The New Parisienne

The Women & Ideas Shaping Paris

Lindsey Tramuta

• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781683358787
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

"Tramuta sweeps away the tired clichés of the Parisian woman with her vivid profiles of the dynamic and creative 'femmes' now powering the French capital." —Eleanor Beardsley, NPR Paris correspondent The New Parisienne focuses on one of the city's most prominent features, its women. Lifting the veil on the mythologized Parisian woman—white, lithe, ever fashionable—Lindsey Tramuta demystifies this oversimplified archetype and recasts the women of Paris as they truly are, in all their complexity. Featuring 50 activists, creators, educators, visionaries, and disruptors—like Leïla Slimani, Lauren Bastide, and Mayor Anne Hidalgo—the book reveals Paris as a blossoming cultural center of feminine power. Both the featured women and Tramuta herself offer up favorite destinations and women-owned businesses, including beloved shops, artistic venues, bistros, and more. The New Parisienne showcases "Parisianness" in all its multiplicity, highlighting those who are bucking tradition, making names for themselves, and transforming the city. "With stunning photographs and inspiring profiles, Lindsey Tramuta tramples the myths and takes us into the lives of real Parisiennes. Bravo!"—Pamela Druckerman, New York Times –bestselling author of Bringing Up Bébé "Like the subjects of her book, Lindsey Tramuta is a force. The New Parisienne is the go-to chronicle of the joyful, progressive, pioneering women of a city that Tramuta understands with deep intelligence." —Lauren Collins, New York Times –bestselling author of When in French "Tramuta's new book posits that Parisian women have been ahead of these radically changing times. But rather than being trendsetters in the stylish sense, they qualify as visionaries and agents of change across spheres of diversity, tech, culture, politics, and more." — Vogue

—CLARA LUCIANI, VERSE FROM THE SONG “LA GRENADE”

Leading the new wave of French feminism

LAUREN BASTIDE

CREATOR AND HOST OF LA POUDRE PODCAST

She is among the most prominent mouthpieces of the current generation’s intersectional fight for equality (see this page for more on this concept). In fact, even people only tangentially familiar with Lauren Bastide and her podcast La Poudre, which stoked the popularity of podcasting in France, know she represents the intrepid group of modern feminists having frank conversations about gender, race, class, and sexuality. It’s through early adoption and strategic use of digital platforms that she has been able to give an unfiltered voice to the underrepresented, cultivating a group of resisters one episode and Instagram post at a time.

We meet in the leafy courtyard of Hotel Amour, a café that doubles as her secondary office when she’s not at the headquarters of Nouvelles Écoutes, the podcast network she cofounded in 2016. She sets her blue baseball cap on the banquette, shakes out her wavy blond hair, and thanks me warmly for taking an interest in her story. That I’ve been following her work with interest since 2009, when she was still a journalist at Elle magazine, would be understating the truth. At the time, I was dipping my feet into the Parisian fashion pool and looking for insights on the Parisian woman in all of her complexity. I didn’t care deeply about fashion designers, but I was eager to understand the role that material culture and aesthetic arts, craftsmanship and style played in the everyday life of the Parisienne. And even then, Bastide’s name surfaced time and again. She was the woman to watch.

Bastide was born and raised in Orléans, a moneyed Catholic town an hour from Paris that she describes with the kind of aversion that comes from being made to feel like an outsider in your own home. “People held balls organized by their aristocratic descendants so that their children could marry amongst each other,” she describes, raising her eyebrows as if to say, See what I mean? Ideologically and demographically, she didn’t fit in. “My social status was a handicap in my school. Everyone was classist because my parents weren’t as educated as theirs were; my family owned shops and hair salons downtown and I stood out among the children of doctors and teachers.” The women in her family gathered on the weekend to flip through the pages of French Elle, fantasizing about runway shows and the grandeur of Paris. Where religion and tradition characterized the community around her, she felt pulled toward aesthetics and art. Her place, she knew, was somewhere in Paris.

A clear view of the Sacré-Coeur from South Pigalle in the 9th arrondissement, Lauren Bastide’s home turf.

“I don’t know what else to do with the mic but give it to someone who doesn’t have one.”

