Un Peu Parisien

Sezane tank
Sezane jeans
J. Crew sandals (similar)
Sezane handbag
Mango sunglasses
Agape Studio necklace (c/o) (similar)
Linjer ring (c/o) (similar)
Agape Studio earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Saint-Boniface Cathedral – Winnipeg, Manitoba

I’ve always wanted to be un peu parisien – a little bit Parisian. But being a little bit Parisian can mean all kinds of different things. It can mean eating a croissant for breakfast everyday, wherever you live. For me, it’s mostly about style. When we lived in the French capital in 2012 and 2013, my contents of my closet, influenced by the life I lived, underwent a slow shift, so slow that I almost didn’t notice that the pieces I was reaching for daily were changing… until the morning a Canadian friend came to visit and I pulled together the most Parisian outfit possible (after oversleeping, also tres parisien): a navy blue blazer, light blue Oxford shirt, skinny jeans and black ankle boots. It was an outfit I’d never worn before, and certainly wouldn’t have pulled out in Canada. But in Paris, it just made sense.

A decade later, I don’t live in Paris. And it’s been so long that I don’t even own a navy blazer anymore. (The opportunities for wearing one in Winnipeg are few and far between.) I’ve pursued a minimal aesthetic, curating a wardrobe mostly devoid of colour. It’s a sartorial place that I feel comfortable, but it isn’t entirely me, and my closet confirms that. If you were to visit me at home, and take a tour of my office/dressing room, you’d be surprised to find two distinct aesthetics competing for space in my closet: minimal, and, predictably, Parisian. While I mostly don’t dress like I live in France anymore, I easily can, should the mood strike. And on the day we took these photos, it did. I was feeling un peu parisien, and I put my outfit together accordingly.

The thing about the minimal aesthetic is that I do love it. But it’s also rigid. There are so many rules – limitations on colour, on cut, on details. I’ve always excelled at following rules, at finding ways to fit myself into a space that wasn’t made for me out of sheer stubbornness and force of will. It’s like a game for me, or a puzzle. The thing about puzzles, though, is that once you’ve put it all together, you find yourself asking, “Okay, now what?”

…and that’s where I find myself with my current minimal wardrobe. I’ve gotten the simple aesthetic down to a science, but that means there’s no more challenge in it. Playing by the rules for the sake of it is boring, and my rebellious heart is ready for a new challenge. But maybe, I’m beginning to think, the challenge is in not taking on a challenge at all; in not treating my wardrobe like a project with a certain set of specifications but a collection of things that I love and that make me feel inspired.

There are some ways in which I will never be even a little bit Parisian. I’m a morning person, for one thing, always up before the sun, while Paris barely yawns its way to life before ten am. For another, scoffing at rules and dismissing them as arbitrary doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m a perfectionist, which is the opposite of the Parisian laissez-faire attitude. I don’t just embrace rules, I make up extra ones for myself to follow, like only wearing four colours. A true Parisian buys clothes she loves because she loves them, with no regard for how they fit into her wardrobe or how she will “justify” the purchase in cost per wear. That isn’t me. Or at least, it hasn’t been since we came back from Paris in 2013.

“Vivre ne suffit pas, on a besoin de soleil, de liberté et d’une petite fleur.”
– Hans Christian Andersen

I’ve always held some space for my Parisian self in my closet. I’ve never stopped buying from Sezane entirely, even when their collections didn’t suit my style. I love rules up to a point, but past that point, I feel compelled to break them. And I’ve always kept just enough clothes in my wardrobe that I could do that, when the mood struck.

The truth is, I’d like to be un peu parisien in my approach to fashion. Or at least, un peu plus parisien than I am right now. For so long, I’ve made up rules for myself and my wardrobe that constrained my creativity but also, I could argue, focused it on a very specific thing. What, I asked myself recently, if I changed my focus? What if, instead of looking perfect, my goal was to look exactly how I want to look on any given day, and I allowed that to change based on how I felt, not on how I wanted others to see me? It’s impossible to know what might happen unless I actually started to experiment.

At this point, I don’t know if I’m quite ready to take the leap. For most of my life, I’ve chased perfection as a goal, knowing it’s impossible but continuing to pursue it in what I can only describe as the naive belief that if I can at least come close, it’s worthwhile. I’m not sure I think that’s true anymore, but letting go of the habits developed over decades in service of that belief won’t be simple or straightforward. My tendency towards perfectionism is tied up with other challenges that I’m still working my way towards untangling. When we lived in Paris, I was so far away from them that I could forget them entirely, but that was never going to last forever.

And now that I’m back in Winnipeg, I’m as close to them as I can possibly be. So instead of trying to make a big change that I can’t sustain (which is too often how I do things) at a time when I’m still walking a path that may not end where I expect it will, I’m making little ones. Choosing a Parisian-inspired outfit, rather than a minimal one, on days when I feel inclined to. Or buying a floral sweater from Sezane that I’ve loved for years but consistently removed from my shopping cart because I won’t wear it “enough” to justify owning it.

Basically, I’m just giving myself a bit more freedom to break the rules when I feel like it, without throwing out the rule book entirely. And maybe that is just un peu parisien. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe, more importantly, it doesn’t matter either way.

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