Auteuil

On my last day in Paris I went to Auteuil, in the 16th arrondissement. It was once a village high on a hill about two miles west of Paris, overlooking vineyards, farms and eventually the country retreats of wealthy Parisians and a few mansions. It’s very quiet with many villas and hameaux (private streets or culs de sac). Some find it too bourgeois but I really enjoy the peaceful village atmosphere and the fact that there are no tourists around. Auteuil is also known for its architecture. Although most of the buildings are haussmanian, there are also a lot of Art Nouveau buildings, especially from Hector Guimard, which blossomed all over the district at the turn of the century. It was really cold so my promenade around the streets of Auteuil was very brief even if I was wearing my oversize coat from Marant combined with black cashmere turtleneck and jeans.

Isabel Marant coat and boots / Acne jeans / Louis Vuitton bag

Ménilmontant

A good pair of jeans are an essential part of my wardrobe. I basically live in my jeans because I always where them at home, at university and I like to dress my jeans up for any occasion, during the day with a casual top or a sweater, and in the evening with a fancy top and a pair of heels. I’ve always been faithful to Acne skin 5 (I have them in five different colors) but recently I wanted to change so yesterday I went to Acne store in rue Froissart and I find out that the Pin model is exactly what I was looking for. It’s a skinny model with high rise in mid blue wash with a vintage touch. This style is everything I need in a look, as they keep everything into place: super tight and fitted, accentuating curves and giving that urban chic vibe. I immediately worn them with the v neck cashmere sweater and Dicker boots: so simple but so chic at the same time.

Isabel Marant boots / Acne jeans / Eric Bompard cashmere sweater

If one day i disappear will you find me

While I am waiting for my new lessons’ start, I decided to go to Paris to study for a couple of week. This morning I was in Marais and after a coffee break at Café Charlot I went to Picasso Museum at Hotel Salé that houses the largest collection of his works including paintings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs and texts. It reopened to the public last year after substantial restoration work. Picasso painting is powerful, his personality is definitely over the top and eclectic. He wrote in 1935: “My picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else” and his inner tension is evident in all his work, and well represented by this exhibition that really helps to penetrate into his world, or at least part of it. 

Acne jeans / Stuart Weitzman boots / Isabel Marant sweater and coat  

Jardin de Plantes

My stay in Paris is almost finish and the next week I have to come back to Italy. I am so grateful for this experience because it gives me the chance to live even for a short time in my favorite city and to know some amazing people. I’ve spent one of my last days in Paris at Jardin des Plantes, an enormous botanical garden in the Latin Quarter. The Jardin des Plantes is actually France’s main botanical garden, serving as home to a national botanical school that trains botanists, constructs demonstration gardens and maintains a massive seed depository to safeguard France’s botanical and horticultural diversity. The sight was established as a garden nearly 400 years ago, with the first plants installed in 1635 to serve as a medicinal herb garden for the royal family. At about the end of the 15th century, the garden came under the stewardship of university-trained botanists, who expanded its size and focus to include plants of all sorts from throughout France and opened the space to the public.

Balenciaga bag / Isabel Marant sweatshirt and boots

Saint Germain

This afternoon I went to over to Saint-Germain-des-Prés to buy some candles at Diptyque shop and have a coffee at Café de Flore with my friend Emma. St. Germain is my favorite area in Paris. It’s still blessed by a youthful energy, interesting streets and the atmosphere that accompanies a living university district. As a center for bookstores, design shops, museums, churches, high-end art galleries, boutique hotels, historic cafés and restaurants, it is virtually impossible to be disappointed. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson with a twist “if you are bored in St. Germain, you are bored with life”.

Acne jeans / Celine bag / Isabel Marant shirt / Chanel flats

Ne me quitte pas

Springtime in Paris is simply glorious: all of the flowers in the city’s parks start to bloom, the trees start to blossom and those bone-chilling breezes off the Seine turn more pleasant than polar. I like enjoying le printemps at Palais Royal gardens, reading a book or studying for my thesis or basically doing nothing. Yesterday after having stayed all the morning there, I went to Fornasetti exhibition at Musée des Arts Decoratifs. It’s a fascinating exhibition, loosely chronological, that paints an entertaining portrait of an artist with a phenomenal output. All the familiar Fornasetti pieces are represented: the furniture, trays, umbrella stands and plates (astounding enough in their volume, humour and execution) but this comprehensive collection delves even deeper. It encompasses early paintings, miniscule sketches on scraps of paper, the books that inspired him, preliminary paintings for scarves and cruise liners, photos of his bedroom as a child (which he decorated himself) and cabinets of curiosities confirming that in Fornasetti’s world, there really was no object unadorned.

Bompard cashmere sweater / Acne jeans / Chanel bag and flats