Paris bulletin 6 2012

Ahae Jeong, originally from South Korea, is a 71 year-old photographer who now lives in the United States.  This May he made international news for something other than his photography. He bought a whole French village at auction, for the sum of 520,000 euros.   Courbefy in the Limousin is a ‘ghost hamlet’ with 19 empty houses, a 13^th century ruined castle, a half-completed hotel, a chapel, a swimming pool, a tennis court and a stable block, all of them in disrepair.

Besides being a photographer of global renown, Ahae runs two prize-winning organic tea plantations. No-one knows as yet what he plans to do with Courbefy but if you take a look at his website www.ahae.com you know neither plant life nor animals have anything to fear.

He has a one-man exhibition in the jardin des Tuilleries during the month of July. A special pavilion has been created to house the photos and entry is absolutely free to all comers. Such is the strength of his desire to make us aware of what we have around us and really look at it (so maybe we’ll take better care of it).

The exhibition is called ‘De ma fenêtre’ (‘Through my Window’) and is composed of a small selection of the millions – literally - of photos Ahae has taken from the window of his studio over the past two years. The window looks out on a pond, a rough track and some trees and bushes. From there, using a range of different cameras but with no ‘truquage’ or manipulation, Ahae has captured the changing seasons and weathers, the bird and animal life, on both the grandest scale and in the most intimate detail. Go and see it if you can and if you can’t, look at the website at least. This is the kind of man we need more of to save the planet.

                                               

In between the down-pours – Paris has been drenched recently - there have been summer concerts and parties all over the city. In my small patch there was the Fête de la Goutte d’Or last weekend. The Institut des Cultures d’Islam is running a festival ‘Libertés!’ all through July, around the theme of the Arab Springs and there was the Fête de la Musique on 21st June (a nation-wide event) and now the 10ème Festival du Cinéma.

The other ‘big’ event of last week, although it attracted less mainstream media attention than ever, was the Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week. I listened to a report on this on France Culture and learnt that the number of Haute Couture houses has dropped from 106 in the 1940s to only 18 today. To be accepted into the inner sanctums of high fashion here’s a summary of the conditions a house must meet:

• All clothing must be made to order for individual private clients, three fittings being standard.
• The fashion house must have two ateliers in Paris, one for tailored garments and the other for non-tailored garments.
• The ateliers must employ no less than fifteen people full-time.
• There should be at least twenty full-time technical people employed throughout the business.
• A twice-yearly collection must be presented to the Paris press and public, comprising at least thirty-five ‘runs’-  i.e. outfits – for both daytime wear and evening wear.

The relative collapse of the haute couture industry is apparently less to do with the cost of the garments it produces and much more to do with the time taken from concept to finished creation. In the world of smart phones and tablets where you can have what you want almost before you’ve formed the thought in your head, four plus months and three fittings is more than most of the rich and indulged are willing to put up with, even for exclusivity.

For the rest of us in Paris, the last week in June, specifically 27^th June, is the start of ‘les soldes d’été 2012’ (the summer sales). This being the Republic and such things being carefully regulated, the summer sales last exactly five weeks. Other departments, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Hautes-Alpes, Alpes-Maritimes, Bouches-du-Rhône, Var and Vaucluse start on 4 July. The sales in Corsica start on 11 July. Overseas territories have their own dates too.

It is inconceivable to us in the UK that the date of the Sales (even if we put a capital S on it) should be so carefully and rationally managed but it does work rather well and there is a lot to be said for it, not least that you can seriously reduce the time you waste the rest of the year, wandering round the shops in the fond hope of picking up a bargain.

The wool shop where I mostly buy my Penguin wool has put up the next summer notice on its window – ‘Closed for the summer holidays from 30 July – 25 August’. Paris in August, a city where vast numbers of local shops and businesses still shut down for a ‘proper break’ so their owners and employees can head off to the countryside and the sea.