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Paris names its first street after a fashion designer
PARIS, Sept 30, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – In a city yet to name a back alley
after Coco Chanel, Parisians stepped out Sunday to do their organic shopping
at a street market named after fashion designer Sonia Rykiel.
Hours earlier the city’s mayor Anne Hidalgo — something of a fashionista
herself — had declared Allee Sonya Rykiel open, with her label staging its
Paris fashion week show between the twinkling lights of the market stalls.
The “allee” is in the middle of a grand Left Bank boulevard where the
late designer, who died in 2016, did her fruit and vegetable shopping.
It is the first time the French capital has named any kind of
thoroughfare after a fashion designer.
To celebrate, Rykiel’s successor Julie de Libran staged a chi-chi
Parisian market-themed show, with her models carrying baguettes or popping
out for a bit of broccoli in lace nighties and a techno trenchcoats.
The collection, with dresses inspired by the “petit filet” string
shopping bags that are de rigueur among Paris’ hipster “bobos”, had a
Saturday night-Sunday morning feel, with a cute terrier on a lead and De
Libran’s young son and his Labrador pup making a cameo.
“Sonia Rykiel gave us a taste for freedom, she was the most Parisian of
Parisians,” said Hidalgo.
Indeed the designer opened her first shop a stone’s throw away in Saint
Germain des Pres just as French students rose up in revolt in May 1968.
But the authorities in the French capital would not be drawn on whether
there were any plans for a Boulevard Karl Lagerfeld or Avenue Christian Dior.
A street named after Chanel would be politically tricky in a city which
mostly votes for the left because of the designer’s “horizontal
collaboration” during the Nazi occupation.
Chanel spent much of the war in the Ritz hotel with her lover, German
intelligence officer Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage.
BSS/AFP/ARS/1645 hrs