This is an edited excerpt of my conversation with for the Back Row podcast. You can watch or listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Follow the show so you don’t miss a single episode. If you like the pod, please leave a rating and a review, which takes ten seconds and really helps other people find this independent show.
If you’re like me, you spent a chunk of your holiday break watching Emily in Paris’s fifth season. When it premiered in 2020, with the bare bones premise that a girl who lived in Chicago marketing IBS drugs had to move to Paris to help her firm’s luxury-focused office, the Guardian called it “an excruciating exorcism of French clichés.” Parisians were crying “ridicule” (translation: ridiculous) in the New York Times. But by 2022, Iva Dixit wrote for The New York Times Magazine that “despite its utter frictionlessness or perhaps because of it, the compulsively hate-watchable show became a phenomenon.”
And so here we are, Emily is still in Paris (though in season five she’s temporarily in that internationally recognized booming advertising hub of… Rome). The day season five dropped, a friend who initially convinced me to watch the show texted me a photo of Sylvie sashaying across his screen, wrists perma-flexed as usual, to commend “the pleasure of this beautiful trash.” I’m also addicted to it, though I think the already thin premise is nearly worn through, and I’d be surprised if the writers get more than a sixth season out of this material. The clothes — ridiculous as ever — continue to do the heavy lifting.
At its core, I’d argue the show succeeds because it presents a fantasy lots of Americans have of moving to Paris and being swept up in a glamorous, romantic, fashionable life. I’ll publish a season five fashion review in Back Row soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to talk to someone who actually lived this fantasy: my friend, , veteran fashion journalist and New York Times bestselling author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. After starting a modeling career in Philadelphia as a teenager, Dana moved to Paris when she was 18 to earn money to pay for college. She returned to the U.S. to attend American University in Washington, D.C., where she studied political science and journalism before getting a job as a reporter at the Washington Post. In the podcast, she talked about how Emily in Paris has impacted Paris, what the show fails to reveal about actual French style, and much more.
You’ve lived in Paris for decades and you’re American. So you kind of are “Emily in Paris.” How did you end up moving to Paris? And did you speak French?
I’d studied French from sixth grade to [high school] graduation. When I landed here and I actually asked somebody a question like, “How do you get to this?” And they told me, I stood there stunned, not understanding a thing they said. It took about a week to hear people in conversation.
I moved to Paris when I was 18 because I was a model, which is how I got into the habit of not wearing makeup. When you went on go-sees [job auditions], you were told not to wear makeup because they wanted to see what your face looks like. And when you went to jobs, you went with a clean face because they’re going to put makeup on you. So I never wore makeup and I haven’t since.
I learned how to be French. The very first day, my agent took me out shopping and made me buy a pair of low-heeled pumps, he said, because it makes your legs look longer than they are without looking like you’re wearing heels. And he said, “Keep your nails clean and short, keep your hair simple — tie it back loosely. Stand up straight. If you want to be French, do all those things and you’re already halfway there.”
And you needed to be French to… appeal to French people?
Because you’re going to see French editors who love your American look, but want you to fit in.
My first two gigs were for Elle magazine. My third gig was for a really cool magazine called Le Jardin des Modes. I was booked because I looked like Jane Birkin. It was a story about young women models who looked like Paris icons. Jane Birkin, of course, was not French. She was British, and I’m like 98% British Isles. There was somebody who looked like Anouk Aimée. There was somebody who looked like Catherine Deneuve.
Birkin picked up French stuff, but kept her Englishness. She had savoir faire, she had chic, but it wasn’t bougie French chic. She had a gentle boho swinging sixties cool. The French are chic. The French are elegant. The one thing Parisian women are not is cool. Cool is American and British. Think about French icons like Brigitte Bardot. They’re not looking cool. They’re looking elegant. They’re looking beautiful. They’re looking very put-together. Jane had the cool going in a big way.
Did you notice anything else about the differences in style between Americans and the French?
French women at the time did not wear blue jeans. As models, we were never allowed to wear blue jeans on go-sees because, as my agent would say, “They make you look big,” which is a polite way of saying “fat.”
That’s some bullshit.
