Cazals @ Virgin Megastore

Gainsbourg 2008

Kitsune presents Cazals live

KITSUNE MAISON EN VRAI !
Le 30 Octobre 2008
à La Maroquinerie, à 19h30

CAZALS
AUTOKRATZ
YOU LOVE HER COZ SHES DEAD
GROVESNOR

La Maroquinerie
23 rue Boyer
75020 Paris

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KITSUNE MAISON
au Régine , à 23 h

A-TRAK
GILDAS & MASAYA
IN FLAGRANTI
DAVID E. SUGAR (live)
LUCA C.

Entrée facilitée grâce à la présentation de votre place achetée pour la soirée Kitsuné Maison en Vrai !

Le Régine
49 rue de Ponthieu
75008 Paris
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36 Hours in Paris

By SETH SHERWOOD

FROM the mime in white makeup to the Chanel-clad grande dame walking her poodle, Paris practically sags under the tonnage of its stereotypes. The Marais is the welcome exception. Far from central casting, Paris’s most swinging district brims with a vivid mix of characters. Stroll its medieval lanes and you’ll rub shoulders with muscle-shirted gays and feather-boa transvestites; long-bearded rabbis and scruffy rock musicians; West African restaurateurs and Eastern European bakers. And if you turn down the tiny rue de Montmorency, you’ll even be treading in the footsteps of the famous alchemist Nicolas Flamel. His former residence at No. 51 is said to be the oldest house in the Marais — and all of Paris.

Friday

5 p.m.
1) HIP-HOP GALLERIES

You can hardly swing a baguette in the Marais these days without smashing a hot-shot art dealer or upstart gallery owner. To discover the neighborhood’s sizzling creative culture, first seek out the eponymous gallery of 40-year-old Emmanuel Perrotin (76, rue de Turenne; 33-1-42-16-79-79; www.galerieperrotin.com). This 17th-century mansion turned expo space is showing, until Jan. 10, the first-ever exhibition by the hip-hop impresario and furniture designer Pharrell Williams. Nearby rue St.-Claude is rapidly filling with contemporary art spaces, notably Galerie Frank Elbaz (7, rue St.-Claude; 33-1-48-87-50-04; www.galeriefrankelbaz.com) and Galerie LHK (6, rue St.-Claude; 33-1-42-74-13-55; www.galerielh.com).

8 p.m.
2) CLASSICAL FRENCH

Founded in 1780, Chez Julien (1, rue Pont-Louis-Philippe; 33-01-42-78-31-64) couldn’t feel more French if the servers sang “Frère Jacques” while serving crème brûlée. But this is no dainty tourist trap. Bought and renovated last year by one of the Costes family, best known for the luxurious Hôtel Costes, the restaurant has exquisite retro-chic décor like plush banquettes and tall mirrors. A stylish crowd of all ages dines on French classics — foie gras, frogs’ legs, rack of lamb and a massive Chateaubriand steak with good crispy fries — but the view is the marquee attraction. From the tree-fringed outdoor seats you can see the Seine, Notre Dame and, just footsteps away, the old St.-Gervais-St.-Protais Church. A three-course meal for two people, without wine, runs about 100 euros ($139 at $1.39 to the euro).

10 p.m.
3) A LOT TO DIGEST

For a digestif, join the assorted intellectuals crowding the classic zinc bar at La Belle Hortense (31, rue Vieille-du-Temple; 33-1-48-04-71-60; www.cafeine.com), a cozy Old World-style wine bar. Straight and gay, leather-bound and tweed-wrapped, the crowd swirls wines by the glass and chats animatedly about highfalutin topics. Even if you don’t know your Derrida from your derrière, no worries: The place is also a bookstore, stacked high with centuries of French and international literature. The back lounge, which has rotating art exhibitions, is the perfect spot to sip some hearty red Guigal Côte du Rhone (4.50 euros) and bone up on everything from Anouilh to Zola.

Saturday

10:30 a.m.
4) ROYAL TUTELAGE

How do you teach your adolescent son about the birds and the bees? If you’re Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV, you hire a one-eyed 40-ish noblewoman named Catherine de Beauvais to initiate him into, ahem, adulthood. Her tale is just one of the colorful anecdotes you’ll hear during the Marais tour offered by Paris Walks (33-1-48-09-21-40; www.paris-walks.com). The two-hour excursion (10 euros) includes architecturally splendid old town houses, the memorial to the Shoah and the 17th-century St.-Paul-St.-Louis Church.

1 p.m.
5) A LUNCHTIME ODYSSEY

The oldest covered market in Paris, the Marché des Enfants Rouges (enter on rue Charlot) was established in the early 1600s and remains a center of Marais life. A new structure has replaced the original, but it still houses cheesemongers, vintners and grocers. Better, there’s a bounty of small restaurants that resembles a Benetton ad: Italian, Japanese, French, Afro-Caribbean, Middle Eastern. Traiteur Marocain (33-01-42-77-55-05) ladles out Moroccan fare like fresh grilled sardines (7.50 euros) and lamb-prune-sesame tajine (8.85 euros).

