PARIS 9/29 — The destination for the Sunday morning journey was the Spring 2014 runway show of the young designer Maxime Simoens. If his name is unfamiliar to you now, then that might not continue being the case in the coming seasons following significant investment by luxury behemoth LVMH.
Both the casting and production bespoke ambition. Although the collection itself, leather, zippers, plunging necklines, also brimmed with self-assuredness, this was by no stretch vintage. Regardless, Maxime Simoens is here to stay.
That afternoon, Manon Leloup (above, left) and Ava Smith (above, right) opened and closed the show respectively. Also featuring on the runway were Sung Hee and Charlotte Nolting.
For her opening look, Manon wore metallic shades (above), which quite possibly provided one of the week’s enduring images to emerge from my series of black and white videos.
During the agency dinner the previous night Sojourner and I started talking coffee. The conversation was not even a couple minutes old and we had already sussed out each other’s coffee nerd credibility. An immediate rendezvous was in order, then, Sunday at 16h15 outside Kooka Boora at 62 rue des Martyrs. Run by expatriate Australians, the café is one of the growing number of cafés in Paris that specialize in fine espresso, the artisanal sort purveyors such as Joe Coffee, Blue Bottle and Ninth Street Espresso have long championed in New York. Sojourner ordered a flat white and I ordered an espresso, straight. Seating was a bit tricky as nearly every available plank of wood with four legs was occupied outside the café in this bustling, picture book of a neighborhood. With some help from a helpful staff member, we were seated, the coffee arrived and it was every bit as delicious as Sojourner had said it would be. Enter into my good graces, Sojourner where she joins fellow coffee nerd and model Isaac Ekblad.
In between sips of her flat white, Sojourner shared some thoughts of hers about the city, which I recorded on camera only just audible above the din of the noisy café. Hearing French all day and everyday is something that Sojourner of course appreciates, but Paris’s proximity via rail to other destinations throughout Central Europe really intrigues her. There is always that potential of spiriting off to Rome or Berlin that captures Sojourner’s imagination.
Sojourner looked right at home seated there outside the café. I felt fortunate to have been able to make such a rare outing into a Paris that is not connected to the machine of Fashion Week. The momentary respite was just that, fleeting, as a rather congested Monday schedule awaited me on the other side of my three hour nightly sleep.
