Bonjour! If you follow us on Instagram, you’ll know that I (Cara) just got back from a trip to Paris with my husband (celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary)! The trip was wonderful! Paris is charming, beautiful and inspiring.
We spent a week museum hopping, strolling around the neighborhoods, familiarizing ourselves with the gorgeous architecture and history, sampling the local cuisine (and wine!), people watching, and, of course, shopping.
One of my friends told me about the fantastic products sold in the French pharmacies. Gwyneth Paltrow wrote an article about them on her website, GOOP, so I printed off the list and popped into City Pharma. I now have a great new sampling of products to try, and they were so cheap!
We even took a bike tour thanks to Erin and her recommendation, and loved it!
There are many pros to traveling to Paris in the fall: less tourists and the changing leaves and fall colors are among the top. However, the one con we came across was the weather. We had highs the low 50s each day with a pretty consistent mist in the air. We didn’t let that stop us, and I loved seeing how the Parisians adapted their style to this weather.
Seeing as how Columbus weather can be pretty cloudy, damp, and cool as well, it was fun to get some inspiration for the upcoming fall and winter (and let’s face it, into spring too). So on to Parisian street style!
Outerwear: Parisians wear a LOT of neutrals. Mostly black with some navy, grey, and an occasional olive green mixed in. The top styles I saw were wool coats (pea coats, military inspired, belted, big collared, and capes). I also saw some olive parkas with fur trim, some sleek (mostly black) short quilted jackets, and the occasional leather moto jacket (I think there would have been more of these if the weather had been nicer. They were especially popular among the younger crowd).
Since the coats covered up their outfits, I didn’t get a good feel for what was worn underneath. However, I did notice that almost all of the bottoms were skinny. Skinny jeans, black leggings, leather leggings, and a lot of tights! The tights were black opaque or heavy knit in shades of grey.
Shoes: The Parisians were definitely more practical in their shoe choices than I had anticipated. I hardly saw any heels (or fancy fabrics/colors/embellishments) at all. Instead they were dressing for the weather in black ankle boots (mostly flat, some with a blocked heel) and sneakers (black or dark colors or white converse). Maybe they changed into their heels when they arrived at their destination??
Accessories: I never saw a Parisian without a scarf. Even my husband noticed this! Men, women, children: they all wear scarves! Again, they were mostly neutrals and the occasional neutral plaid, so they didn’t bring a lot of color into their outfit but added interest (and warmth) through texture and layering. For handbags: the most common styles for Parisians were big top handled totes and smaller cross-body styles.
One last thing I noticed of Parisian street style was that Parisian women love red lipstick. It could have been 9:00 in the morning and her hair in a ponytail, but with her black jacket, black ankle boots and grey scarf, she always had a red lip! I loved the way this finished off the look and added just a bit of color.
Have you been to Paris? What was your favorite part?