute fashion is emphatically haute culture, not the misunderstood burlesque joke it is here. There is the marvel of sitting next to the editor of Le Point (a political magazine) at a dinner and being able to engage in an informed discussion about the new designer at Rochas. There is the marvel of knowing that one’s first lady, Mme Chirac, will never embarrass her nation by turning up in a shalwar kameez or experimenting with white leggings that make her bum look the size of Algiers.

And there is the marvel of limping into a French pharmacy, as I once did, having spent a week on a boat turning the skin on my feet into something resembling a 20-year-old camembert casing and thinking “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they stocked something as specific as Cream for Extra Dry Feet?”, only to discover that, naturellement , they had 20, alongside the obligatory 400 treatments for cellulite. Of course they do. This is the nation that invented style — or the nation with the good sense to bother claiming to have invented style. The English language hasn’t even got a word for chic. So the greatest marvel of all is why the nation as a whole exhibits so little of either.

The French love irony, but might not be amused by this instance because style, along with smoking and feeling pity for Americans, is at the core of their identity. France gave us Chanel (who looked to the British aristocracy and its sporting clothes for much of her inspiration), the New Look (which Dior borrowed from Winterhalter) and those adorable truncated fringes that look good only on a certain kind of French woman (actually, one French woman: Audrey Tautou). It is a nation where self-respect and feeling bien dans sa peau are intertwined: at once a duty, a birthright and a way of living that is tied up with a mature awareness of the effects on others of one’s appearance (France may be unique in its medical assessments of female toddlers, which take their grace into account). Being bien dans sa peau , a gift handed down from mother to daughter, is not the haphazard thing that, say, British quirkiness is. More a science than an art, it is bound up with knowing where to buy those industrial-strength knickers that hold your stomach in yet don’t show through your slim knee-length skirt, how many suppositories one needs to keep one’s weight below 9st (57kg) and the best way to care for cashmere. It is, frankly, something from which the Brits could benefit. But it does not, on its own, amount to stylishness.

I’m not being hasty. Like all English women (probably women everywhere) I was raised with the certainty that French women were the most stylish, and that if I could only get them to stop scowling at me, they would share the secret. At 16 I fell madly in love with Paris, and on the basis that even the concièrges would look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade went to live there three years later. Big mistake. The concièrges did not look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade . In fact, no one looked like Audrey Hepburn in Charade . This is probably because Hepburn was a woman of Dutch/Anglo-Irish heritage working in America. The real French looked like Japanese tourists with bad Burberry habits. I realise now, of course, that upping sticks to Paris at 19 was as misconceived a plan as entering Celebrity Big Brother to disseminate one’s political beliefs about Saddam Hussein. No one should take up residence in Paris before the age of 40 — it is such an innately bourgeois city that you cannot truly appreciate it (nor it you) until you are sufficiently established and well heeled to acquire your own Burberry habit, plus an Hermès Birkin, after which le snottiness extraordinaire , which all the best Parisian sales assistants go to sales-assistant school to master, becomes easier to quell.

Burberry has been reborn as a very chic commodity. French dress sense has not. Like so much in France, it dwells in a glorious past. It still consists, as it did 25 years ago, of sensible skirts, sensible, air-hostess shoes, bulky jackets, chunky unattractive gold jewellery, numerous “tasteful” standbys such as a tan leather belt, a silk scarf knotted at the throat, a black trouser suit that doesn’t waste its time being shapely and (ye gods) the padded velvet hair band, plus any number of “serviceable” objects such as the quilted shapeless jacket and those nasty nylon handbags that the rest of us moved on from long ago. For the rich there are also bulky fur coats and helmet hair. When even Claire Chazal, a newsreader and French insititution, features so highly on the fashion radar, you know this is a nation with risk issues.

Am I missing something? Not for want of trying. I’ve scoured streets for girls who look like Amélie, with her chic bob and slightly off-centre, faux-prim style and general je ne sais quoi , which was how I thought French women should look. As it turns out, not even Amélie (or rather Audrey Tautou, who played her) looks like Amélie. Too busy growing out her bob and wearing Zac Posen.

I’ve listened captivated to Kristin Scott Thomas and tried to see only the good in le style français. A staunch (and spectacularly beautiful, stylish) Francophile, Scott Thomas has nothing but praise for her adopted homeland’s dress sense. According to her, French women have infinitely more flair than the Brits, infinitely better tailoring and infinitely more wisdom in that they would never (and I quote) “wear pearly-pink lipstick. It simply doesn’t exist in France. Or maybe it does, but women don’t wear great swaths of it, like they do in England. That’s the very height of vulgarity.” Hmm, until that last point, I was with Kristin, but as I write, Bourjois, that emblem of savvy, French chic, is advertising the ghastliest of frosted pink lipsticks on prime time UK TV. Don’t tell me it’s not marketing this merde in France, too. And by the way, a cool, youthful brand called Bourjois? I rest my case.

