French Silk and Wine
Most girls dream about the French fantasy: high fashion, pastries, wine, romance, elegance, desire. But most of all, the inherited confidence and self worth that is attached to this ideal. The woman who dresses effortlessly perfectly; she just threw on the first thing she saw in her closet and yet it looks as if today is the day everything will happen for her - even though you assume everyday seems like the day everything will happen for her regardless. She will get the promotion she has been working for, stroll through the Parisian streets, which in the fantasy smell better than they do in real life - you really think Paris smells perfectly sweet and sexy because of the sheer amount of perfume campaigns set there, but really it remains a sexy city despite the urine smell that reaches you every other street corner - she will walk through the Parisian streets, have a meet-cute with the most gorgeous person that comes across her. This woman has meet-cutes! Who even has meet-cutes nowadays? She does! She will accidentally barge into the person that will soon become her new lover; she looks at them with a relentless confidence, but one doesn't come across pretentious in the slightest. She's the kind of woman who will shop at Saint Laurent and Valentino for kicks and giggles, whilst most people only dream of ever owning one piece by these designers. This is the kind of woman who will drink champagne at 4 o'clock and still have the most perfect skin. She has songs written about her, she triggers a cascade of double looks as she walks down the streets to a restaurant at night. She has dinner parties with her friends and they eat and drink and talk and laugh until the early hours of the morning. They are loud, but the waiters don't mind; this group's energy cheers them up, they are nice to them, they include them in their playfulness, they become friends for the night. In the most beautiful cliché-way, this woman leaves a distinct imprint of her lips as she drinks her espresso at the end of her dinner out with friends; there's still chatter around the table, the friends are talking between them. They went through desert like they were in blood sugar deficit, leaving mere crumbs on the shiny white plates that served a previously whole sweet-something. Napkins everywhere, lipstick stains all over them, cigarettes buds scattered around. It was a party. And it was merely Tuesday night, how perfectly random. What better way to celebrate life, what better way to live it but to move unrestrained by the bureaucracies of time and weekdays. "I'll sleep when I'm dead" said someone famously, whose name I ironically do not know. She leaves the restaurant with her friends, arm in arm with one of her girlfriends, who is equally as beautiful and equally as intriguing as she is. They and their friends are the last to leave the restaurant. It's way past 1am, there is barely anyone on the streets. More cigarettes get pulled out of these people's bags - again, remember they are unrestrained by time. Down the street they are in, comes a figure. It's the meet-cute lover-to-be. They interlock eyes. Somehow they get talking (no one mundane ever really knows how these things happen, but to people like her they do). They get talking and some time goes by and they decide to leave the group and wonder off together. Double kisses on the cheeks of everyone that was present at dinner, which ended an hour ago by now, but again, everyone in this fantasy is unrestrained by the concept of time and sleep; double kissy kisses and they are on their way. Where? may you ask. It doesn't matter. They will go wherever the night takes them. The mandatory romantic walk down the Seine happens, with imaginary saxophones and trumpets playing in the background, the warmly lit river walk. They are joking, they are laughing, they are getting caught in intensely lingering looks and THEY JUST MET! The night is theirs. The world is theirs. Love feels rediscovered that night. What happens from this point on barely even matters. The fact that we got here, the fact that She got here is already mind-blowing enough to the daydreaming mind. Maybe the lover walks her home, kisses her on the cheek and watches her go in before walking away. Maybe they end up passionately kissing their way upstairs to her apartment and reach a completely new level of fantasy altogether. It doesn't matter. Because either ending would have been equally perfect. This fantasy isn't triggered by anything overtly complex. No. This fantasy simply stems from the kind of confidence everyone aspires to have, a kind of confidence that says "I'm here and I will take as much space as I happen to take", a kind of confidence that appears unaffected by outside input or judgement. The kind of confidence that allows you to wear what feeds your own personal fantasies, the kind of confidence elevated by fashion and beauty and scent and taste and feel. A confidence coming right off the catwalks of Saint Laurent and Valentino and Channel. What a wonderfully freeing aspiration, to find your own version of the Parisian woman confidence. How wonderfully exciting to create that confidence, to dress for it, to move for it, so as to one day live in it. Self portraits photographed by Stephanie Mariano