We had our jeans tailored, so they did look good. There was the French version of jeans, which came while I was here. That’s when stone-washing and acid washing and all that terrible stuff for the planet started. But also, those little stove pipe jeans, which were super-French. They were basically capri pants, but skinny and cropped and low. You had to peel them off you. This was before there was stretch in jeans. French women would wear those in denim or black twill with the low heels with a pointy toe, and then they’d cinch them with a baggy little tank top or a tight little sweater. Or with a men’s jacket. Basically the look that Emmanuelle Alt still wears today, that was quintessentially 1983’s Paris.
I like her style.
That was a look. I quickly learned that if you had five or six basic pieces, you could go really far. If you had the oversized man’s jacket that you could wear with a shirt or without a shirt, a simple shift dress in navy, beige or black — basically Coco Chanel’s black dress — St. Laurent’s tuxedo for women like Betty Catroux wears. A really good pair of blue jeans, despite what my agent said — [Levi’s] 501s, tailored to fit you. I kept them and my daughter’s wearing them. And a couple scarves and a big men’s-style overcoat. You could go really far. That’s really all you need. Colors basically are neutrals like navy, taupe, black, and white, and then you zhuzh it up with scarves.
Speaking of scarves and your daughter, New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman recently did a column about how to wear scarves like a French woman, snd she talked to you and your daughter Lucie, who is so cool and so stylish.
She tries to fix me still. I’ve lived here three quarters of my life and she’s like, “No, mama, let me do it for you.“ And she fixes my scarf or she’ll do my hair for me.
She told Vanessa, regarding scarves, “You just know how to do it… You start when you’re a kid and mimic your grandmother or aunt. You just put a scarf on, like putting socks on. It’s not something you think about. It’s in your wardrobe vocabulary.”
She also said, “I would never wrap it around my neck more than once, unless it’s really cold out, because then you look like you are wearing an airplane pillow.” Does she wear a scarf every day?
Every day. She has a big one, she has small ones, she has some for her hair. She has the shawly ones. She probably has 40 of them.
When I’ve seen you in person, which unfortunately isn’t that much because there’s an ocean between us, I don’t feel like I’ve seen you wearing many scarves.
I like the shawls that Hermès makes that are big, in silk and cashmere. I use them for everything. I wear it as a shawl when it’s chilly out. I always have one with me on a trip. If we’re in Turkey and we’re going into a mosque, it’s on my head and we’re good to go in the mosque. If I’m really tired, I roll it up in a ball, use it as a pillow. I’ll use it as a blanket. It goes with me everywhere. I have about five or six of those. The first one I bought the day that Deluxe made the New York Times bestseller list.
If people want to Frenchify their style, what are the ingredients if you had to distill it to a formula?
Definitely a scarf. And you don’t need to get the carré that goes around your neck. I don’t wear them much because I find them a bit claustrophobic. There are so many YouTube and TikToks you can watch and learn how to tie them. That will take you far. Get one really beautiful one from, say, Hermès, but it doesn’t have to be Hermès, but the big kind, 140 cm.
the other thing you need to spend money on is shoes. Not crazy, teetering high heels. Just good shoes. Get good little [Chelsea boot] with a sensible heel that you can trot around in. In the end, shoes and scarves, and you’re good to go.
What about bags?
I don’t carry a bag. It goes back to writing Deluxe. I spent a whole chapter on handbags and by the end of it, I was like, “God, I never want to see another handbag again.”
Where do you put your stuff? What do you go out with?
My phone and my keys. Everything’s in my phone. I actually have a really nice winter coat that’s a gentleman’s coat that I bought at Connolly. It has the inside pockets.
What is the French attitude toward face lifts? I feel like plastic surgery has just been so normalized, at least in the U.S.
If they do, it’s small. You’re not trying to change what you look like. You’re not getting a radical Kris Jenner look where you just shave 40 years off your life. You’re doing a little thing that sort of takes you from 70 back down to 55. Because in France, we like women. We don’t all want to look like girls. And women have lines, they have character. We want to look like grown-up women. We don’t want to look 22.
You watched Emily in Paris for the first time, from the very beginning, where we see Emily move from Chicago.
I had avoided it because I saw the impact it was having on Paris. All these women started walking around my neighborhood wearing fuchsia berets. And then every time we go to the Café de Flore, there were all these women in their berets doing selfies. In one day, I went out for a run in the Luxembourg Gardens and there were beret women doing pictures. And then I was walking home on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and there were women in berets doing pictures. And then I went across the river and they were wearing berets and doing selfies.
And this corresponded with the rise of the show?
Absolutely. Each time the show comes back, there they are.
