Where the Rich Hunt for Bargins

The Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré Accepts either Gold or Silver

By Richard Erickson

These are people with threads and some even have furs; most of them are ladies, dressed for serious shopping. It is just after lunchtime and they are ready to go.

I am in the mood to look at them, but not in one for shopping myself. When I used to do it, in the winter sales, around here especially - I always got some great silk shirt for 50 percent off and six months later discovered that I don't wear silk shirts as a rule; in fact, never.

The last great shirt I got - the ultra-classy 'Garage' shirt made out of wood - I wore just before Christmas to a little get-together and my wife said that Halloween was long past. Nobody else said anything about it, so I didn't get a chance to say Nelson Mandela would like it. It is discouraging to be artistic in a town full of people with no imagination.

At the first corner after the rue Royale where there is a lot of traffic, there is a line-up to get in the Hermés shop at the rue Boissy d'Anglas entry. It is so close to the British and American Embassies here, that these people may be merely picking up a little something after lunch or some sort of group - it is unusual to see such a queue, because by this time, the winter sales are nearly over - although I don't suppose scarves come in extra-small or XXXL sizes.

But back on the rue Faubourg side of the store, I see store employees taking down security bars and a sign says the shop has been closed for lunch. Closed for lunch? I guess this shop's clientele don't shop during lunch hours - so the crowd is not from the embassies after all.

This is the high-ticket high-fashion high-name end of the street. The names you constantly read in the reports on fashion - the last two weeks were full of them, as some collection - summer I guess - was walking down runways all over town; the names you read, they are all clustered around here.

Some of the places have itty-bitty little cards with prices on them that you bring your sharp-eyed chauffeur to read for you; but others have no signs or mention of prices at all.

I guess these are the places, that if you feel compelled to go in and ask what something in the window costs, you can't afford it. At Gianni Versace's I saw this - this - dress? In the window and I did exactly this. I went and asked the guy inside the door.

I should have known better because he was bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger. He politely insisted I had to go upstairs to find out. I weighed this idea and thought readers would think me really wimpy - to run the photo - without finding out the price.

'Upstairs' was not right there. After about 50 metres of classy marble floor running towards the back I was getting chicken so I asked the first young oriental lady I came to, who was standing beside a large, round two-tone marble table.

She started telling me about how prices were discussed upstairs and I made up a story, not entirely untrue, about merely being a passerby struck dumb with the sublime beauty of the dress - dress? - in the window and all I wanted to know was how much such a marvelous thing could cost.

With a slight but friendly smile, she looked me up and down and decided, on the basis of my standard winter-reporter dress - somewhat the same as what IRA trainees wear - that she could tell me the secret, especially in order to save me the trouble of going upstairs and possibly seeing their really good stuff. She said, "1X60X0," and I repeated it because it seemed impossibly low.

She smiled larger, and entirely sincerely, and said, "63,600 francs." I knew why she smiled and I cursed myself for leaving my diamond-level plastic in my other mailorder-catalogue street-report combat suit. With my usual mere blue or green plastic it would take me a week to get that amount of cash out of a money-machine.

I do not think it was a 50 percent-off price, but probably included the 20.6 percent value-added tax. Adding that on is probably how it came out with that odd-600 francs on it. Just pin-money for a Paris afternoon. Tip for a stout doorman or something. He opened the heavy door for me when I left and said goodbye, just like he would to any other valued customer. If I could have given him the 600 francs, it would have made both our day's.

On the sidewalk, there were three oriental-looking fellows, who didn't look dressed well enough for any known international airline travel, looking at 'the dress.' I pointed at the dress and they all smiled - Yes! Great Dress! - and I took out my notebook and wrote 63,600 in it so they could see the number and pointed at the dress. They cracked up. Western civilization is funkier than they'd heard.

All this was right opposite the British Chancery, just after the Japanese Embassy and just before the British Embassy, I guess. 'I guess,' because these places don't have name-plates on them; you have to look up in the air for flags, or badges; up where the pigeons can see them fine.

These embassies are all in a row on the south side of the street, and as you go west the last in the row is the Embassy of Columbia. This is separated from the Palais de l'Elysée by the closed-off rue de l'Elysée. The Colombians are therefore closest to the French and I wonder if this means anything.

Closer yet is the shop of A. Popoff & Cie, which is directly opposite the entry to the palace, at number 86. If you are around here sometime, do not be put off by all the police you can see and those you can't; nor by all the TV cameras stuck all over the building fronts. Several 'big brothers' are watching you at once here.

It may be possible that this is one of the few places in the world where it is perfectly safe to go shopping for truly expensive things carrying plastic sacks full of cash money. It looks like an unlikely neighborhood for muggers.

Since I am not going to get a shirt today I call off the tour at the avenue de Matignon after passing about a block's worth of art dealers, whose specialty seems to be serious but dull paintings in very thick and ornate frames. There are not many pedestrians here either because none of these dealers have the 'soldes' signs in their windows.

The last building, on the corner, is somehow representative of this part of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. At sidewalk level there are perfectly respectable carriage-trade shops, and above them nothing has changed since the last century, not even the paint.

Beyond the avenue de Matignon there is more rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In fact, there is still about two-thirds of its length still to go; to the Place des Ternes on the edge of the 8th and the 17th arrondissements.

I think I'll do the rest in a new installment - and maybe throw in some history too, like I did for the earlier report about the rue Saint Honoré.

Luckily the sun never did really break through the overcast. It has been perfect shopping-for-sales weather in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré today in Paris.

Richard Erickson, living in Paris for the last twenty years, has been putting Paris online as long as anyone. More of his writings can be found in Metropole Paris where this article first appeared. He can be contacted via erickso@world-net.sct.fr.