Evidence suggests that it is this bourgeois DNA, combined with a willingness to elevate style to the very highest cultural plateaux, that suffocates style on a national level. French women may have more underwear shops per capita than anyone else on the planet. They may triumph when it comes to sourcing the “perfect” trench, the “perfect” court shoes (yes, they’re still wearing them) and the ultimate Birkin rip-off (French fashion is all about perfection and getting something on the cheap). And all right, they don’t get that fat. They’re among the few people on Earth who can wear Balenciaga drainpipes. But they don’t, bar a dozen or so fashion editrixes who look as if they’ve just stepped off a Helmut Newton set. Lou Doillon, the daughter of Jane Birkin and Jacques Doillon, is the other Parisian everyone invokes when they want to cite someone who embodies hip French style.

It is surely one of life’s great ironies, and utter wastes, that the cradle of fashion, and magnet for the world’s top designers, is a city in which you can’t find anyone prepared to wear the stuff. It’s as if their ability to intellectualise fashion and discuss it in the abstract — taxi drivers in Paris can give you an up-to-date resumé of Karl Lagerfeld or hold forth on the relative merits of Gaultier or McQueen — excuses them from actually having to follow anything as foolish and Anglo-Saxon as a trend. Fashion is distinct from style, of course, but without change there is stagnancy, and stagnancy is not stylish. It is stultifying and dull and leads to a nation that dresses less like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour and more like timid, provincial town hall employees. I’ve seen more verve in Ann Widdecombe’s little finger — especially when she’s just had a manicure.

One fashion consultant who represents up-and-coming designers and lives in Paris during the week believes that this risk aversion is part of a general crisis of confidence. “Paris is the hardest city in the world for a new designer to crack. The French like very old, established and, in the main, French labels. It’s seen as cultural arrogance, but the reverse is probably true.” It’s also true that apart from Zara (a Spanish import), the French don ’t have a high street anything like as vibrant as Britain’s. Instead it has chains such as Gerard Darel and Et Vous: goldmines for yet more perfect trenches and decently cut (inexpensive) trousers and tops, but deserts when it comes to the directional, up-to-the-minute catwalk interpretations you see in Topshop, River Island, New Look, Dorothy Perkins and — now — Wallis and Principles. Obviously this spares them the more arresting sights one sees blotting the British landscape, a list of which would be both invidious and time-consuming, but it also equals staid predictability. And don’t think that predictability precludes tackiness: the French are as conflicted about, and influenced by, their trashy celebrities as we are. Since this is the land where trends never die, the influence is, arguably, that bit more pernicious.

Of course, there are exceptions: Carole Bouquet, Inès de La Fressange, Camille Miceli (the scarily stylish PR at Louis Vuitton) or Ségolène Royal, the dark, gamin bright light of the Socialist Party; when they get it right, it’s perfect. But en masse the French are not as individual as the British, as groomed as the Americans or as affluently dressed as the Russians. Yet even before Marie Antoinette (and look where being stylish got her), France’s reputation of superiority in matters of style was entrenched. By the 19th century, when Paris was the world’s literary and artistic centre, wealthy foreign women flocked there for their clothes (though Frederick Worth, the leading “Parisian” couturier of the time, hailed from Lincolnshire). After the Second World War, when shabby Britain was gripped by austerity, we gazed even more hungrily across the Channel for signs of civilised luxury, spurred by Robert Doisneau’s romantic images of Paris and its chic inhabitants.

Perhaps the notion of French style was always a bit mythic, something we needed to believe in when life here was so humdrum. In 1949 Nancy Mitford, another avid Francophile living in Paris, wrote: “English visitors here often complain to me that there are no well-dressed women in Paris.” Her explanation was that les elegants , “of whom there are dozens . . .never actually set foot in the street”. How ineffably French. Yet four years later she noted that “the English have a touching, if often misplaced, faith in the excellence of French taste”.

But Hollywood has done more than anything to mythologise the idea of French style. An American in Paris , with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron; Paris when it Sizzles , with Audrey Hepburn; Gigi ; Cole Porter’s I love Paris ; Henry James, Edith Wharton . . . there is a venerable tradition of Americans sexing up all things French. The Americans in Paris exhibition now on at the National Gallery and featuring rose-tinted views of the city, and of Americans in the city by, among others, Whistler and John Singer Sergeant, suggests that they’ve been doing it since at least 1860. That’s an irony the French should enjoy.