2:30 p.m.
6) POST-STARCK DESIGNS

The nearby streets are home to Paris’s most inventive young creators. Inside the futuristic funhouse called Lieu Commun (5, rue des Filles du Calvaire; 33-1-44-54-08-30; www.lieucommun.fr), you’ll find housewares from Matali Crasset, a protégée of Philippe Starck, as well as electronic music CDs and street wear. At the homey shop OneNineSixOne (135, rue Vieille-du-Temple; 33-1-42-72-50-84; www.oneninesixone.com), Gaëtane Raguet transposes vintage photos of Paris and America onto canvas wall hangings and lampshades. When Christophe Lemaire is not embroidering alligators as artistic director of Lacoste, he sells 1950s-style V-neck sweaters and 1970s-inspired suede jackets at Lemaire (28, rue de Poitou; 33-1-44-78-00-09; www.christophelemaire.com), his personal Marais boutique.

4:30 p.m.
7) F-STOP PIT STOP

Has any city lit up under more flashbulbs than Paris? November brings Le Mois de la Photo à Paris — Paris Photo Month — with scores of exhibitions citywide led by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (5-7, rue de Fourcy; 33-1-44-78-75-00; www.mep-fr.org). Notable shows include “An Experience of Amusing Chemistry” by the contemporary photographers David McDermott and Peter McGough, which recalls the American Gilded Age using 19th-century techniques. Also being held is a retrospective of the fearless Turkish photojournalist Goksin Sipahioglu, founder of the international photo agency SIPA, who captured landmark events and personalities of the 20th century from the Suez-Sinai War to the 1968 Paris riots. Shows run Nov. 5 to Jan. 25; 6 euros.

9 p.m.
8) SUSHI OR TARTARE?

The wild wall mural at Usagi (58, rue de Saintonge; 33-1-48-87-28-85; www.usagi.fr), with its mix of Japanese manga-inspired figures and French Baroque motifs, is an apt metaphor for the cooking. The brainchild of the artist and fashion designer Shinsuke Kawahara, this new minimalist-cool restaurant has generated a cult following for its clever French-Japanese hybrid cuisine. A tender filet of Salers beef is paired with a sweet miso broth and crispy lotus-root chips. Oven-roasted cubes of chicken are served with a chutney-like mix of sake, ginger and scallions. Desserts are equally inventive. Dinner for two without drinks, about 90 euros.

11 p.m.
9) FAIRE LA FêTE

That’s the French term for partying, and you have ample opportunity to use it in the Marais. The newest hot spot for gay par-ee is NYX (30, rue du Roi-de-Sicile; www.nyxclub.fr). Hidden behind a bakery façade, the small but lively club draws gays and lesbians alike for draft beer (3.80 euros) and D.J.-spun electro, rock and disco. The hot spot for straight revelers is Andy Wahloo (69, rue des Gravilliers; 33-1-42-71-20-38), a vaulted orange-lit room decorated with kitschy Arabic film posters, soda bottles and detergent boxes. It draws a well-dressed crowd who order the house cocktail (rum, banana liqueur, lime, ginger, cinnamon; 9 euros) and dance on North African-style banquettes.

Sunday

11 a.m.
10) TURN THE MEAT AROUND

As you enter the narrow, cobblestone rue des Rosiers, the smell of fresh-baked challah drifts from bakeries, and school kids in yarmulkes pop out of doorways adorned with the Star of David. This is the heart of Jewish Paris. Many Parisians say that the nation’s best shwarma and falafel are served at L’As du Fallafel. Alas, every tourist from every continent seems to be in on the news, resulting in lines more common to Madonna concerts. Instead, cross the street to Mi-Va-Mi (23, rue des Rosiers; 33-1-42-71-53-72), where the lines are shorter, the service is friendlier, and the falafel (5 euros) and spit-grilled shwarma (7 euros) are almost equally good. Ask for some zesty red salade Turque on top and finish with excellent fig strudel (3.20 euros) at nearby Florence Finkelstein (24, rue des Ecouffes; 33-1-48-87-92-85).

1 p.m.
11) VILLAGE PEOPLE

Need some Art Deco lamps, Baroque picture frames, vintage dresses or other French collectibles to bring back to your pied-à-terre? The Village St.-Paul (south of rue de Rivoli on rue St.-Paul; www.village-saint-paul.com) holds scores of boutiques that burst with retro finds. For those hard-to-find antique dolls of apes sporting fezes, try Lima Select (15-17, rue St.-Paul, 33-1-42-77-98-02), an emporium of unusual dolls and figurines. If dressing like a 1910 chorus girl is your thing, snap up some old lace, garters and frilly dresses at Francine (2, rue Ave Maria; 33-1-42-72-44-50). Amid all the colorful personalities of the Marais, you should fit right in.

THE BASICS

Numerous airlines, includingAir France, Continental and Delta, fly direct between New York and Paris. According to a recent online search, flights for travel next month start at about $700.

Celluloid titans live eternally at the Hôtel du 7eme Art (20, rue St.-Paul; 33-1-44-54-85-00; www.paris-hotel-7art.com), which is packed with movie memorabilia, some for sale. It’s a tad worn, but the location and price are prime. Doubles from 90 euros.

