After Exuberance, Against Chic
By Arley Sakai
Have I swapped all exuberance for the pursuit of chic?
— dream journal entry, July 2024
There was no light in the sky when I arrived in Paris. Pewter-grey September Tuesday, the start of Fashion Week. I had my 2010 Prius’s worth in cash in my checking account and a pair of broken-in Doc Martens to last me the next three months of travel. My goal was to touch the city, to have it enrobe me.
That first afternoon, I flopped onto an air mattress in Jane’s dining room to take a minute-long nap before throwing on a bedazzled jean jacket for a launch event somewhere in the third arrondissement. We held complimentary champagne flutes while orbiting around an art installation, the displayed pieces reminiscent of Balenciaga Power Rangers. In the high fashion spirit, the crowd was shamelessly self-selecting—gorgeous and conspicuously conscious of it. Imagine a dim room full of expensive black hoodies; then imagine the most perfect bodies inside them. How could anyone feel good about themself inside this warehouse? I got drunk. But no centiliters of wine could make me as interesting as the American-trash pastiche on my back. Double denim with a faux fur collar and a cheetah print cardigan—an ensemble to deflect the streamlined sleekness of the scene.
Any inclination to swim against the current in Paris felt contrary to a deep, culturally ingrained reverence for the concept of chic. American fashion magazines have co-opted the word “chic” for their own culture-importing agendas as nothing more than a vague descriptor for stylishness—particularly as it refers to refinement. The word itself comes from 17th century chicanerie, meaning, in part, “trickery,” but is just gibberish otherwise. A chic ethos can be distilled to the fashionista cliché: always take one thing off before you leave the house. Reduction = refinement. In other words (or just one), it’s chic to say “no.”
White fatigues, beige petticoats, mariner shirts—the French wardrobe leverages the enduring grace of understatement. As I sojourned in Paris, I thought it best to give credence to chic as I encountered it in its platonic state. This led to days of wandering around La Republique feeling oppressed by the militant agenda of model chicness, which is to say, I fell in line with their status quo. Black blazer, black slacks, black boots. I put on a shadow thinking it would do me some good. Severity registered in my reflection, coalescing with a strange social anxiety I hadn’t previously experienced. It was like a veil. My initial inertia in Paris subsided. Restlessness rustled inside.
The only friend I made by the end of my first month in Paris was a guy I started to see, Henri. He was rich and kind, but slightly detached from the world. He was just fired from his Dior marketing job and wasted whole mornings on Instagram reels. After spending days together in his apartment, I started to go crazy, triggered by the sight of his stained Sandro cashmere sweater. So I installed distance in my evenings. I drank and took walks alone, not that Henri even wanted to go out.
One night on a walk near the Louvre, I noticed two friends wearing matching orange pants. The color shocked me. Not having anywhere to be, I trailed them for a few blocks until they veered into an apartment building, taking a picture of them just before they were gone. The next morning, I revisited the photo. The bright legs read like four fortune strips. I wondered if just a little more context would confirm their significance.
By early October, loneliness started to slip in, but I couldn’t enunciate the word. Maybe it was just the weather heading for the worse, a week of sleet projected ahead. Maybe it was the nightmares I was having, such as Henri eating my liver à la Prometheus. Fear made me buy a train ticket for the next morning. “Andrew, I miss you already.” Henri wouldn’t even say my name. It was pouring as I left his apartment for Gare Saint-Lazare. I dried off in the stuffy train car, which promised to take me away from Paris for a while.
Chic was a distant concept in Spain. No one was afraid of color in Barcelona, except maybe my shoegazer friend who put me up in his AirBnB for the week. He took off his black Cocteau Twins t-shirt as we approached the beach. I did the same. The sun was delicious and I felt stupid with consuming it. Next thing I was drinking Diet Pepsi by the pier in Valencia, thinking about a line Etel Adnan wrote, while looking out from the same shore: “places act upon the mind by means of their light.” A sudden shift in the atmosphere brought a lightning storm, then a heavy downpour, then a flood. I was pushed out to Portugal. From my bunk in a Lisbon hostel, I couldn’t deny that the rain was following my every move. And that I was in fact, very lonely.