‘In France, women are obsessed with good taste’

Apart from a handful of super-stylish actresses, celebrities or chic Parisians, it is fair to say that the average Frenchwoman dresses in a classic, conservative and safe way. This approach of choosing rather dull colours and dowdy shapes can be attributed largely to the emerging bourgeois classes of the 19th century — the days of Maupassant and Zola, which are actually not so long ago. It’s this enduring legacy of 19th-century social diktats, of dressing with substance, integrity and not trying to appear too showy (very nouveau riche) that makes Ségolène Royal (a politician), Bernadette Chirac and Claire Chazal such aspirational icons. (Indeed, Chazal is promoted as being perfect daughter-in-law material). Frenchwomen are not educated to spend a lot of money on their appearance.

The average English woman is a little more adventurous. But then, she also has a very fashion-forward high street to play with. She references different eras and looks at things with more confidence. It doesn’t always boil down to how tasteful you look: in England, it’s about having that energy or flair. In France, women are obsessed with good taste and not stepping outside the boundaries of what is sartorially acceptable.

Parisians, though, are another story. They are a little more “undone”. Their hair isn’t always perfect, they aren’t 110 per cent groomed — but that is a lot sexier.


2. Golden Girls
By JILL GERSTON

MARY CASTELLANO, a transplanted Miamian whose caramel-colored hair spills past her shoulders, has never done her own highlights. But last year, the idea crossed her mind when Ms. Castellano, who is 26, realized how prohibitively expensive it had become to color her beautiful hair.

"You can't work in fashion in this city and not look good," explained Ms. Castellano, who is an account executive at Ogan Dallal Associates, a Manhattan public relations firm that handles clients in the fashion industry. "People check you out, and if you have black roots and your hair is fried, it doesn't matter that you're carrying a Bottega bag.

"When I moved here after college," she added, "I didn't realize that along with rent, phone and utilities, I'd have this huge expense for hair."

For a time, she went to a string of East Side salons and paid about $500 a month for highlights and touch-ups of her long, thick hair. But, confessed Ms. Castellano, who lives in a small one-bedroom apartment in Lower Manhattan and shops the sales at Scoop, not Chanel, "it was just too much." Finally, through a friend of a friend, she found a neighborhood salon that charges her $275, an amount she called "reasonable for New York."

Although it's a struggle for a young working woman, Ms. Castellano is a New York Blonde.

This polished, pedigreed creature can usually be spotted in her natural habitat, the Upper East Side, dropping off her offspring at the Episcopal School, scrutinizing embroidered 480-thread-count sheets at Pratesi and sipping drinks at La Goulue.

Some days she migrates south of 57th Street to SoHo or the meatpacking district or the sole bastion of chic in Times Square, the Condé Nast building. If she is an especially free-spirited member of the flock, she may actually live in Greenwich Village or on the Upper West Side, but this is rare, though not as rare as those who make their nests across the pond in Brooklyn Heights or — gasp! — Park Slope.

The New York Blonde may work at a fashion magazine, a public relations company or an art gallery, places where spending a morning getting one's roots touched up is not considered grounds for firing. Or she may be a high-powered executive on Wall Street or Madison Avenue, settings where precisely highlighted blond hair is as potent a power accessory as a bespoke suit or an Audemars Piguet watch.

She may have made a career simply out of shopping, getting oxygen facials and taking classes in screenwriting. Without question, however, she has a weakness for cushion-cut diamonds and espresso macchiato at Sant Ambroeus on upper Madison Avenue.

Although the number of New York Blondes is understandably elusive, twice a year scores of them gather in Bryant Park for a week of fashion shows. There, they surreptitiously observe their soignée companions, taking in details like Anna Wintour's impeccable brown bob shimmering with highlights the color of Shalimar perfume. If you missed them in February, you can catch them again in September.

In New York's haute fashion circles, there is perhaps a consensus that the coveted look is the chic white-blond hair of the departed Carolyn Bessette Kennedy . "She's the icon, the hair to worship," Plum Sykes, a contributing editor to Vogue, writes on the opening page of her breezy best-seller "Bergdorf Blondes," a literary bonbon studded with pampered PAPs (Park Avenue Princesses), A.T.M.'s (rich boyfriends), a strategy session for a Chanel sample sale and appointments for $450 blond highlights.