You half expect to see mad monks at the Hôtel Saint Merry (78, rue de la Verrerie; 33-1-42-78-14-15; www.hotel-saintmerry.com). Housed in a 17th-century building by a church, it has 12 rooms done in medieval décor: dark wood, exposed beams, raw stone, even the occasional flying buttress. From 160 euros.

For chic, in-the-know elegance, try the three-apartment complex at 5, rue de Moussy, known by its street address (33-1-44-78-92-00; ask for Patrice). Created by the fashion mogul Azzedine Alaïa, the large, airy apartments contain furniture from iconic designers like Mark Newsom and Jean Prouvé. The rate for two is 450 euros per night.

***

Far from the Eiffel Tower, a hip new hotel

By Mary Blume

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

PARIS: Gentrification takes many forms. A part of Pigalle has dubbed itself, perhaps not entirely happily, SoPig but, more interestingly, a savvy French group has opened a hotel in an offbeat part of Paris mingling casual trendiness with low rates. Open only a few weeks, it may give pause to such high-end New York hotel entrepreneurs as Robert De Niro of the very costly Greenwich or The Mercer's André Balazs. Rooms start at €79, or $108, per night.

The first Paris hotel to be designed from scratch by Philippe Starck, it was built by Roland Castro, architect of low-cost housing projects, under the aegis of Serge Trigano, whose father was a co-founder of Club Med. It is called Mama Shelter.

The name was chosen by Starck and by one of Trigano's sons, Trigano explained. "It suggests the mother who welcomes us and the impression that one is sheltered from the aggressions of the city. We wanted to create a kind of cocoon."

The cocoon is far from Paris's traditional center, in the northeastern 20th arrondissement, decidedly untouristic except for Père Lachaise cemetery. As part of the bobo movement to the city's low-cost east, the area is attracting a spillover from the now-overpriced Bastille, but it has a long way to go. "We are a quarter of an hour ahead of time," Trigano said.

The sprawling arrondissement combines charming mews houses and hideous housing projects, mama and papa shops and the restless young, an urgent need for renovation and such leafy pockets as La Campagne à Paris, a bunch of small villas built in 1906. The impression at times is almost of a mix of Chelsea in London and the South Bronx.

Mama Shelter is on a lot at 109 Rue de Bagnolet formerly occupied by a garage. It was discovered by an associate of Trigano's, Cyrille Aouizerate, who is a philosopher and real estate promoter, a combination possible only in France. He describes the hotel as a lay monastery or a modern kibbutz.

What Starck has wrought there is a fresh and welcoming mix of the hyper-modern and the cozy. Guests can check in at machines similar to those at airports (likewise taking a tip from the airlines, room rates vary according to how far in advance one books by credit card), but there is also a live staff to take bookings and dispense advice. At the end of the lobby is a small computer-equipped business center and along its side are vitrines variously decorated with Napoleon-style hats, backbackers' guides, telephone and computer accessories, Kiehl's lotions, DVDs, soft-porn books and pétanque balls to be used in an as-yet-unbuilt space.

The public rooms give onto a deck that overlooks disused railway tracks. They are cool and yet nestlike, with a huge eight-person foosball which encourages guests to mingle and a large video screen on which people can introduce themselves, Facebook-style, over a Caipirinha or a Coke. The bedrooms in Starck's usual black, gray and white are smoothly compact but not spare, with kitchenettes, quality linens, free Internet and showerheads as wide as dinner plates.

The impression is both laid back and solid. Trigano has recruited Alain Senderens of Lucas Carton to supervise the menu and Jean-Claude Elgaire, for 49 years concierge at the Plaza Athénée, to work with the staff, which is young, multinational and, Trigano said, for the most part inexperienced: "You may have to repeat your order a time or two but it doesn't matter. They are learning and they are very nice."

There is no fancy spa, though there will be a yoga room, and there is little of Starck's famous furniture in the public rooms because it is too costly. Trigano, who had not visited the 20th arrondissement before the project began, got the property cheap and figures his investment will be recouped in two or three years.

"The area is already moving - apartment space has nearly tripled in price since we began seven years ago, and it isn't as out of the way as it seems," he said. Mama Shelter is on the way in from Charles de Gaulle airport and from Villepinte, where immense trade shows are held, so it is attracting business people as well as tourists.

Right next to the hotel (which has a fashionably unmarked entrance), a mediathèque, also by Castro, will shortly open. Across the street is a popular nightspot called the Flèche d'Or, which Trigano's company owns so that if the racket from bands like Blackjoy or Apple Jelly or Ben'Bop is too loud for hotel guests the order will go out to cool it.

When Club Med was taken over and Trigano was ejected as president, he founded Serge Trigano & Sons, beginning with a travel agency and hotel and seminar management. Mama Shelter is the first hotel he owns and is a far cry from vacation villages, though he says they share the same values of gentillese and inclusiveness. "Here at night you'll have people from the neighborhood coming to play foosball with hotel guests. That wouldn't happen on the avenue Montaigne," he said.

Mama Shelter might be considered a post-boutique hotel. "It is not a boutique, not a hotel à la mode," Trigano said, "it is a contemporary hotel where you can bathe in the Paris cityscape." The future, he maintains, lies in small city hotels.

