Fanny Berger

One of the cool things about getting paid to write fashion blogs is, well, getting paid. And seeing my name on someone else's website AND knowing that at (probably) more than 2-3 people will read what I write.One of the cool things about having my own blog (that I share with the lovely Kiran) is being able to write what I want. Even if it's a little depressing. 

Upon the arrival of the Nazis in Paris in 1940, Jewish hat designer Fanny Berger was forced to sell her business to an “aryan." She evaded arrest until September 1942. She spent 9 months at an internment camp at Beaune-la-Rolande before traveling to Drancy and finally to Auschwitz. She was killed upon arrival in July 1943. She was 42 years old. Even more tragic is the fact that Berger was estranged from her family prior to her death because they did not approve of her independent lifestyle and career choices. 

Very little information on Berger is available other than a 2008 documentary made by her niece, entitled "Murder of a Hatmaker." Indeed, only a few photographs remain as visual proof that this woman ever existed. 

As Lisa Katzman writes: 

"Some of these details are related in a chillingly detached account by two French archivists, who, as the official custodians of the Vichy regime's census data and Nazi records, bear the burden of history with a disdain that seems equally directed at the Jews as the Nazi occupiers. It is an attitude that provides the subtext for much of what unfolds in the film, including the bizarrely self-reproaching admission of an elderly aristocratic acquaintance of Odette's, who claims he has no recollection of serving as a witness to the mandatory sale of her business to a gentile 'Aryanized' hatmaker, because, as he says, 'to send a person to her death, I think I would remember.' "


What's more than tragic, or depressing, is the infuriating fact that so little remains of this particular member of the Parisian fashion industry. Coco Chanel slept with a Nazi and a bottle of her perfume is sold every thirty seconds. Fanny Berger committed the crime of being born Jewish, and we've all but forgotten her. Sometimes depressing is necessary. 

Posted by: Carla 

Go to the record store, and visit your friends

Mikhail Baryshnikov (actually it was him playing Aleksandr Petrovsky, my all-time least favourite of Carrie Bradshaw's boyfriends) once said that Paris is the most magnificent city in the world.

He was right.

I've spent collectively perhaps 12 hours walking around Paris--Christian Dior once said the only wartime deprivation he didn't mind was the lack of fuel, because it meant people began to stroll around the city. It was like walking on a cloud. And I don't say this from the perspective of a wide-eyed Canadian girl who "loves" fashion. It was more than that. Being in a city like Paris reminds you that you will never hope to know all the legends who've walked those streets. Pierre Balmain and Christian Dior used to design in Paris together for Lucien Lelong and then they'd go spend time at Balenciaga's apartment. It was in paris that Chanel insisted on living throughout the occupation, to keep one eye on her #31 Rue Cambon boutique and another on a handsome German officer. Louis XIV visited Paris only a handful of times during his entire reign, but Margeret de Valois and Henry de Navarre were married there, at Notre Dame in 1572. It was a wedding that helped spark the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. Mary, Queen of Scots was married in the same cathedral to Francis II. Paris is also where Napoleon I held his coronation, where he (and Jim Morrison) have been laid to rest, and where Hemingway liked to chill.  Gertrud Stein called it, simply, her hometown.

When the Nazis invaded and occupied the city, they planned not to squash Parisian culture, but to co-opt it. They wanted not to feel inferior to Paris but to call it their own. Oddly enough, I got to stand in the same spot as Hitler stood for his famous photo in front of the Eiffel Tower. For better or worse, this is a city full of history, culture, beauty and tragedy.

This long pre-amble is essentially my way of saying that since leaving France, I've experienced a huge jones for this city. The friends I went with were slightly less impressed (what can you expect from a group of 25 year old [straight] guys?) But I couldn't move past the fact that Paris is so old, and like a person, its lived a beautiful, long, complicated and often haunted life. Its cobblestones hold a million stories of the famous people who've walked along them, as well as those unknown people who call Paris home.

To aid both my Paris-jonesing and my poor French, I've been checking out a pretty great blog on Parisian street style. Thankfully, it isn't all always in French, but it has some pretty great street style shots (reasons we love Tommy Ton!) and if you look close enough (past the fabulous clothes) you can see tiny snippets of my favourite city.  So, Style and the City is pretty worth checking out, but then again, so is the real thing.

Posted by: Carla