How Does One “Be” Parisian Wherever They Are?

1. By owning: jeans, men’s shoes, a small silk scarf, a long trench, and “the very simple, but very expensive T-shirt.”

2. By living with, not against, the opposite sex

3. Antithetically, too, by being one’s own knight in shining armor

4. By forgoing plastic surgery

5. By swiftly destabilizing male suitors (And how to do this? Canceling dates last minute, ordering romantically confusing dishes on a menu, forgoes bras, unintentionally, in the summertime.)

6. By becoming familiar with Sartre and Foucault

How Does One NOT Be Parisian Wherever They Are?

1. By being the last to leave a party

2. By abbreviating on text message

3. By foolishly not making your lover think you have another lover (even though you don’t) — this may include sending flowers to oneself, erratically crying and frequent showers

4. By having a big-ass wedding

5. By opening a bottle of wine; though you’re able to do it, let him, because “that’s equality too.”

I was kidding yesterday. I will never actually give up on trying to be French. What do you take me for, a quitter? I am not a quitter. The only thing I have ever forcibly quit were cigarettes the summer after 8th grade when I went to Switzerland and wanted to look cool. Wanted to look French. But I was too young to start chiseling letters into my tombstone then, and you know what they say about people, right? They’re much more effective at completing tasks (in my case, to become French) when they’re alive, so I quit.

I’m happy to report that I’m still alive and as such appropriately equipped to comment on de Maigret and co’s new book How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are, which is from where the above tips have emerged. It arrived at my doorstep on the day of publication during New York Fashion Week earlier this month and in one fell, airplane-perpetrated swoop, I read the whole thing, cover to cover.

French women are such complicated feminists.

They exude the sense that they’re strong and independent and as a result, often are strong and independent but they also lean greatly on the male gaze and the subsequent love it so frequently emits. What makes them different is that this reliance is bolstered by the straight-shooting pursuit of unflinching love. They are very romantic. They’re also to the point. When I met Caroline de Maigret, she told me that there is no such thing as the perfect woman — that “you can’t aspire to be the perfect type of woman because she doesn’t exist.” She also went on to describe the most salient difference between x and y chromosome carriers.

“Women look in the mirror, men don’t, that’s why they have more confidence.”

A ha! Doesn’t it seem as though the ideology is a hugely lucid window into the personal style of the French woman? It’s honest, it’s clear, it’s simple and it makes you wonder why you didn’t think it on your own.