Paris

I fell in love with France when I was about 12 years old.  One day I woke up and decided I was going to be French.  Well, maybe it was that I was going to be a fashion designer…  Anyway, everyone knows that if you’re a fashion designer you have to live in Paris, so naturally had to learn French.  


On the first day of French class, I was so excited - I was going to be a French girl!  I started doing everything French - wearing red lipstick, eating croissants, putting my hair in a French twist, flipping through copies of French Vogue…  



We started with the basics - Bonjour, je m'appelle Suzie, comment ca va? etc, etc.  Then came the first verb and its conjugation chart: aller.  Je vais, tu vas, elle va, nous allons….  What???  I was so confused.  What was a conjugation chart?  Why had I never heard of this before?  This wasn’t what I bargained for….  I slowly started to panic - I would never learn how to speak French or be a French girl, and all my big dreams of becoming a famous French fashion designer started to crumble…


Thankfully when I showed up to class the next day, everyone was just as, if not more, confused than me.  After a few days, everything started to magically click, and I was again confident that I would one day be French.

That is, until the end of the school year…  I enrolled in French II, but there were not enough students signed up for the class, so they decided they weren’t going to offer it.  I was crushed.  How could they not offer French II?  After I had learned all that vocabulary and those verbs, and - didn’t they know I was going to be a famous French fashion designer?  I mean, this wasn’t just a foreign language class; this was my life


I came home so upset.  My father finally calmed me down and talked to the school counselor the next day.  They were able to work out a plan so that I could attend another school for my French class the next year.  I had to get up at 5 am every morning to do this, but I was determined.  Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking…  I had magical images in my head.


By the time I graduated high school, I had completed 6 years of French.  I took two more years in college and spent a semester in Paris.  It was pretty amazing.  The first 24 hours in the city were like a dream.  Part of that was probably the jet lag, but it was my first time in a foreign country (besides the Texas/Mexico border, which doesn’t really count), and I was overwhelmed with the sense of adventure.  It was a mixture of fear, anxiety, curiosity, and excitement - the same feeling I get today when traveling to a new place.


Paris is a city of quirky free spirits and artists, who sit in cafes in the Marais having intense intellectual discussions about poetry, literature, and art.  It’s a city of elegant, wasp-waisted women riding their bicycles along the Champs Elysees, with the obligatory baguette and little dog in the front basket.  It’s so tantalizing and appealing.  Who wouldn’t want to be French?


There is so much attention to detail and beauty as a part of the French culture, and I think that’s what I so strongly identified with.  I remember being in a cafe and looking at the intricate mosaic tile pattern on the floor - a fan of scallops, with ombre shading in copper and rose gold edged in a delicate line of pewter danced in front of my eyes.  The gradations in color were accented by the dim lighting in the cafe. 

This inspired me and ultimately led to the Paris collection: