paris diaries: model edition
two days in paris, straight from my diary
monday
11:09am
i am in the back of an electric car with my hood up and glasses on and my skin is slightly greasy from the plane. i am being driven down a wide road that reminds me of the journey from heathrow to london, except we are driving from cdg into paris. it reminds me of england because it’s grey outside and the road is grey too, but if i look to the right there are plenty of trees, all a rich shade of green that can only be achieved by plenty of rain. they’re the kind of trees that i would draw as a child — thick brown trunks and a full green crown.
i flew from jfk on the redeye last night and landed about an hour ago. i spent most of my flight lucidly pissed because the woman behind me kept kicking and pushing my seat. i was irritated but also woozy from my airport martini and lack of sleep and so spent the few hours suspended above the earth in a vague state of half-consciousness, listening to billie eilish’s hit me hard and soft album on repeat and dozing in and out of sleep.
i’m in paris because i’m shooting a campaign with sephora tomorrow. everyone keeps asking me what exactly it entails and i have to explain that i honestly don’t know yet. i don’t know where i’m going tomorrow or what time or what we are shooting and it’s less than 24 hours away, which is standard in the modelling industry and completely ridiculous to everyone else. but i’m excited.
as we drive, i think about how a month ago i was on set with maybelline and i heard the makeup artist next to me say that she did 21 days of meditation and it changed her life completely. the morning after that shoot i sat in bed with my eyes closed, a manifestation meditation playing from my phone’s speakers, and randomly had a vision of me in paris, in a hotel room i did not pay for, and decided that it would happen. and here we are. one month later. on the way to a hotel room in paris i did not pay for.
2:09pm
i’m standing outside a popup sandwich shop in montmartre, waiting for my focaccia sandwich with burrata and ham. i dropped my bags, had a shower, and then walked the thirty minutes here before i felt tempted to get into the bed. it was a mildly enjoyable city walk. there wasn’t much to see — my hotel is cheap and clean, and in order to be both, it is in the outskirts of paris.
i feel tired and muted, like a soft blanket has been draped over my brain. i know i am happy, but it’s hard to feel the sensation fully. i had a coffee at the hotel before i left and it wasn’t enough. i feel dulled. but i suspect i’ll sleep well tonight.
i’ve missed seeing older architecture and cobblestones and painted doors. i love the way that it feels like paris is invigorating me, as opposed to siphoning from me. it’s making me feel alive again.
6:22pm
i’m sitting outside at cafe de la poste with my book and my phone that is possibly going to die soon, which was not very smart. my book is bad but i can’t articulate why and it’s irritating me. i ordered their caesar burger and an aperol spritz with the guidance of my waiter who’s very attractive in a way that is honestly just french. he’s not my type and has a shaved head and a septum piercing but he has a gentle, genuine kindness about him and a smile that reaches his eyes and he obliged when i asked for his recommendations. he walked me through the menu and ended up recommending literally everything, even things he had not tried yet. cute. i think he got flustered.
by the end of the tour de menu i felt as though i could trust this man and i gave him my phone to charge inside and watched him walk away with his notepad and my phone and thought that might be it, i might never see my phone again. but i couldn’t muster up the energy to be genuinely concerned. then he came back not even two minutes later and said sorry, all the chargers are full right now. so i will wait.
i have been walking all afternoon, since 1pm. i walked from my hotel in saint ouen-sur-seine to montmartre, down to the 9th arrondissement, and then took the metro four stops over to the 3rd arrondissement, where i am now.
i wanted to stop in montmartre but it was flooded with tourists and starting to spit so i walked to the sacré cœur basilica and kept walking south. my friends sent me a list of paris recommendations last week and i saved them all in my maps and somehow i’ve reached a list of almost 100 already. my favourite way to explore a new city is to walk absolutely everywhere if possible and be driven by my natural curiosity, but i like to use recommendations to orient myself.
i walked and i walked and it was so empty in the streets, in a way that i couldn’t tell if it was because of a national holiday or the weather or if it was just a monday in europe or some combination. i liked it.