Despite the confines of her environment, she always marched to her own drum. That trait ultimately served her well, throughout journalism school and the ten years she worked for Elle. By the time I discovered her, she was on her way to becoming editor in chief and was known for having her finger on the pulse of Parisian society—its preoccupying cultural stories, its next big disruptors (she prophesied the rise of bloggers and the “influencers” that would follow)—and emphasizing the human side of fashion, not its frivolity.

She brought journalistic rigor from her training in news reporting and was always engaging to read. There was heart where for other writers there was obligation. “Foreigners know Elle as a monthly glossy but as a weekly in France, we covered news and reported stories. We could write about Balenciaga and the burqa in the same issue, which I liked.” Still, she had even higher ambitions for the magazine. She wanted to cover the underrepresented for whom having it all was anything but a philosophical debate. She envisioned stories on police violence, racism, prostitution—more than the thorny concerns of the magazine’s imagined core readership: Parisienne born-and-bred, white, heteronormative, thin, and bourgeoise, with the trifecta of career, husband, and children. La totale.

“It’s a violent double bind for the women who don’t check those boxes,” she says, adding that her political consciousness sharpened over time as she realized she was addressing a target audience that didn’t actually exist and didn’t represent the population. Where were the cosmetics reviews for darker skin tones, size twelve-plus ready-to-wear, and diversity in the models? She found answers for the glaring absences in representation in the teachings of influential thinkers Angela Davis and Édouard Glissant. By that point, clashes with a new editorial director ensued, pressures from advertisers mounted, and the idea of changing the system became pure fantasy. She knew it was time to go.

“La Parisienne is from the suburbs or from foreign or immigrant parents. It’s diversity that’s going to shake up Parisian culture.”

The turbulent year she spent next as a panelist on the late-night show Le Grand Journal, fighting to be heard on and off camera, only fueled the development of La Poudre. “It was a good day if they let me speak for sixty seconds. As maddening as it was, I didn’t want to give them the pleasure of breaking me down. I spent my days with my Nouvelles Écoutes cofounder Julien Neuville building my show, creating the business, then I’d go to work at five p.m. with a big smile. I used all the financial stability I had from that gig to build the business.”

While enrolled in a master’s degree program in gender studies at the Université Paris 8, she set out to build an influential podcast network, the Gimlet Media of France. Her show La Poudre, now with over 2.5 million downloads, became its calling card, dominating the French zeitgeist in the manner of This American Life or Serial. By the end of season one, with greater confidence and a solid following, the episodes had a decidedly more potent urgency as Bastide discussed timely aspects of women’s issues with artists, thinkers, and change-makers, her voice mellifluous but always firm. Within the intimacy of a Parisian hotel room, she has spoken to afro-feminist and documentary filmmaker Amandine Gay about growing up adopted and the fetishization of black bodies; she has discussed rape, mother-daughter relationships, and sexual orientation with author Sophie Fontanel; and she welcomed activist Daria Marx to speak about fat-phobia in France and the problems with the “body-positive” movement. In 2018, she launched the first English-recorded interview with the British bestselling author and journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge.

Ask her loyal listeners what makes her approach so refreshing—which she extends to discussion series and the moderated talks she hosts—and the answer is always the same: She sets up the discussion, asks the right questions, then takes herself out of it. She lets the other woman’s voice lead. “I create something that appears to be cosmetic on the surface but the message is subversive and political. The voices I feature want revolution, like me. I give a megaphone to activist women who speak directly into the ears of young girls, many of whom listen from the best neighborhoods of the country.” The way to raise awareness and enact real change, in other words, is by penetrating invisible boundaries. Bastide is a bridge connecting the fighters, the marginalized, the discriminated, and the privileged. With her help, the future for la Parisienne is an enlightened one.

Her Paris

FAVORITE WOMAN-RUN BUSINESS?

The Carreau du Temple (shown above), run by Sandrina Martins, who is brilliant. She leads a social and cultural space that is open and free to all Parisians.

PREFERRED NEIGHBORHOOD?

Around la rue des Martyrs, where I’ve lived for fifteen years. I’ve observed its changes and am part of its history. It’s a little village: My kids give kisses to the baker; I run into people I know all the time, families with young kids who have “grown up” with me.

WHERE DO YOU GO TO BE ALONE?

