Fashion & Design

Food writer Laura Calder analyses her fear of clothing and discovers the intricate links between food, fashion, and the fine art of French dressing.

Three stylish boutiques to add to your shopping itinerary...

Pleasure for the Eye and Ear

In the Batignolles neighbourhood near Place Clichy, French Touche is a small cave where you enter without knowing what you are looking for, and yet find the item you’ve always wanted.

French industrial designer Mathieu Lehanneur’s inventive pharmaceuticals in MoMA’s new show, introduce ritual and art into medicine.

Every Sunday, a youngish friend of mine, who recently suffered a heart attack, puts a week’s worth of pills into his seven-day dispenser. For each day there is a big yellowy-pink oval vitamin pill, an orange Plavix, a specially-coated aspirin and, lastly, a quarter of a Bisoprolol, divided by a mechanism that looks like a tiny paper-cutter. After he takes his four morning pills, he puts one cholesterol-reducing Lipitor pill into the newly-empty compartment, to take at seven in the evening. This he often forgets to do.

Paris, out of fashion? Not so quick. This spring, a new fashion and design center, La Cité de la Mode et du Design, will be inaugurated along the Seine’s Left Bank, between the Bercy and Austerlitz bridges. The three-story building will host a fashion school, L’Institut français de la mode, an exhibition space—big enough to welcome catwalks of course—as well as music production studios, a bookstore, cafés, a restaurant. Paris-based architects Dominique Jakob and Brendan Macfarlane have enveloped the concrete construction of a dockside warehouse built in 1907 with a structure called the “plug-over,” made of steel, glass, and landscaped material. The 12,000-square meter building (129,000 square feet), also known as Docks en Seine, is the only one in Paris to extend over the Seine, with its lower part, a promising open-air terrace that can accommodate flooding.

Les Bijoux de Dieter Roth
Until May 11
Dieter Roth earned international renown for his innovation as a painter, sculptor, musician, and director. The Swiss artist transferred his radical sensibility to jewellery making in collaboration with the Icelandic goldsmith, Hans Langenbacher. This exhibition showcases a selection of the designer’s most striking pieces from the 1960s and 1970s. €6.50-8.
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 107, rue de Rivoli, Paris 1. Mº Palais Royal. 01 44 57 50. www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr

Pierre Paulin, “Le Design au Pouvoir”
Until July 27
The recently reopened Galerie des Gobelins pays homage to Pierre Paulin, the renowned contemporary French designer. Furniture buffs will instantly recognize iconic pieces selected from past collections, such as the 1965 Ribbon chair, and relish the chance to view his most recent work. €4-6.

Théâtre, Cinéma, Music-Hall, Ballet
Until January 27
The Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent’s current exhibition switches focus from the designer’s catwalk creations to his lesser-known costumes for stage and screen. Film and fashion buffs can admire the likes of Catherine Deneuve’s Belle de Jour get-up, or the outfit worn by Isabelle Adjani in Subway, shown in film clips, photographs and original sketches. €3-5
Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, 5, avenue Marceau, Paris 16. Mº Alma Marceau. 01 44 31 64 31. www.ysl-hautecouture.com

Beauty and cancer: two words rarely seen together. Yet, an astonishing boutique near the Bastille, L’Embellie, reconciles these two concepts. The shop aims at embellishing the life of women suffering from cancer by providing them with both elegant and practical items. “Because an ill woman is not just ill…” announces the few words written on the shop window.

“I wanted to create the place I dreamed of when I was ill, with all the details which can make a sick person’s life not only easier but also prettier and more comforting,” explains Anne Matalon, herself a cancer survivor who founded L’Embellie a few months ago. “Sick women need to enjoy their everyday life again—shopping, taking care of their body and skin. I’ve never enjoyed being elegant as much as when I was ill.”

About three years ago, a mysterious-looking clothing store with all-black interiors called Wochdom opened on rue Condorcet, an otherwise unassuming street in the Ninth arrondissement where we have lived for the last seven years. Sandwiched between Montmartre, seedy Pigalle, and the Japanese restaurants-saturated Opéra district, the Ninth is one of the rare quartiers in central Paris that is utterly devoid of historical monuments. Luminaries like George Sand and Frederic Chopin once lived here, and so did leading Surrealist André Breton, but it is not a neighbourhood that attracts camera-laden tourists like other Parisian arrondissements. When Wochdom arrived, however, long floppy haired girls in acid-washed jean jackets and legwarmers over high-heels began convening at our local cafes, hauling out their latest buys for mutual inspection.