THE FIRST TIME I went shopping in Juan-les-Pins I must have taken leave of my senses. In the space of an hour, I had spent a small fortune on the kind of clothes that look fantastic on the French Riviera for about five days in August — as long as you are going to a glitzy party every single night — but ridiculously over the top anywhere else. Oh, and they need to be worn with sandals that have very thin straps and killer heels, which is not ideal if, like me, you manage to sprain both your ankles.
When I returned to London, my new Riviera look disappeared into the back of the wardrobe and stayed there, apart from an unsuccessful outing in Australia (a dinner in Perth, which is very conservative, unlike Sydney). So, this year, when I was heading once again to the Cap d’Antibes, I decided to bear all this in mind and be more sensible with any purchases while there.
However, once you’re in Juan-les-Pins, the lure of glamorous, dressing-up-box outfits can prove difficult to resist. My two friends, who joined me for a day of shopping, groaned when I set my heart on a cream corset dress with a full net skirt. “I could wear it all winter!” I exclaimed, which would have been possible, but only if I’d been prepared to team it with a long cardigan and boots. When I tried it on it looked awful, with seams in all the wrong places so that I resembled Madonna in her Desperately Seeking Susan period — not a good look. Wisely, I decided to give it a miss.
Actually, it’s hard to avoid dressing like a movie star — invariably Brigitte Bardot — if you shop on the French Riviera. Wander into any one of the boutiques in Juan-les-Pins’ main shopping area and you’ll notice that even the assistants look as though they’re on a break from a Cannes film shoot.
At a boutique called Capuccino, on Avenue Guy de Maupassant du Cap, the emphasis is ultra-feminine with masses of frills — for one dazed moment I thought I’d wandered into a children’s fancy dress shop by mistake. The rack of minute denim skirts and jeans, elaborately embroidered and extravagantly trimmed with lace, appeared to be aimed at 10-year-old girls. It was only when I looked at a price tag — £406 (€600) for a pair of jeans — that I realised they were intended for child-women, with body shapes identical to the current crop of Hollywood stars: slender torso, impossibly flat stomach, big breasts.
Advertisement
There are plenty of women like this on the Riviera; mostly foreign visitors (once they reach middle age, Frenchwomen seem admirably couldn’t-care-less about the shape and condition of the flesh they expose). Yet it is a body shape that defies nature. It is also, I suspect, the real explanation for the astonishing popularity of cosmetic surgery among Western women in their twenties and thirties. You can’t be that slim while combining the body of a pre-pubescent girl and the pneumatic breasts of Pamela Anderson, without medical intervention. It is possibly no coincidence that another boutique in the main shopping area of Juan-les-Pins, which sells costume jewellery in colours as bright as sweets, is called Toutes des Lolitas (Avenue Georges Gallice).
I’m a size 12, and none of these clothes would fit me, but then they wouldn’t have fitted Bardot in her heyday either. So I was thrilled to discover that the other big fashion statement on the Côte d’Azur this year is actually wearable.
Everyone on the Riviera is donning beautiful knee-length dresses in chiffon or cotton, heavily embroidered around the neck and hem, which, at first, I took for kaftans. On closer inspection, I realised they were more like the top half of a shalwar kameez — ideal for throwing over swimsuits, or as dresses in their own right.
For a while now, styles from the Indian sub-continent have been taken up by women such as Jemima Khan and the late Diana, Princess of Wales. When the Indian designer Rohit Bal presented a collection called Sanskrit at a glitzy gala in New York, the audience loved his beadwork and tie-dyed fabrics.
I tried on half a dozen Indian and Pakistani pieces in Cannes, at an ultra-fashionable boutique called Clementine that also sells Jean Paul Gaultier. Much to my friends’ approval, I settled for a fabulous dress in bright-blue tie-dyed cotton, with silver beads and tiny mirrors around the neck and hem, and thigh-high side splits .
Advertisement
I’ve already worn it out for dinner in London, which either means that my Juan-les-Pins shopping habits have improved or Riviera fashion is no longer as divorced from the real world as it used to be.
Toutes des Lolitas: 00 33 493 617 154
Capuccino: 00 33 492 930 777 Clementine: 00 33 493 999 045
Rohit Bal: www.rohitbal.com.
Advertisement
CLOTHING CONUNDRUM
In spite of an uncomfortable encounter with Vivienne Westwood in the spring, when I interviewed her for The Times, I like her clothes. So, when I found a matching skirt and top on sale in a shop in Wimbledon, I grabbed my size and hurried into the changing room. The top, a sleeveless shirt, almost like a waistcoat, in soft brown cotton, fitted perfectly, and could be worn with a bra just showing in the deep V-neck. The skirt, however, was a mystery. Knee-length, in almost the same shade of brown, with a darker vertical stripe, it seemed to have a waistband made for someone twice my size.
Advertisement
I left the changing room to ask the shop assistant for advice, much to the amusement of other customers, who assumed I’d picked up the wrong size. The assistant scratched his head and said he had been told how it was supposed to be worn, but had forgotten. “I’m going to ring a friend,” he said, explaining that he knew someone who was a Westwood expert.
I took the skirt off, at which point I noticed a wide band of loose fabric inside, fastened by buttons in the middle. It looked weird but, with Westwood, anything is possible. I put it on again, this time fastening the band across my stomach. I then borrowed a belt to slip through the loops on the outside, pulling in the excess fabric. Suddenly, it looked terrific — as though it had been draped on my body by a sculptor. I’ve always thought that that is what Westwood really is: a sculptor who works in fabric, rather than a conventional designer. But it’s the first time I’ve bought a suit that needed instructions — it was almost as difficult to put together as flatpack furniture.
SPLASH OUT
Advertisement
The key thing about swimsuits is that you need two. I swim in a black one with huge polka dots, by Moschino, which doesn’t sag or become transparent when it’s wet. But the one I really love is French, in gold and brown stripes, by Susan Pascal Creations (00 33 388 499 069), and much too nice for anything but lounging on a beach or by the side of a pool.