But Mrs. Kennedy is not the only iconic New York Blonde. A short list would also include Gwyneth Paltrow, Ivanka Trump, Diane Sawyer, the actress Stephanie March, the model Karolina Kurkova, Candice Bergen, the socialite Tinsley Mortimer, the Vogue senior editor Meredith Melling Burke and the designer Tory Burch, who all have the exquisitely groomed fair hair that personifies New York Blondeness.

The Many Faces of Blonde

Do not confuse New York (upper-case) Blondes with New York (lower-case) blondes, a more ubiquitous breed that is too busy going to work, shopping for groceries, getting the dishwasher repaired and watching "Grey's Anatomy" to worry about whether their caramel streaks have become brassy or their dark roots will show up in photographs on NewYorkSocialDiary.com , a blog that chronicles the society set. New York (lower-case) blondes lighten their hair over the bathroom sink or have it highlighted at a salon that doesn't serve cappuccino or present you with a bill that is only slightly more modest than airfare to Paris.

Nor should New York Blondes be confused with their more conspicuously bleached West Coast counterparts. For one thing, their fair hair gleams like a beacon in an environment of granite, soot, gray skies and little black dresses.

"Blond hair is such a contrast to the cityscape surrounding them in New York," said Leatrice Eiseman, a color specialist who is director of the Pantone Color Institute, an organization that tracks color trends. "You don't have that juxtaposition in a climate of sun and sand."

If you think of the world as a large-scale version of your high school cafeteria, New York Blondes are the "good girls" and Hollywood Blondes are the "bad girls."

"New York Blondes have sex appeal, but in a classy sort of way," said Robert Verdi, a celebrity stylist who is a host of "Fashion Police" on the Style cable network. "Hollywood blondes are more obvious, more va-va-va-voom. There isn't any attempt to look natural."

Or, as Ms. Sykes put it: "It's the difference between Scarlett Johansson and Carolyn Bessette. In New York, the look is blond and chic with no bust, and in L.A. it's blond and busty and sex bomb. Here, the sexy element is considered a bit tacky."

The Price They Pay

The pedigree of the New York Blonde goes back at least 40 years, to the days when a covey of well-dressed, well-tressed socialites like C. Z. Guest and Nan Kempner were the reigning fashion doyennes. These women would stop by some flossy East Side salon for a "comb-out" (the 60's equivalent of a blow-out) before lunching at now-shuttered water holes like La Caravelle and La Côte Basque. In their trim suits, gloves and alligator pumps, they were the style setters of their day, and their perfectly cut and sprayed coiffures were often colored shades like ash or platinum.

Today, you hardly hear the word platinum associated with hair. But the New York Blonde's obsession with her hair is, if anything, more powerful than ever. Although the cut may be a simple classic style — no messy, razored layers, no tacky imitations of Mischa Barton — the hair itself looks like something Botticelli would have done had he worked in a posh Manhattan salon and charged $300 for highlights. Delicate ribbons of flax are intertwined with streaks of vanilla and threads of gold strategically placed over a honey-toned base to create a silky, shiny, better-than-natural-looking head of hair that silently telegraphs "high-priced," "high class" and, most of all, "high maintenance."

"Trust me, it takes a lot of money and a lot of effort to have hair that appears so effortlessly beautiful," said Kathleen Flynn-Hui, a senior colorist at Salon AKS on Fifth Avenue and author of "Beyond the Blonde," a gossipy roman à clef set in a Madison Avenue salon. In her opinion, a New York Blonde's hair is her best accessory. "It looks expensive and it definitely turns heads," she said.

At Manhattan's haute salons, highlights generally start at $200 and soar into the stratosphere upward of $500 without tips, depending on factors like the length of one's hair, its color (lightening dirty blond hair is less pricey than transforming chestnut), the processes required and the star power of the colorist. By contrast, according to a study published in American Salon, a trade magazine, in 2004 the national average that American women paid for standard highlights was $61 to $71.

Sometimes the New York Blonde has her hairdresser tend her tresses in the privacy of her home, a service that can double or triple the cost of a salon visit. She may also require an emergency application of Clairol when visiting faraway playgrounds like Aspen or Rome.

"It is part of the lifestyle of being a New York Blonde," said Rita Hazan, the colorist who owns the Rita Hazan Salon on East 65th Street and whose appointment book is filled with names of clients on both coasts, including Jennifer Lopez and Jessica Simpson.

"My clients fly me wherever they are to do their color," added Ms. Hazan, who charges $500 and up for highlights. "They'll call and say, 'Rita, I'm in Canada' or 'I'm in Italy' or 'I'm in Utah.' Can you come?' I pack my bags, and I'm off on the next plane" — with a first-class ticket and luxury accommodations.