"When I first left the Club I thought of opening small hotels in, say, Morocco. But I think, and this is just intuitive, that tastes have changed among the younger generation.

"I think the 20th century was the century of big enterprises like the Club Med with people going to the ends of the earth and I have the feeling that at the present time you take the TGV train and go from Paris to Brussels or from Amsterdam to Rome for an exhibition or a concert. That's why I am directing my firm toward urban hotels."

Serge Trigano & Sons has three projects afoot for hotels in Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux, cities that have a mix of leisure and business customers. "The principle would be the same, to discover cities via unexpected quarters where things are happening, to build hotels perhaps smaller than this one where the quarter and the city and clientele come together."

Mama Shelter still smells of fresh paint, but its 172 rooms are well booked. Aided by the economic crisis, Trigano's intuition looks set to pay off. The idea of possible imitators worries him not at all.

"People tried to imitate the Club," he pointed out, "and they never could."

***

Fashionista Paris

By Henry Alford
Monday, September 29, 2008

Five hours after I'd started visiting some of Jean-Paul Gaultier's favorite places in Paris, a woman I did not know grabbed my manhood.

I'd gone up to Montmartre to buy a ticket for the following evening's show at the Moulin Rouge, the colorful if over-touristed cabaret whose gaudy charms have long held sway over the imagination of the designer we associate with Madonna's cone bra and the male skirt. Ticket purchased, I walked a block south and stumbled onto a rival establishment called Cabaret Frou Frou, whereupon a husky-voiced young woman hurriedly sat me down in front of a metal pole and offered me a dance.

Aha, it dawned on me. Not a cabaret, but something more intimate. I tried to make my apologies, but she cut me off. "I do a dance!" she said in heavily-accented English.

She then proceeded to "walk" her index and middle finger up my inner thigh and grab me. I stood abruptly and said, "Sorry — no. I'm ... Je suis homosexual."

She stared at me unmoved, as if I'd just told her that my hobbies include raising chinchillas.

Heretofore, my chief anxiety about traveling to France had always been that, at some point during my trip, I would be called upon to pronounce the name of the town Ypres. But my Frou Frou experience had now redrawn that map. The French: unexpectedly handsy.

A month earlier, I'd written to Monsieur Gaultier and asked him to send me a list of the places in Paris that are the most meaningful to him. I knew that the selections made by an avatar of louche glamour and subversive wit would provide a refreshing tonic to the City of Light's inherent sentimentality. Not only has Gaultier inspected many of the city's public and private spaces as possible sites on which to stage fashion shows, but he's an artist who's always looking for visual appeal, and often finding it in unlikely places.

The idea was that I would spend three days visiting some of these locales and then have dinner with him at a restaurant of his choice — Jules Verne, the Alain Ducasse 120-seater on the second platform of the Eiffel Tower — before visiting the rest. And so, one June night just two days after l'incident Frou Frou, I found myself — accompanied by Gaultier and his director of communications, Jelka Music — zooming toward the Eiffel Tower in a black SUV driven by the designer's driver and bodyguard. "We go to a cliché, but a fabulous cliché that I love," the blond and boyishly enthusiastic Gaultier told me with some merriment.

Talking to Gaultier is like being with your favorite eccentric uncle, the one who bought you liquor in high school — his crystal blue eyes glisten with warmth and pop with curiosity; when he's very excited, his left pinky twitches. He added, "I love postcard clichés. You have to be a genius to take a good picture of Paris. So many have already been taken."

Gaultier's admiration for the Eiffel Tower — over the years he has recreated the monument's iconic architecture in both clothing and jewelry — became palpable when we got in its elevator and stared at the structure's workings: "It's like lace," he said. "Like metallic lace." The messenger bag slung over Gaultier's shoulder only enhanced his affect of childlike animation. As the elevator eased upward, the recesses of my mind bodied forth the name Willy Wonka.

Once in the twinkly and glass-drenched dining room, Gaultier, all courtliness and je-vous-en-prie, insisted that I have the seat with the best view. To dine elegantly at a great height over Paris is to render yourself at once rooted but vulnerable — you feel like a jewel on a tiara, but you're glad that the city is not known for its earthquakes. As we sipped pink Champagne and gazed down at a doll-size Paris, I thought, I could get very used to being Jean-Paul Gaultier.

I'll admit I hadn't expected to be at the Eiffel Tower with him. Weeks earlier, when I'd thought about the picks that I might get from the enfant terrible of French fashion and now the chief designer for Hermès, whose high-low aesthetic is a heady cocktail of exquisite tailoring and satiny, trusslike corseting, I imagined a smattering of after-hours S & M clubs, perhaps a to-the-trade-only boutique specializing in 18th-century military epaulets carved in sandalwood by a Formosan prince and his colony of lepers. But instead I received a list of 15 or so locations, some of which, like the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergère and the flea market at Clignancourt, could not accurately be described as recherché.

