I got bookfluenced by Nathalie Rykiel |
The best influencer is a 70-year-old French-Jewish woman I had never heard of until about a week ago. But before I introduce you to her (well, to her Instagram), I am going to take you on my path of discovery.
I clicked on a New York Times fashion article, and can tell you precisely why this one caught my eye. It shows a woman who looks not entirely unlike yours truly, standing beneath a cherry blossom tree (love those!), wearing a really perfect pink velour top, or dress, the photo cropping makes this impossible to tell. The headline, “She’s Selling Women the Pleasure of Clothes,” made me think this would be an article from which I, woman, could get the pleasure of a link to what this garment was, what it cost, and how insurmountable it would be to get it shipped to Canada.
The story did not come through on the front I’d hoped. I learned that what I was looking at was by a brand called Pompom Paris, was probably a “velour sweatshirt designed to fall off one shoulder as a minidress,” but also that “Pompom is not sold online,” only at a gorgeous-looking boutique on a particularly lovely street in the centre of Paris.
I learned that the shop itself has “satin pillows with crystal-embroidered words and phrases like ‘Blonde,’ ‘Spiritual Bimbo’ and ‘I Love Men But They Don’t Make Me Happy,’” the last of these a fascinating (to me, at least) sign of how the French are and are not adopting North American attitudes about straight womanhood. No leads on clothes-shopping, retail or resale.
But where I went right was by following the Instagram sinkhole of Pompom and its founder, Lola Rykiel. Rykiel is the 40-year-old granddaughter of iconic French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel, who died in 2016. One could scoff about nepo babies, or one could instead simply enjoy what is apparently a heritable ability to make appealing outfits. My knowledge of Sonia Rykiel was limited to having seen that name on a Manhattan storefront growing up, and then to........