There is a second-hand shop in Paris known for employing the best-dressed sales assistants in the business. I visited Nuovo towards the end of last June – Lily-Rose Depp and Gabbriette had been in a few weeks before—and was greeted by a server in a cropped, cocoon-backed jacket, low-rise denim, and scuffed ballet flats. She looked like Kate Moss in 2006: a devastating mean girl on first-name terms with le tabac.
The jacket—curved-sleeves, covered buttons, standaway collars—reminded me of Aaron Esh and Miu Miu’s autumn/winter 2024 collections: where bourgeois, baby-girl coats were styled with the casual ease of someone dashing to the off-licence: hoods up, sunglasses on, models charging down the catwalk with top-handle bags wedged into the crook of their arms. It was an attempt, as Esh explained in an interview with British Vogue, to bottle “the vibe and the c***iness” of the classic Left Bank snob.
I had almost forgotten about that chic sales clerk until I came across this image of Jennifer Lawrence strolling through Los Angeles in wide-legged denim, moccasins, and another of those twee jackets. Squint and it could pass for something Balenciaga was selling in 2006—see: here—after Nicolas Ghesquière’s still-celebrated autumn/winter collection. The domed hats and rounded coats teetering on skintight trousers and vertiginous heels—it remains, even 20 years on, a lesson in cold-blooded Parisian style.