And so I made my way into Gaultier's Paris, hoping to be able to find the beating pulse behind the postcard cliché. The only hotel on Gaultier's list was the Pavillon de la Reine, where he had lived for two years during the 1990s. This vine-covered, 54-room mansion is separated from the lovely Place des Vosges in the Marais district by a hush-inducing private courtyard. Though I had not been able to secure a room, Laure Pertusier, the hotel's elegant, young director of sales gave me a tour. As we took in the hotel's cozy blend of 17th-century wooden beams and Louis XIII-style fireplaces and antiques, Pertusier told me that Pavillon's clientele was "not the Champs-Élysées crowd. Not so bling-bling."

She added, "Famous people who don't want to be recognized like the hotel. Otherwise they go to the Ritz or the Crillon." She showed me a picture of the Victor Hugo suite in which Gaultier had lived — it featured a lovely, monochromatic, Laura Ashley-type floral wallpaper — and told me, "We had the idée to change the name of the room to Gaultier." I said, "You'd have to change the wallpaper."

The Gaultier spirit is more readily identifiable at Paris's wax museum, Musée Grévin. As a child, Gaultier loved its Palais des Mirages — a heavily mirrored formal parlor with elaborate chandeliers. You stand cheek-by-jowl with a busload of tourists, whereupon the lights dim and a whirlwind of elephant braying and blinking lights transforms the room into a bumptious, cloudy fantasyscape; it's as if you're trapped inside Marie Antoinette's hypothalamus, but Marie has a head cold.

Downstairs I found some 300 wax figures. These included Jeanne d'Arc at the stake; a bloodied heretic tied to a board by the Inquisition; Henri IV, stabbed in a carriage; a skeleton in armor; and Jean-Paul Gaultier. I thought: the unstated theme of this museum is bondage.

The two Gaultier locales that I am the most eager to return to the next time I go to Paris are the Natural History Museum and, just across the street, the tearoom and the hammam of the mosque known as La Grande Mosquée de Paris. The former is divided into two huge, hangarlike buildings — the child-friendly Grande Galerie de l'Evolution, and the fabulously eerie Galeries de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie Comparée .

The evolution building is a soaring, 19th-century iron-framed, glass-roofed structure with dramatic pools of light; from these pools emerge taxidermied interlopers such as sharks and monkeys. But it's the stampede of fossils at the paleontology museum that most impressed; once you enter the main room, about 100 animal skeletons, including those of whales, yaks and hyenas, look as if they're about to flatten you. I loved it, and longed to lie down on the floor and have hyena hooves paillard me.

For 58 euros, I then had a massage and steam bath at the mosque's somewhat ramshackle and warrenlike hammam; those of my spirits that weren't lifted by this gentle regimen were done so by my subsequent inhalation of mint tea and baklava in the mosque's placid outdoor tearoom. While women in headdresses smoked a hookah next to me, and a flight of tiny birds pecked at my baklava crumbs, I sipped at my tea, and thought: In the future, I will acknowledge only things related to paleontology and baklava.

"ONE thing I don't like about Paris is Haussmann," Gaultier told me at Jules Verne, speaking of the city's master planner. "Which is sad because it is much of Paris. Galeries Lafayette: Non. I love the Île de la Cité, Montmartre. Voilà. I like places where it's like a little village. I'm very lucky because the place where I live — it's near Pigalle, it's called Rue Frochot — is an allée behind a gate. With a tree, like in the country."

Gaultier's candor about his home address had inspired me to tell him that I'd "seen" him at the wax museum. He had gasped: "Une catastrophe! We all look oar-ible! The only ones who look how they are in reality are the footballers."

I had opined that the unexpected legacy of a visit to the Grévin is that one is reminded how tiny the famous are. The 5-foot, 11-inch Gaultier had huffed, "That, too: totally wrong!"

Switching the topic to another venue of illusion — music halls — I'd asked Gaultier why he had included the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge on his list. He'd reminded me that as a child, he got into trouble when his teacher found him sketching costumes from a televised performance of the Folies Bergère; but when the teacher taped one of the sketches to Gaultier's back, the punishment backfired, and Gaultier became a schoolyard celebrity.

"Then I did a revue with my teddy bear at home," he said. "I pretended he had breasts. The first cone bra I did was for my teddy bear, not for Madonna. I had a strawberry box for the stage, and I put a lot of feathers on my teddy bear for the headdress. I used feathers from my cleaning brush for the finale."

Gaultier's penchant for glitter, nurtured by trips to Théâtre du Châtelet with his grandmother, would later exhibit itself when the 17-year-old mailed Pierre Cardin some sketches in 1969. Much to Gaultier's later embarrassment — "I mean, it was so tacky," he has said — he had souped up his sketches with gold foil paper and sequins. Cardin, charmed, gave Gaultier his first job in fashion.

The Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge are not what they used to be; Gaultier suggests instead that one go to the chic and highly choreographed striptease that is Crazy Horse. There, 12 semiclad woman, all with the same delicious measurements, caper and vamp to songs amid futuristic light projections and scrims.

"I adore. Very modern. I brought Madonna there two times, she loved it. Ah, oui. Go, go, go. It is beautiful and phantasmatic. For me, it's not erotique. It's extraordinary, phantasmatic, fetishistic."