A Slave to Her Salon

The price of being a New York Blonde is also measured in time.

"I think the really chic ones are in the salon every two weeks, because your roots start growing out the minute you leave the salon," Ms. Sykes said. "The girls who look good are there every four weeks, and the ones who don't look so good are there every two months."

But even if a salon appointment is every six weeks, the effort required to constantly look this beautiful can be exhausting.

"It might sound like fun to the ordinary woman, but it requires enormous discipline and commitment to chase the perfect the way New York Blondes do," said Natalia Ilyin, a cultural critic, echoing the title of her newest book, "Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time." Ms. Ilyin, who is also the author of "Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture," added: "Going to the salon is not a fun thing you do once in a while. It's part of an identity that you have to keep up."

Even a society swan like Tinsley Mortimer, whose gorgeous, long blond locks capture photographers' lenses at fashion shows and black-tie benefits, conceded that it was too difficult to maintain the coveted pale "baby blond" look.

"I loved being really light blond, but it was just super-high-maintenance," she said. "Now I have a little darker blond color that is easier to take care of."

A color-savvy New York Blonde, who can distinguish between a chardonnay highlight and a Champagne highlight, is very finicky about getting the exact shade she wants. It isn't unheard of for her to stride into a salon with swatch of maize-colored silk or a tiny daughter with butter-colored curls and request that the same hue be woven into her hair.

An alchemist who can custom-blend a fabulous shade will be rewarded with a grateful client who doesn't switch colorists every six months, a client, perhaps, like Mona de Sayve, a partner in her mother's interior design firm, Ann Downey Interiors, who has been a client of Ms. Flynn-Hui's for 18 years. Ms. de Sayve remained loyal even during the years she lived in Paris.

"I tried Alexandre and Carita," Ms. de Sayve said, mentioning two of the city's most chic salons, "and no one could do it right. In Paris, they just don't understand blond highlights. They're too old-fashioned. I'd let them do touch-ups — with Kathleen's formula — but I would fly to New York every six or eight weeks to see Kathleen."

Although Ms. de Sayve now lives in Palm Beach, she comes to Manhattan every month to have her blond hair colored by Ms. Flynn-Hui, who charges $275 and up for highlights.

In the eyes of many New York Blondes, this sort of diligence is worth it.

"It's not only worth it, it's necessary," said Toni Haber, a real estate broker for Prudential Douglas Elliman whose workaday uniform runs to Armani suits and Prada heels and whose golden hair is highlighted by Jennifer Costa of the John Barrett Salon in Bergdorf Goodman. "In my career and the people I take out for business and socialize with, it's important to be chic-looking because they notice your nails, your hair, your shoes, your ring. It makes you feel better, too."

In a city that thrives on symbols, there is another reason so many women are willing to be a captive to their colorist: dazzling blond hair, associated with gold, rarity and status, is a symbol of power. "The New York Blonde embodies a lot of the values of our materialistic society," said Ms. Ilyin, the (naturally blond) social critic, a former New Yorker, who lives near Seattle. "She is thinner, blonder, richer than the rest of us, and she has better shoes. Hair that gorgeous is hard to attain. She creates in the viewer a sense of lack, a message that says, 'I have more than you.' This is power."

Perhaps that sense of power explains why, for New York Blondes, the pursuit of perfection begins early, as evidenced by teenage Rapunzels who are booking appointments to have their hair chemically enhanced.

"Believe it or not, I've had some really young kids come in — maybe 10, 11 or 12 years old," said Ms. Costa of the John Barrett salon. "But that's uncommon. More often, it's girls in high school."

Is There Life Beyond Blonde?

Rare is the New York Blonde who changes her stripes.

"Once you have invested the time, money and effort into being a beautiful blonde," said Steven Amendola, a colorist at the Kevin Mancuso Salon on Park Avenue, who estimated that 75 percent of his customers were blond, "you are not going back to being a brunette. It is the rarest of clients."

Count Ms. Sykes, the author of "Bergdorf Blondes," among the happy Snow Whites who have no desire to be transformed into Cinderellas.

"If you have really dark hair and dark eyebrows like I do, the maintenance would be just terrible," said Ms. Sykes, a 5-foot-10-inch sylph with long chestnut-colored hair. "I tried going slightly blonder, and it didn't work for me. With my English complexion, I looked green."

Ms. Sykes has even forsaken her Bergdorf Blondes and crossed over to the dark side in her new novel, "The Debutante Divorcée," to be published April 18. Brunettes fill the pages. Or, as the author put it deliciously, "My protagonist has hair the color of espresso beans."

Perhaps brunette is the new blond.