An overnight bus brought me to Berlin in late November. Everyone I encountered looked haggard and underslept—even the merchant at a vintage shop near the crumbly apartment in Kreuzberg where I was couchsurfing. The small, subterranean store was cluttered with things I wanted and couldn’t afford. But just as I turned to leave, my eye caught something folded on the bottom rung of a stepping ladder: a pair of Diesel corduroys from the 70s. Orange as oranges. I purchase them instantly, telling the merchant how rare a magnetic color can be, especially in the cities.
“Where were you looking?” he asked slowly. “Not here, I imagine. No one wears bright things here.” I mentioned the chic city, its shadows. “People are so sad,” he went on. “They don’t even know it, but it shows in their style. I remember when people dressed better, more intentionally. There was nothing else to demonstrate their taste. Phones do the explaining now, but we forget it’s just a flat surface. We’re forgetting texture and color, spontaneity. And risk.”
“We’re forgetting what we don’t know or have but what we instinctively want to see.” Like a dream, I thought.
Visiting places outside of Paris further emphasized its aesthetic monotony as I came back. How the city’s inhabitants dressed as rearticulations of the environment: sleek as limestone, slim as alleys, stoic as the Seine. Threads all grey and subdued like the perpetual stratus cloud above. Places act upon the mind by means of their light. Within a few days, that anxiety I didn’t understand returned. Finding friends or dates was a full-time gig in rejections. My room high in the nineteenth arrondissement turned into a cloister. “So, this is death,” I whispered to the molting pillow.
Of course people here are so sad. Paris belongs to a diminishing planet just as well. A coping strategy must ensue. I slept a lot.
Dreams about a wild jungle came to me; about flying foxes, how their pups will die if they aren’t swaddled enough before maturation; about their role as pollinators for blossoming eucalyptuses and other Australian plants. This brought me to reading about anthropologist Deborah Bird-Rose’s notion of “exuberance”—an inherent vibrance belonging to the flowering plants that draws the orange-breasted Pteropus to their pinwheel lips for an interspecific kiss, transporting pollen on their noses across bushes so they may smooch new blooms into being. Bird-Rose says this is the species’ way of saying “yes!” to each other, to life itself. By contrast, chic roots itself in subtlety, relying ultimately on an aesthetic of concealment. It wants us to say “no.” Chic carries an appeal to restraint, an adherence to a restrictive mentality.
Paris suggested a shadow and made me sick. I needed a remedial substance, something to summon the light this city lacked. I sought exuberance.
During my last month in Paris, I began to wear my orange pants with a matching orange scarf nearly every day. I stopped thinking about the warehouse of my non-belonging. Possible jungles preoccupied my mind, even as the days got grayer, darker. Soon enough it was too cold to even think about wearing my black blazer. I swapped it with a vermillion mohair jumper I found for 20 euros, which I would’ve never picked up three months ago.
My friend emailed me saying that it’s perverse how much you feel like you belong to a place just before leaving it. She was right—my last week in Paris was the best to date. In shades of orange I went out to readings, museums, clubs. I stayed up until 3am every night. I rolled a cigarette for a girl at a jazz bar who then invited me to a drag queen’s birthday party a few days later. That Saturday, I showed up in a carnelian-covered tank, shimmering in the flash photos. Boys in auburn wigs took to me. I blushed like eucalyptus and drank until blissed, heavy, asleep.
I woke up two days later in Southern California, a bed in my mother’s house below the Ojai Valley mountains. By then, Paris had folded into a difficult memory—something I wanted to know and have but didn’t actually see. Like a dream in reverse, I thought in bed. The sun was still rising, the glow like the fabric over my knees. Like a fortune I once read, returning to me again.