The cinema has been an even greater influence than the music hall on Gaultier over the years (and, indeed, Gaultier did the costumes for "Bad Education," "The Fifth Element" and "The City of Lost Children," among others). He had included the movie theaters La Pagode and Le Grand Rex on his list of favorite places. The former, in the Seventh Arrondissement, is an antique pagoda built for the wife of the owner of Le Bon Marché department store in 1896, and was saved from demolition in the 1970s by a group headed by Louis Malle; the latter, in the Second Arrondissement, is the largest theater in Europe (around 2,750 seats), and often the site of rock concerts.

Gaultier told me that as a child growing up in the suburb of Arcueil, he'd seen a billboard for "Cleopatra" staring Elizabeth Taylor, then at the Rex. "She looked enormous, and in gold. I thought, 'Oh my God, I need to go there.' "

Though the Ducasse meal was extravagantly sauced and beautifully presented, I'd felt I needed to ask Gaultier about the other restaurant he'd mentioned on his list, Casa Olympe. Saying that it's near his house and "almost my canteen," he'd said that the restaurant was very small and unpretentious.

"The first time I went there, I chose one beautiful mushroom — a girolle, with garlic," he said. "Olympe brought it out in a pan, with eggs broken on it, like in the countryside. Fabulous. The next day I went with friends and said, 'I would like to have four girolles like yesterday,' and she said, 'Non.' She said, 'I went to the market today and the girolles were not beautiful, so I did not take them.' I loved that."

"You like to be slapped," I suggested. "In some way, yes," he said.

After dinner, taking the elevator down the tower, Gaultier had looked slightly panicked for a minute and said, "We didn't talk about Angélina." I thought, Angelina Jolie? But Music, the communications director, had explained, "It's a dessert."

"I can't believe you're talking about food after that meal," I'd said, referring to the fact that each of our desserts had had two parts and had been supplemented by a tray of petits fours, as well as plates bearing two kinds of marshmallows, one of them passion fruit.

"No. This is different," said the man who wanted to be a baker before he wanted to be a designer, and who once dressed models in brioches. Gaultier, it turns out, is a fan of the super-rich, tennis ball-sized confection known as a Mont Blanc — a ball of meringue is topped with Chantilly and a lot of wormy strands (or vermicelles) of chestnut paste, that is served at the tearoom, Angélina, next door to the Meurice hotel near the Louvre.

Indeed, much too early the next day, I tucked into one of these atom bombs, and was immediately flooded with the sensation of having foie gras-ed my digestive system. Looking across the room filled with maiden aunts and the occasional family from Akron, I thought, I am now officially an 89-year-old woman. Upon realizing that the Mont Blanc had caused me literally to break out into a sweat, I headed off for the Hermès store near the Madeleine and thence to Gaultier's own store on Rue Vivienne, spritzing myself with free cologne at both locations. I was smelling beyond my means.

Eager to reassert my masculinity, I went to Crazy Horse that evening. If my experiences seeing a show at Moulin Rouge and visiting the lobby of the Folies Bergère had brought me in touch with a colorful, if slightly dusty, kind of camp, Crazy Horse was something altogether different. The room is all black and red lacquer; each table has a glass Champagne bucket lighted by an illuminated marble slab beneath it. The effect is highly chic. The show is by turns beguiling and slightly silly, but always bubbly.

During the break, I read an alphabetized list of people who've patronized the establishment over the years; on seeing the unlikely names Simone de Beauvoir, Patricia Hearst, Randolph Churchill, Seiji Ozawa and Georges Pompidou, my eyes flitted to the letter R's, hoping to find Eleanor Roosevelt.

On my last day in Paris, I headed for the flea market at Clignancourt. Though a longtime favorite of Gaultier's, he'd told me he now does most of his flea market-going in London or New York, because in Paris he is recognized and followed around by style mavens who want to see what he's buying.

The flea market is immense, and, unlike American fleas, has a section — the Marché Paul-Bert — with high-end antiques and gorgeous home furnishings. As I walked around, I remembered what Gaultier had told me at the Eiffel Tower about shopping at flea markets: "The old fabrics are sometimes nicer than the new ones. One time I bought the jacket of a fat man, and I put that jacket on a girl because I liked the fabric. I took it in, and I rolled up the sleeves. I made a new silhouette."

Such, I thought, is the power of Gaultier's Paris. It may present itself as one easily recognizable, if not clichéd, thing — a fat man's jacket or a cabaret called Frou Frou — but, in fact, it's something else entirely. Something less expected. We come for the choreography, but we are delivered something more brutal.

EXTRAORDINARY, PHANTASMATIC AND FETISHISTIC

HOW TO GET THERE

Many major carriers, including Delta, Air France and Continental, fly from New York-area airports to Charles du Gaulle airport in Paris. Round-trip fares for travel in October start at around $775, according to a recent Web search.

WHERE TO STAY

The young fashion crowd, many of whom will be in Paris for the spring/summer Ready-to-Wear shows being held through Oct. 5, loves the 20-room Hôtel Amour (8, rue Navarin; Ninth Arrondisement; 33-1-4878-3180.) Each room is uniquely decorated on the theme of love by a different artist (e.g., Marc Newsom, Sophie Calle); the hotel's brasserie is open late and has a garden. Doubles from 140 euros, around $200 at $1.46 to the euro.

