Paris Fashion Week Part 3 - Paris Nightlife

Cha Cha Club, rue Berger, Paris

Le Sens, rue de Ponthieu, Paris


I have left Paris 4 years ago, so whenever I go back to the city of Lights I feel like I am rediscovering it, reappraising it as if I were a stranger, falling in love again as I wonder at the detailed craft of a Haussmanian door, the elegant architecture of an interior court or the quaint charm of a back street all wrapped in wisteria flowers. Walk anywhere in the center, you will find yourself enamoured and aspiring for love within minutes.

However, staying in touch with the tout Paris and its turbulent nightlife takes having good friends, which fortunately for me I have kept across years (16 years to be exact).

On Thursday night I met with Mr Facebook, whom I used to go to school with until I was 8 years old. He contacted me on facebook about a year ago and we've been facebook-flirting ever since (I love facebook!). In spite of all the years, when I left the Hotel Costes and made my way to Le Fumoir which is one of the trendy cafe-bars next to the Cour Carree du Louvre where the fashion crowd often stops for a drink and a ciggarette or a line of coke, I recognized him instantly. When I told my mother I had met with him, she told me that I went to his 9th birthday when I was a kid, and after having been tortured and rolled in the mud by him and his boy gang I declared I would never ever go to a boy's birthday ever again... Well I am quite glad I got over the trauma.

Mr Facebook has this kind of sexual magnetism and social ease that will instantly appeal to any girl in their right mind, and he knows his way around the closed circle of trendy Paris. We first headed to L'Eclaireur behind the Hotel Crillon where fashion people party in a wide wide dimensioned 19th century bar where you have to get into through a hallway hemmed in colonnades. The ceiling is so loud if it hadn't been that crowded I bet you could have listened to the echo of your own voice singing to the latest French and international songs. After half an hour of screaming about 16 years of wild youth experiences we decided to leave the premises and go to a comfier place in Le Marais, Cha Cha, where all the young artistic Paris en vogue head to around 11pm.

A little harder to get in unless you know the right people, it is all wallpapered in crimson covering and has this cozy and select feeling you only find in Londonese members' clubs, only a lot more decadent in a sweet and friendly way. The courtyard is the best meeting place with glamorous smokers evolving in a cloud of smoke curls and plunging in and out of in-depth Frenchy French intellectual conversations. The first floor has a jacuzzi for a wild end of the night, but the staff will chuck you back to the ground floor as soon as a celebrity arrives, so as to let them enjoy wild life behind the screen of heavy velvet curtains. The image of the night that I wish I had captured is the vision of Champagnista M sitting on the back of an armchair, laughing behind her left hand, head framed by the very close and adament faces of three handsome French dandies.

As you can imagine, we left her here in good company when it was time to migrate to Le Sens behind Les Champs-Elysees. It is the 'in' club in Paris where you can queue up for half the night under the intransigeant look of the door girl who, escorted by an army of costumed transvestites, behind her mask and call-girl clothes, must the be the most powerful woman in Paris at the moment. You go there to see and be seen, and dance with Celine de Rotschild and 17-year-old soon to be supermodels while a projector displays images of LA style Saint-Tropez bimbos partying in pools in teeny-tiny bikinis. London meets LA meets Paris in there and it is a bit hectic and very post-modern.

Not sure how we managed it but at dawn we mustered the energy to go and fool around for another hour in Mr Facebook's trendy retail clothes shop on the Champs-Elysees... A night in Style!


By Champagnista V