Vera Wang’s Paris Love Affair By Rachel Donadio

It is 1969. Vera Wang is 19. Her competitive figure skating career is ending, and she is studying art history at the Sorbonne during a junior year abroad. She is walking down the street with her mother. Both are dressed in their favorite designer of the moment: Yves Saint Laurent. A tan belted raincoat that fell midcalf, brown Céline boots and a Hermès Kelly bag for Maman, and a navy blue peacoat, gray flannel slacks and a turtleneck for Vera. “That was the first time that I really became Parisian,” Ms. Wang said earlier this month, drinking tea tea at one of her longtime Paris haunts, Carette on the Place du Trocadéro in the 16th Arrondissement. The designer was back in town because, on Tuesday, she will become one of a handful of designers to be made a chevalier of France’s Legion of Honor, the country’s most elite decoration for contributions to the glory of France (other American designers who have received the honor include Ralph Lauren). At the end of the ceremony, which falls on the first day of Paris Fashion Week, she’ll be showing her fall 2017 collection in a short film online. She calls it an ode to Paris. “When I heard about the honor, I think I was actually in shock, because I didn’t grow up as a French designer. I’m an American designer,” she said. “But I did grow up with an integral part of my life being attached to Paris and France.” “I have had five lives here. Maybe seven,” she continued. “There’s been so much history for me in this city that sometimes it’s hard to come back, because glimpses of what my life once was and will no longer ever be again still affect me.” Ms. Wang, who grew up in Manhattan, first visited Paris at age 6. Her parents bought her a pair of charcoal-gray patent leather Mary Janes. The shoes opened worlds. “I was a typical kid: I got my school shoes in the fall and I got my Easter shoes in April. And I looked at my feet and I was just mesmerized by them,” Ms. Wang said. “They were shiny and to me, fancy,” she said. “It was my first feeling of being intrigued by fashion. By clothing. By things you wear. It was raining that night and I remember looking down at my feet and I suddenly just had this awakening or something.” Fast forward to her junior year abroad. Ms. Wang was dating a fellow professional figure skater, Patrick Péra, who was on the French national team. She traveled around France attending his competitions. In Paris, she would buy fragrances at Guerlain on the Champs-Élysées; go to the movies at Trocadéro and clubbing at Jimmie’s Regime and Chez Castel, a nightclub owned by the French soccer star Jean Castel. “I was not a member. My boyfriend was,” she said. “It was so sophisticated. It was the mix.” “It was like Studio 54,” she added. “You would see Alain Delon there. You would see Jean-Paul Belmondo.” “That was a good year,” she said, noting (with some understatement), “I did not live the life of a typical exchange student.” She spent her days strolling on the Avenue Montaigne, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and Avenue Victor Hugo. She would shop at Kenzo, near the Place des Victoires in the Second Arrondissement, then pop into the tiny Louis XIV restaurant nearby for lunch. “I looked for it, but it’s gone,” she said. That year, she lived on the Rue Spontini, down from what was then Yves Saint Laurent’s shop. Her mother would visit, and when her mom walked the dog, she “would see him coming to work at 10 at night,” Ms. Wang said. “My mother, who always loved fashion, would say: ‘That boy is too skinny. He works too hard.’” When her father visited, he’d stay at the Hôtel Plaza Athenée. “He’d call it the most expensive coffee shop in the world because he’d have a hamburger and a cup of coffee,” Ms. Wang said. He bought her a white cotton double-breasted smoking. She said she loved it, then spilled red wine on it by accident. “I remember crying,” she said. “I don’t usually cry over clothes. That’s how much fashion had come to mean to me by then.” Her art history class at the Sorbonne would visit the Jeu de Paume; its Impressionist collection is now in the Musée d’Orsay. The teacher, Mademoiselle Vanel (“Always Mademoiselle, like Chanel,” Ms. Wang said) “slept one night with Picasso. Probably among thousands of women. And she never married, and she never forgot it. She used to tell us a story of how one night with Picasso was worth a lifetime alone.” That’s when Ms. Wang met a woman who worked as an editor at Paris Vogue. “I just went crazy, and I said: ‘When I go back to New York, when I finish college, Sarah Lawrence, then I want to be that. That’s what I want to do,’” Ms. Wang said. She did, eventually spending 16 years as an editor at Vogue. Then, in 1982, when she was 33, she left Vogue and moved back to Paris for a year to catch her breath. “Paris has always been a place that I’ve run to — it’s always been my escape,” she said. She bought an apartment in the 16th Arrondissement. (She has since sold it.) “It’s not the commercial Paris, l’Opéra or St. Germain des Prés. This is my ‘hood,” she said. She went for long runs in the Bois du Boulogne, dated an art gallerist and reinvented herself. When she returned to New York, she segued into working as a design director for Ralph Lauren. In 1990, she opened her own bridal boutique, and then started ready-to-wear. Her brand is now sold in 28 countries. Which is how she ended up back in Paris. “It takes great courage to just live when you’ve kept yourself busy,” Ms. Wang said. “My own country has always been about career: getting it done, always worrying but not wasting time, trying to be efficient. But Paris taught me how to live.” International New York Times Wikipedia