The phrase "design hotel" finds its most literal embodiment at Hôtel du Petit Moulin (29-31 rue du Poitou; Third; 33-1-4274-1010; www.hoteldupetitmoulin.com), conceived by Christian Lacroix. He has had a field day in each of the hotel's 17 rooms, with a pastiche of styles ranging from Baroque to pop. Rates are 190 to 350 euros. Breakfast, 15 euros.

Pavillon de la Reine is a 54-room hotel in the Marais (28, place des Vosges; Third; 33-1-4029-1919; www.pavillon-de-la-reine.com. Rooms start at 370 euros.

WHERE TO GO (THE GAULTIER TOUR)

Crazy Horse Paris, 12, avenue George V; Eighth; 33-1-4723-3232; www.lecrazyhorseparis.fr; The show, including a half bottle of Champagne, or two drinks, starts at 70 euros a person.

Bal du Moulin Rouge, 82, boulevard de Clichy; 18th, 33-1-5309-8282; www.moulin-rouge.com. The show begins at 9 p.m. and costs 99 euros, including a half-bottle of Champagne. An 11 p.m. show costs 89 euros.

La Grande Mosquée de Paris, 2 bis, place du Puits de l'Ermite; Fifth; 33-1-4535-9733; tea room: 33-1-4331-1814; www.mosquee-de-paris.org.

Grande Galerie de l'Evolution, 36, rue Geoffroy Saint Hilaire; Fifth; 33-1-4079-5479 or 33-1-4079-5601

Galeries de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie Comparée, 2, rue Bouffon; Fifth; 33-1-4079-5479; www.mnhn.fr. Admission is 8 euros.

Le Jules Verne, Eiffel Tower, second platform, Avenue Gustave Eiffel; Seventh; 33-1-4555-6144; www.lejulesverne-paris.com. Prix-fixe dinner 190 euros.

Casa Olympe, 48, rue St-Georges; Ninth; 33-1-4285-2601

Angélina, 226, rue de Rivoli; First; 33-1-4260-8200.

Hermès, 24, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré; Eighth; 33-1-4017-4717; wwwhermes.com.

Jean-Paul Gaultier boutique, 6, rue Vivienne; Second; 33-1-4286-0505; www.jeanpaulgaultier.com.

La Pagode cinema, 57, bis rue de Babylone; Seventh, 33-1-4555-4848.

Théâtre du Châtelet, 1, place du Châtelet; First; 33-1-4028-2840; wwwchatelet-theatrecom.

Musée Grévin, 10, boulevard Montmartre; Ninth; 33-1-4770-8505; www.musee-grevin.com. 19.50 euros.

Le Grand Rex cinema, 1, boulevard Poissonnière; Second; 33-1-4236-8393; www.legrandrex.com.

Marché aux Puces de Clignancourt; Avenue de la Porte de Clignancourt; 18th. Located in the north of Paris, this is most easily reached by cab. Make sure to visit the Paul-Bert and the Serpette markets.

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LA NUIT JOY DIVISION

L’hotel Particulier de Montmartre

L’hotel Particulier de Montmartre (The Montmartre townhouse) is not a hotel like any other. It is an exceptional mansion sheltering five suites all offering luxourious services, with contemporary design in a unique environment.

Totally atypical and nested in a secret passage in the heart of historical Montmartre, the hotel is surrounded by an unusual and luxuriant garden. Inspired and unusual, our hotel is original and luxurious, creative and extremely comfortable. This townhouse will offer you something no other hotel will: Suites like top of the range appartments in which you will feel at home or even better.

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Vive la difference

Vive la différence

Paris is so uniformly elegant that sometimes you just cry out for a building that breaks the mould. Here are four examples of contemporary architecture that catch the eye

• Matthew Tempest
• guardian.co.uk,
• Monday April 28 2008

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This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday April 28 2008. It was last updated at 11:49 on April 29 2008.

Modern architectural gem ... French Communist Party Headquarters. Kadu Niemeyer/Arcaid/Corbis

Baron Haussmann has a lot to answer for. While his mid-19th-century re-ordering of the French capital made Paris one of the most beautiful cities in the world, it can also be crushingly regular and uniform. No matter whether you're in the swanky 16th arrondissement, or the grimy 20th, the six storey, balconied blocks of apartments are astonishingly samey.

And despite the "Big Bang" of the Grand Projets in the 1980s – the pyramid in the centre of the Louvre, the hole-punched-out La Grande Arche in La Defense – things have been rather quiet of late in the French capital. While "starchitects" such as Foster, Rodgers and Hadid throw up buildings in London, Vienna and Berlin, Paris has somehow missed out on the all the fun.

But all is not lost – here are four buildings, all do-able within a day, three within walking distance of each other, that can match anything more cutting edge cities have to offer.

French Communist Party Headquarters

Possibly Paris' architectural gem, and best-kept secret, the national HQ for the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) was designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the centagenarian Brazilian who created the entire capital city of Brasilia from scratch.

