Same Building. Two Floors. Ninety Years Apart.
What a bartender's white jacket, Hugo Matha's silk neckerchiefs, and George Orwell scrubbing pots in a Parisian cellar taught me about the most French idea I know.
I was supposed to be working. Instead, I was reading a magazine about bartenders’ jackets. Bartenders’ clothing in Paris, does that count as ‘work’?
It was the Financial Times weekend supplement, How To Spend It, glossy and full of things I admire from a respectful distance. The piece was about the white dinner jacket: why it has never really gone away, what it means when a bartender wears one, and how different bars around the world are reimagining it. London, Tokyo, New York, Copenhagen. Details I adored: one Mayfair bartender sourced a fabric so washable he soaked it in coffee and grenadine for three days to be sure the claim was true. Another bar permits any tie, except green. Red is also out. Don’t ask why.
And then, briefly, Paris. L’Hôtel de Crillon. One of my favourite places in Paris.
A bar. A designer named Hugo Matha. The staff in double-breasted waistcoats cut from a textured honeycomb fabric, with natural horn buttons chosen for the variation in their depth, wearing silk neckerchiefs instead of ties, the colour of the scarf telling you, if you knew how to read it, exactly what role that person played in the room.
I put the magazine down with a calm, silent exhale. I opened my laptop. What followed was several hours of joyful disappearing, into the history of a building, a designer’s unlikely commission, a very French philosophy, and one English writer who scrubbed pots in a cellar so grim he could barely bring himself to describe it. Another fabulous rabbit hole! I was in pig heaven.
What I found at the bottom was not just a story about clothes. (Remember, one of my careers was in that space.) It was a story about how France thinks about the people who serve, and what it means to take that act of service seriously enough to dress it beautifully.
What follows is for MyFrenchLife™ Annual subscribers and Mighty Supporters: the full story of how a young designer from the Aveyron, a 1758 royal palace, and George Orwell's most wretched winter in Paris all connect to one quietly revolutionary idea about beauty, service, and what France refuses to let go of.
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