i hit a mental wall at around 4pm. i was feeling bloated and gross in my body and just so tired but found my spirits lifted with the discovery of a pair of vintage linen trousers that fit like a glove and make my butt look phenomenal. i bought them. all of the vintage store owners are chic bilingual young women and they smile and say bonjour when you enter and type on their phones in a way that doesn’t feel impolite, but more like they’re giving you privacy to shop.
i then walked into a vintage designer shoe store across the street and to my surprise found a pair of vintage louboutins in my size, a big fat whopping eu41, and bought them in under two minutes. they made me feel sexy and i haven’t been feeling sexy recently.
i am in paris so naturally i am sitting facing the street and someone just asked me for a lighter for their cigarette and teenagers are the same everywhere. there is someone talking loudly in a continuous stream of french to my left and i think for a few minutes that he is on the phone, until i turn my head and see that he is talking to a woman who responds sporadically and quietly. he doesn’t seem to mind. it’s nice background noise.
the couple next to me talk in both spanish and english about their day and the people they know and the food they are going to order and i wonder if they are in love and i feel so envious. they are so physically close to me that it is impossible not to eavesdrop. he tells her a story that confirms my suspicions. he says that he has learnt that when she comes out of the shower wrapped in a towel with her hair soaking wet and tells him that she is just about ready to leave, that it does not mean that she is actually just about ready to leave, and that he should not put his shoes on yet and actually she needs another twenty minutes at least. she laughs. i smile. they are definitely in love.
my food has arrived. the ketchup is in a bottle and it takes forever to get out and it’s okay, because no one is in a rush here, not even the ketchup.
tuesday
8:29am
in the back of an electric car again. this time i’m being driven from my hotel to set. i’m wearing a black skirt with lace trim and a black 3/4 sleeve v neck with my trench coat and black ballet flats. it’s overcast and spitting slightly and the sky feels bloated with the possibility of a full shower.
i woke up just before my alarm, at around 7, and lay there dozing in and out of sleep for a little while. i was glad when it went off and i could get up. i took off my biodance mask that i wore overnight and rinsed my face and applied some eye patches, and then scraped my tongue and flossed and brushed my teeth and plucked a few stray hairs on my eyebrows and applied my violette fr lip balm. then i went over to the hotel restaurant and drank a cappuccino with whole milk, because i learnt my lesson yesterday that paris is not the place to avoid dairy.
as i’m driving through the streets, i’m thinking about the architecture of a city. in paris, there is a natural way of life that means you move from point a to point b to point c to point d. in new york, it often feels like the aim is to move from point a to point d as quickly as possible. and why?
if nothing else, it is a byproduct of a system that holds capitalist efficiency above all else. when this is the ultimate goal, there is an absence of the moments in between — the friction, the unexpected interactions, the struggle. and if you try to shortcut it in a city like paris that isn’t built for that, the city pushes back. there is no way to walk as the crow flies. you have to walk left and then right and then wait. there is no faster way to do things.
i love the way the architecture of a city bleeds into your actions. i watch a man on the way to work smoking a cigarette. he pauses outside the metro station and finishes his cigarette completely, leisurely, before he descends down the steps.
the best thing that can happen when you are visiting a new city is that you’re able to embrace the best parts of it. you’re there for a short enough amount of time that you’re able to live through those parts of it and ignore the ugliness. ultimately, you romanticise it. and what better place to romanticise than paris?
the driver has the windows down and it’s cold and the air feels fresh and i feel tired and alive. it’s been seven years since i started modelling and i wonder where else this career will take me and i wonder where paris will take me and i wonder if he will ever ask me on a date. fuck.