This is one of his rare European works. Constructed between 1967 and 1972 in the then working-class district of the 19th arrondissement, it has a sinuous brown-glazed façade, and tell-tale concrete support pillars. The apparent upturned white saucer on the forecourt – reminiscent of Niemeyer's work for the parliament building in Brasilia – is the real give-away though. This is, in fact, the ceiling of the underground central debating chamber of the communist party; and probably one of the most magical and breathtaking internal spaces in Europe.

Inside, the walls are all curved. As are the sliding electric doors to gain entry. Light is diffused through thousands of steel squares that hang from the ceiling, while brown leather chairs all face the white concrete podium at the front. It is – to use a non-technical architectural expression – straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And best of all, it's free and open to the public.

The central chamber is not the only room worth seeing – the sloping concrete entrance foyer, the rooftop café and the other meeting rooms are all worth a look, but ask nicely as the party officials can be a bit paranoid – this is a working political party office, after all.

(For Niemeyer aficionados, he also designed the HQ of the communist party newspaper, L'Humanité, in the northern suburb of St Denis, and the Job Centre in Bobigny, north-east Paris).

· Parti Communiste Français, 2 Place Colonel Fabien, Metro Colonel Fabien, Open Mon-Fri 10am-4pm,

Cinémathèque Francaise

John Edward Linden/Arcaid/Corbis The Frank Gehry-designed new national film centre couldn't be further away, physically or design-wise, from its famous old base in the Trocadero, overlooking the Eiffel Tower (immortalised in the Bernardo Bertolucci film The Dreamers, it had a key role in the 1968 uprising 40 years ago).

The new building is in the Seine-side district of Bercy, in Paris' south-east, which mayor Bertrand Delanoë is pushing as a new urban "village". Gehry's design, finished in 1994 (and so three years before his more famous Bilbao Guggenheim), was actually for an entirely different client, the American Centre, and its conversion into a cinema and educational complex is far from perfect.
On the two street sides of the building, Gehry's limestone and zinc building is fairly unobtrusive, fitting with the height and context of the Haussmann street plan. On the two sides facing a park, however, Gehry's trademark "collapsing-cubist" style comes into play, albeit in a restrained way (Gehry compared it to a "dancer lifting her tutu").

Although the four-screen facility is state of the art for cinemaphiles, the out-of-the-way location (and lack of a bar!) make for something of a soulless experience for cinema-goers - although it's still exciting for architecture-buffs!

· Cinémathèque Francaise, 51 rue de Bercy, Metro Bercy. Open to the public midday-10pm. Closed Tuesdays

Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir

Tibor Bognar/Corbis Across the Parc de Bercy from the Cinémathèque Francaise is Paris' answer to London's Millennium Bridge – and a very graceful riposte it is, too.

At 300m long, the pedestrian and cyclist footbridge designed by Austrian Dietmar Feichtinger links the two banks of the Seine, but (unlike it's British equivalent) slopes off into an upper and lower deck, thus providing shelter in the centre of the river for walkers in the rain, and an eye-like aperture when seen in cross-section.

The materials are similar, wood and steel, and while the Paris bridge probably lacks London's "blade-of-steel" profile, it has a curvaceous, lolloping form to it, which, when crossing, feels a little like being on an old wooden rollercoaster.

Named after the French feminist thinker, and opened in 2006 by mayor Betrand Delanoë, the bridge's disembarkation on to the south bank deliberately pierces the new François Mitterrand Bibliothèque Nationale in a most phallic manner – no doubt de Beauvoir would have approved!

· Footbridge Simone de Beauvoir, Metros Bercy or Quai de la Gare. Open day and night

Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Peet Simard/Corbis President François Mitterrand commissioned the national library as his final "grand projet", after a difficult start this gigantic library is starting to show its quality.

Designed by French architect Dominique Perrault and opened in 1996, the building – four vertical towers shaped like open books, demarcating the corners of the site – is very conceptual and 1960s-esque, but the materials and quality are pure1990s.

Arriving from the de Beauvoir footbridge, one is confronted with a pyramid-like mountain of steps leading to an elevated plaza, bookended (pardon the pun) by the towers. Two long external escalators then take the reader down into a sunken garden, with a beautiful, if slightly mysterious, artificially planted forest (the reading rooms all look out on to the trees, giving them an incredible tranquillity in the middle of the city, but there is no public access). The towers themselves are simply for book storage, all the public space is subterranean.

While there are some impracticalities (it can be a long walk to the toilets from the reading room) and the towers had to have shutters added to protect the books from the light, the building is becoming recognised as a subtly crafted delight.

· Bibliothèque François Mitterand, open daily 9-7pm, except Sunday and Monday mornings. Metro François Mitterrand

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Pharoah Sanders at New Morning

Pharoah Sanders at New Morning: A member of John Coltrane’s bands and an influence on his sound, Sanders is one of the last living giants of free jazz. Like Ornette Coleman, who has praised him as “probably the best tenor player in the world,” a love of RnB comes through even in his wildest playing.

New Morning: 7-9 rue des Petites Ecuries, 75010 Paris, Métro: Château d’Eau. Jan. 25 and 26 at 8:30 p.m. €25.30. Link for tickets.

Pharoah Sanders plays “My Favorite Things,” a song closely associated with his late comrade John Coltrane.

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