I love going to exhibits alone. The Musée du Quai Branly, the Palais de Tokyo, and especially the Jeu de Paume are where I often find powerful themes that connect with the questions I’m grappling with.

Driving awareness for the emancipation of disabled people

ELISA ROJAS

LAWYER AND DISABILITY-RIGHTS ACTIVIST

Elisa Rojas isn’t being hyperbolic when she says she adores Paris. Her eyes flicker and her smile widens the moment I ask her what moves her about the city as we sip macchiatos at Le Bistrot du Peintre in the blissful lull of August. She’s not a big spender, she tells me, but loves to observe the way the upper echelon of Parisian society lives; the boutiques they frequent, the clothes they buy. “It’s proof of the disparities that exist,” she says emphatically. She loves beautiful things but wonders if one can be interested in the futile while being an activist. She doesn’t have the answer yet.

After arriving from Chile as a child, she lived at the gates of the city before moving with her family into what she considers the bustling heart of real Paris, a unique pocket of the 12th arrondissement that both maintains the spirit of its working-class roots and draws in a mixed crowd for its ever-expanding culinary scene. “It’s terrible to say, but I rarely leave—the neighborhood has everything I need!” It’s teetering on the cusp of being too gentrified, though, and she says its diversity is fundamental to its soul. Still, this is home. Nowhere but this city fills her with what she calls a “stupid” level of pride. “I mean, look at it,” she says, gesturing to the street as if no explanation was actually needed. “It’s because we know we’re associated with a city interconnected with beauty and culture that so many people dream of experiencing.”

That profound love for the city and a desire to experience it with greater ease and access are among the things that Rojas, an employment lawyer, has in mind when she fires up her computer to write, tweet, and connect with an engaged community of activists. She is among the most sought-after voices on disability rights and uses Twitter, her blog, and the collective she cofounded, CHLEE (Collectif Lutte et Handicaps pour l’Égalité et l’Émancipation, or the Struggle and Disabilities Collective for Equality and Emancipation), to raise a magnifying glass to the country’s failures to enable disabled people to participate as full citizens in society.

It’s a role she’s not even fully comfortable with occupying—she dislikes being on camera and is discerning about the interviews she’ll give to the press. Truthfully, she was initially reluctant to be part of this book. But when she considers that the unemployment rate sits at 18 percent among disabled job seekers, twice as high as the national average, and the median income of disabled individuals creeps in at 18,500 euros per year, more than 11 percent less than that of the able-bodied,²⁶ she sees her ability to fight and speak up as a luxury, a tool she must wield.

“Journalists have a tendency to perpetuate the image of handicapped people as either being sad and vulnerable or heroic for simply getting up and brushing their teeth in the morning,” she insists. Despite their handicap goes the common refrain, as if a disability is fundamentally incompatible with a regular existence. “Wherever possible, we’re woven into inspiration porn,” she explains, adding that even her seemingly inexplicable success story—going to school, studying law, becoming a lawyer, using the tools she learned in school to defend her ideas—has the makings of an inspirational tearjerker meant to uplift the able-bodied. What she carries with her is a firm message: the words used to tell these stories matter.

They matter when she takes aim at laws that are passed but never enforced; at Sophie Cluzel, the secretary of state who represents issues relevant to people with disabilities under the prime minister, for her spurious ideas of inclusivity and barely veiled ableism seeping through each of her self-congratulatory tweets; and all those who couch their indifference in the plight of disabled people with moral platitudes and marketing campaigns that check boxes more than they drive real impact. She can be lacerating in her fury about the systemic dismissal of disabled individuals, like herself, and the denial of their humanity. She may roll her eyes at the casting of able-bodied actors in the roles of disabled characters but vehemently denounces prevailing representations of the handicapped body as abnormal or deformed. Worse yet are the representations of disabled women. “We’re first infantilized and then perhaps seen as women and therefore infantilized a second time. But we’re not even really recognized as women; we’re perpetually asexual little girls.” They are doubly burdened.

On paper, everything she’s fighting for sounds entirely reasonable. Disabled people in France should be more visible. They should be able to live autonomously. Their rights should be equally as important to society and to governing bodies as those of the able-bodied. Concern for such rights and representation was even...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Before you Begin: A Cultural Primer
• Les Femmes
• On Image & Representation
• On Motherhood
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Copyright Page