3:52pm
i’m curled up on the sofa in the hair and makeup room in my trench coat because i’m cold. i took off my flats so i could tuck my feet up under me and they are wrapped in the bottom of my trench coat. i’m always cold.
i love my makeup artist. she is from lyon and asked if i spoke french because she caught me laughing at something someone said in french and i said i can’t really speak it anymore but i can understand most of it, so now she speaks to me in french and i respond in english and i feel connected to her in a way that only comes when you are forced to be vulnerable with someone from the outset.
i have three shots today — one is for a skincare product, which i’ve already shot, the second is for a lip combo, and the last one is for blush. she slightly messed up the timings for the lips and so i am ready two hours before i need to be for the shot. so i am curled up on the sofa, editing videos on capcut and typing this and chugging a coffee through a straw because i can’t ruin my lip.
i love shooting with other models on set. when i do ecomm work — i.e. the pictures that you see on the website — it’s rare that there are other models there. but for a campaign, it’s much more common. i ate my lunch with two other models — a forty year old woman from guadeloupe and a twenty-four year old woman from ukraine. i feel unbelievably captivated by their beauty, and their features, and their experiences, and wonder if people ever feel that way when talking to me.
we spoke about men and the trade offs of being involved with them, and what you get when you marry for money and what you get when you marry for love and what you get if you don’t marry at all, and ultimately decided that everything has its downfalls. i told them about my most recent break up and my relationship history and felt incredibly young. the woman my age said she wanted a rich husband and i said i wanted to be the rich husband and the woman older than us said that everyone she knows who married rich is divorced and lonely but they live in beautiful houses and have full custody of the kids. she shrugs her shoulders as if to say, you get what you sign up for.
the white men from the south of europe, she says, do not know historical suffering, both in their personal lives and in the history of their country, and that is why they cannot comprehend the experiences of a woman, let alone a non-white woman. these are the worst kind of men to date, she says. i agree with her, and we get up to scoop out bowls of fresh tiramisu before we head back to set. i don’t think he’s going to ask me on a date.
wednesday
11:36am
i started my morning later than i anticipated. i’m jetlagged, naturally, and couldn’t fall asleep until 3:30am. so i woke up at 10am, got ready, grabbed an almond croissant from a local boulangerie, and now i’m on the metro again, speeding towards the first arrondissement to spend my last few hours in the heart of the city. the metro is clean and efficient and the same as public transport in any large city. i find myself lured into a false sense of familiarity by the rocking and electronic station announcements and warnings and don’t pay much attention to the stops, focusing instead on finding a good song to walk through the streets to.
there is an older french woman next to me and she scrolls through her text messages with her pointer finger slowly. her background is a couple of clownfish and she has short white hair and she hovers her finger, hesitantly, over an automated text that tells her she should call a number for something nouveau, but decides against it. i exhale. next stop.
12:13pm
i’m sitting on a bench in the square louvois, a tiny garden that is in fact circular. i was surprised when i walked into the square and the benches were numerous and not fitted with anti-homeless architecture. america has ruined me. the bench is comfortable and dark green and fits nicely against the curve of my upper spine.
the water that flows through the fountain is loud and reminds me that no matter where i am in the world, i will always feel comforted by the sound of running water. i could sit here forever, listening to the water flowing and the dim sounds of traffic and the little french girls chasing each other.
there’s a small tour group to my right that enters the square, and the guide is telling them about the statue’s history but i can’t catch much of what she’s saying over the noise of the fountain. i catch snippets of 19th century and then arrested by the police of the vichy government. she says something about kids under 18 being deported from france during the war. crimes of the vichy government. i feel simultaneously disappointed that my romantic moment reflecting on the beauty of life has been ruined and guilty that i didn’t think to look at the history of the square before i sat down. i feel bad about humanity.
the woman next to me eats her baguette with jambon and scrolls on her phone and the tour group moves closer. we listen without much choice to the horrific crimes of the french government while the little girls scream as they chase each other in the grass. the tour guide talks about how one of the women depicted in the fountain is what she likes to call the ‘final boss’ of the french resistance — jewish, a woman, and a homosexual. i feel good about humanity again.
This is the most beautiful thing i read so far
this is one of my favorite posts from you!! 💌