My life as a jet-setter started, peaked, and died my senior year of high school.
After graduating as valedictorian of my high school class, my parents treated me to a trip to Paris. It was my first time in Europe, and they pulled out all the stops. As one of five children, having a hotel room all to myself would have been a luxury at The Holiday Inn, but my parents booked me a room of my own at The Ritz in Place Vendome. The Ritz! THE RITZ! THE RITZ! I understand The Ritz has recently undergone substantial renovations but, at least back in the early aughts, the rooms were like jewel boxes: sumptuously decked out in the finest draperies and upholsteries with chandeliers and gold detailing on the walls. Climbing into bed, I felt like Marie Antoinette melting into an enormous cream puff of the softest, highest thread count sheets ever spun. I had a dressing room where the housekeeping hung my clothing artfully on hooks as if it were Dior’s finest rather than the Gap and Abercrombie I lived in back then. The TV had an entire station dedicated to runway shows (“FTV”) that I played the entirety of my stay. In the morning, room service wheeled breakfast into my bedroom with croissants so delightfully buttery and crispy I might have awoken the next door neighbor biting into one if it weren’t for the 34898 yards of fabric and wallpaper insulating the rooms from one another. (Though, my Dad choked when he discovered that a single banana cost 8 Euros and we promptly took our subsequent breakfasts out on the town.) My parents took me to the famous and exclusive Bar Hemingway on the first floor of the Ritz (if memory serves, at the time, you could only get in if you were a guest of the hotel?) where I enjoyed a few sips of my mother’s champagne cocktail. We talked a lot about Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a fabulous memoir that takes place in part in Paris, and that absolutely tears your heart out of your chest. My father and I shared the most divine roast chicken at Taillevent; it was made-to-order, so we waited in suspense for an hour and it did not disappoint. We took a day trip to Versailles, where I learned that Louis XIV had had the gardens groomed in such a way that they widened as they got further away from the main house so that, to the naked eye, it would look as though it was the same width all the way to the horizon (#mindblown). We took the elevator up the Eiffel Tower to eat at the Jules Verne and, despite a fear of heights, drank in the city sights in big gulps from the most spectacularly elevated of vantages. We spent a quiet morning roaming around the petite Musee Marmottan, which houses an insane collection of Monet’s water lilies in one large room, and then ate croque monsieurs in a nearby cafe. For dinner at Tour D’Argent, another celebrated Parisian restaurant, my father had somehow forgotten to pack a tie. (Very odd, come to think of it, as my parents aren’t exactly the wear-sweats-on-the-plane types: my Dad almost always travels in a blue blazer and my mother is somehow always donning a fur). The helpful concierge at the Ritz sent out for a tie “from a nearby store.” The store turned out to be Ermenegildo Zegna, and my father had to bite his tongue as he unwittingly paid for the most expensive tie he’d ever own. For dessert one night, we found a little patisserie around the corner from the hotel with the delicious French dessert mille feuille, which my father absolutely slaughtered pronunciation-wise (it came out something akin to “moollee filey” rather than “meee foy”). My mother took me shopping on the Champs Elysees and, even better, Rue Saint Honore, where she treated me to a sky blue Longchamps tote that I promptly wore for nearly two years straight.
Maybe it was my recent birthday, or the birth of minimagpie, or the fact that I have leaned on my parents more this year than any year in recent memory, or my habitual introspection over the past few months thanks to this little bloglet, but I have been thinking a lot about this trip to Paris lately. I had always had a close relationship with my parents, but I began to view them differently on this trip abroad. Wedged between the above-described pastiche of extravagances and discoveries were dozens of quiet–in many ways unremarkable–moments enjoyed in the company of two brilliant, well-traveled people giddily showing me around one of their favorite places on earth. What might have previously fallen under “annoying parent territory” (i.e., my mother always reminding the waitstaff that she likes her fish “all the way cooked through, please” and her sauvignon blanc “ice cold”) now struck me as charming eccentricity. As I watched my father inspect Napoleon’s tomb, his hands behind his back, his glasses at the tip of his nose, a wad of reading material in his pocket, I saw him as the inquisitive scholar he is. As my mom strolled into the high-end stores on Rue Saint Honore, her pashmina thrown artfully over her shoulders, light tendrils of Dior perfume wafting behind her, her bag tucked smartly under her arm (“never leave a bag unzipped in Paris,” she said, knowingly), I observed the salesclerks approach her with deference and I saw her as the confident, graceful woman she is. Straddling the summer between my admittedly parochial youth in D.C. and the dawn of my life as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, I felt the earth shifting beneath my feet as I drank in a totally foreign culture with these two suddenly-new-to-me people. It was the first of many moments in my adult life that I realized how unfixed life can be: how even the greatest of constants can change, and how these changes can be beautiful rather than scary.
And with that.
Some fashion finds that remind me, in their effortless sophistication, of Paris.
+Alexis Noelle dress (on sale for $336). On sale for even less — $249 — in a size P here.
+New shoe obsession alert! The Dior slingback ($790). For sure going to be one of the IT shoes of the fall season.
+From the maker of the famous BonBon earrings, Rebecca de Ravenel’s new flower earrings ($525) are of course going to be another cult classic.
+Ruffled polka dot dress ($59).
+Hermes clutch ($2,949).
+Zimmermann lace playsuit (on sale for $210).
+Chic leather slides — if the Hermes ones I’m always referencing aren’t in your budget, these are a GREAT wallet-friendly alternative (on sale for $75).
+A cute Birkin basket bag ($125).
+Polka dot scarf (on sale for $29).
+Finally, OMG — THIS TIBI DRESS (!!!!) is on sale for 70% off! What a perfect LBD. Also available in white as the most perfect rehearsal dinner dress ever for $247.
+Oscar de la Renta dotted mules (on sale for $266!) The sales, people. THE SALES. There are too many goodies available these days and it’s become a problem.
+Ladylike Cuyana bag ($375).
+Little silk scarf ($45).
Oui oui, oui oui!