La Coquette

Pencil case Chic

I don’t even know how or when this started, but my sister Aimee and I once had a joke about French kids loving pencil cases.  It has to do with a certain tidiness we find in the French school child, perhaps partly imagined, as we have never been in French school ourselves.

But I’ll never forget when I received in Florida a handmade booklet created by my cousin Jeanne and her fifth grade class, telling us all about their lives in their village of Viré.  How they wrote so carefully on their wee little sheets of graph paper!  The penmanship!  I asked my cousin recently and she said they took all of their class notes on graph paper, so that certainly helped dissuade from the big, loopy style that females seem genetically disposed to in America.

It had been years since we’d mentioned the pencil case thing, and I had forgotten all about it, until I wore a 1940’s navy top with polka dots under a Mont Saint-Michel eyelet sweater one night when I was home from Christmas, like a petite écolier, and my sister Aimee took one look at me and said, “You look very French.  Like you should be carrying a pencil case.”

Paris Shooting, En Coulisse!

If you live in the Chicagoland area or Texas, I bid you to check out the September Fashion issue of Chicago Magazine and Texas Monthly this Fall--you will see the so fabulous shoot that I worked on last week.   

Contributor’s Page snapshot shot off rue de Vaugirard:

From left:  Alice (makeup), Antony (hair), Stacey (stylist), Camilla (model), Luigi (photographer), Me (stylist’s assistant, Consigliere on all matters French).

I know, it's so hard to tell who the model is.

The photographer and makeup artist were from Milano.  After working with them for two days, I wanted to make all of my words roll up and down as if they were cascading over little Italian hills. I was all, “BellEEsimo CaMEEya!” whenever I would fasten a new skirt over Camilla's snake-like hips.  In terms of how annoying I was, it reminded me of the first time I saw Les Parapluies de Cherbourg in college and I walked around for days singing my every action in a French accent.  “Hand noooow, I’m taking out zeu trash.”

Here's the Martin Grant look we shot in front of the Saint Sulpice church. 

Marc Jacobs at Place de la Concorde.

There were eleven looks in total and Stacey did a seriously amazing job styling.  And my pictures of course do no justice for Luigi's talents.  (Except maybe show that he is limber.)

Day Two, just after the final shot. 

Fin.  Fine.  The End. 

(This post was brought to you by the makers of Actifed Jour et Nuit, Propolis Spray Buccal Apaisant, Leader Price Jus d’Orange, and especially Drill’s cough drops; those suckers are amazing.  Also, grazie mille to Alex for letting me borrow her camera.)

Pics from last year's Chicago Fashion shoot can be found right here.