Mango sweater
Zara jeans (similar)
Jonak babies (similar)
Chanel handbag
Celine sunglasses
Celine necklace (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o)
Modu Atelier earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Avenue de la Bourdonnais – Paris, France
Paris, May 28, 2023
Dear friends,
Years ago – it was probably 2015 – when most fashion girls still actually wrote blogs, I stumbled upon a beautiful post featuring photos taken at an old style cafe near the Eiffel Tower. It wasn’t featured on a blog that I read regularly, and I don’t know that I returned to it ever again, but I always remembered those photos. We so rarely go anywhere near the Eiffel Tower when we’re in Paris that it seemed unlikely we’d ever have the opportunity to visit the cafe and reinterpret those shots in our own way.
…you know, until we decided to stay in the sixteenth arrondissement this year. Finally, I thought – my cafe photoshoot dreams will come true.
By now, you’ve surely noticed that there is no cafe in these photos, that I’m simply standing in front of the doors to two apartment buildings, which obviously means there’s a story in how we got here. And I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you how my cafe photoshoot turned out to look like this, so here we go…
The cafe in question is the Brasserie de La Tour Eiffel, where the decor hasn’t changed since Tiffany lamps were in vogue. There’s a zinc bar, leather banquette seats and all kinds of vintage details that I can’t resist (and that I can see, slowly but surely, disappearing from the Parisian landscape, replaced by modern, minimal and no doubt easy to maintain coffeeshop decor that could just as easily be in Perth as in Paris.) I love a good plan, so I’ve done my research. I know the cafe opens at seven in the morning, and that it usually isn’t busy until nine, so if we time it right, we can be there before anyone else and get our shots without being disruptive… and without other patrons in the background.
We set off from our apartment on rue Alfred-Bruneau around 6:30 am. This is mission: cafe photoshoot. We’ve been planning it passively for years and we are ready.
Too ready, perhaps. The walk from our apartment takes about twenty-five minutes. We arrive just before seven and the cafe door is open, giving us a view of the lone waiter slowly sweeping the floor inside. All the chairs are still stacked on tabletops from the night before. There is no one else there who might start moving them. “Let’s take a walk around the block,” I tell Ian. This is Paris, after all. An opening time is more of a suggestion than a rule.
So we walk around and come back. Nothing has changed. The waiter is still sweeping, a fact that seems almost impossible given the relatively small square footage of the cafe and the amount of time it took us to wander through the neighbourhood. The chairs are still stacked. It’s clear, by this point, that the cafe won’t actually open until 8 am… if we’re lucky. Which means we can spend the better part of the hour wandering otherwise mostly deserted residential streets, waiting for our chance to finally make our cafe photoshoot a reality, or we can quickly come up with an alternative plan.
…you can guess which open we chose.
The thing about plans is that sometimes, they change. I haven’t always been super open to that, but I’m learning. Maybe one day we’ll get to make our cafe photoshoot dreams come true, but this day just wasn’t it. And, truthfully, I think these brown doors, while perhaps more ordinary, and certainly less likely to be replaced than a cafe interior, are equally beautiful. Sometimes plans change, and the change leads you to something you wouldn’t have otherwise imagined. That’s pretty amazing, when you think about it.
