UV Magazine – Seventeen Crushes (Paris)

Seventeen Crushes (Paris)

The romanticism of Paris spreads like an invasive exotic: what surprises you most is its subtlety.

Paris is a human city. Urine stains the walls. The weather leaves a lasting dampness. Women are natural, perpetually un-kept hair and minimal make-up. Paris Fashion Week to them is a fucking circus. The people are stare-bears, eyes averting as soon as you catch them. The symmetry of spatial design is as equally stiffly conservative, the corduroy straight lines and the manicured gardens. Everything is glazed over in repetition…but then the crush begins.

The men are territorial, marking every corner like a love cat. The touch of a rain drop is a fingertip on bare shoulders. Eyes engage in courtship. You begin to see the streets more like a perforated dotted line. There is beauty in every gap communicating at first something you can’t pronounce. A Morse code. The treasured green pockets, boulangerie smells, father and son hand-in-hand on the walk to school. For such high density living it can be so self-consciously quiet. There is no gaudy advertising signage, no clothes hanging from balconies. An architecture of absence but not absent of feeling.

Paris is a place where you fall in love again. Where seventeen crushes are crushed into one.