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Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
When a Nasty Habit Is Part of Your National Identity
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. On my first weekend living in Paris, I decided I had to learn how to smoke, and quickly. I sat in the dismal studio apartment I shared with a roommate and lit up Gauloise after Gauloise until my face turned a shade of chartreuse. I was an exchange student in the mid-'90s, and this was the intensity I applied to most activities that held the possibility of transforming me into the person I wanted to be. Parisians smoked, and if I aspired to be a Parisian, which I desperately did, then I would smoke. By the end of the weekend, I could sit in a café with a cigarette dangling from my lips like a shorter, swarthier, coughier Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. When I learned recently that France will soon ban smoking outside—banishing it from under lonely streetlamps and on park benches, where a last puff could be shared between lovers—it seemed that some essential part of French national identity was ending. If you are forbidden from lighting up in almost every social situation, then smoking, mon ami, is effectively illegal. Russians have their vodka. Americans have their McDonald's and AR-15s. Japanese have a concept called karoshi, which apparently means 'working so hard that you die.' Every self-respecting nation has a fatal habit that helps define it—a guilty pleasure its citizens indulge in despite the scoffing of foreigners, and because doing so almost proves that their identity is worth dying for. The French—Sartre and Bardot and Gainsbourg and Houellebecq—have their smoking. 'I drank the coffee, and then I wanted a cigarette,' thinks Meursault, the antihero of Albert Camus' novel The Stranger and, after the Little Prince, likely the first French person in literature many students of the country's language will encounter. 'But I wasn't sure if I should smoke, under the circumstances, in Mother's presence'—he's sitting vigil over her dead body. 'I thought it over; really, it didn't seem to matter, so I offered the keeper a cigarette, and we both smoked.' [Read: The allure of smoking rises again] Before I go much further, let me be clear: Cigarettes will kill you. I'm old enough to remember a 13-hour flight during which I experienced the slow asphyxiation of being stuck in the smoking section. The world does occasionally improve, and fewer people dying of lung cancer is certainly one of the ways. But nostalgia does not come with health warnings. What was most alluring about cigarettes, besides the notion—okay, the fact—that I looked cooler holding one casually between two fingers, was the quality of time that opened up in the space of a smoke. It's been a while—maybe 20 years—since I've touched a cigarette, but what I still remember, more than the nicotine, is the sensation of pressing 'Pause.' For the few minutes it took a cigarette to become ash, I had nothing to do but enjoy the silence or the chat I was having outside a bar. These moments of idle nothingness—or acute presence—are a source of nostalgia for me in part because they belong to the aimlessness of youth, and because our phones have since become a constant portal to somewhere else. But they also make me wistful because this sense of time out of time feels so very French. Think of the languidness of a French meal, with its aperitif, entrée, plat, fromage, dessert, café. Or the nation's incredible shrinking workweek—now 35 hours, by law—in favor of more leisure time for love affairs and philosophical debates. Or the month of August, when no one is around. Or strikes, when everything stops. Or the years it takes to make good cheese and wine. Or that glorious description of the concept underlying the country's internet-privacy laws: 'the right to be forgotten.' This whole cultural preference seemed to have been hand-rolled into every cigarette. Smoking was like a type of punctuation—life's em dash—forcing me to slow down, and putting everything else in relief. Sartre once contemplated quitting (really), but he couldn't bear what that would do to the rest of his existence. 'I used to smoke at the theater, in the morning while working, in the evening after dinner, and it seemed to me that in giving up smoking I was going to strip the theater of its interest, the evening meal of its savor, the morning work of its fresh animation,' he wrote in Being and Nothingness. 'Whatever unexpected happening was going to meet my eye, it seemed to me that it was fundamentally impoverished from the moment that I could not welcome it while smoking.' [Read: An innocent abroad in Mark Twain's Paris] This is an eloquent description of a severe addiction. Smoking is a disgusting habit, and I don't miss it, not really. But I do worry a bit about France. What Sartre was articulating—a life of enjoyment, of savoring those evening meals and the theater and mornings spent lost in thought—can be hard to come by in our world. Did smoking help those moments materialize out of our otherwise hectic lives? Maybe. For the French, I always sensed that smoking, even when its dangers were well known, was almost an illustration of existentialism. The act seemed in some way to distill the central idea of that most French of philosophies: True freedom is terrifying because it means taking responsibility for every single choice we make. But not taking responsibility is worse—it is to live in bad faith. Smoking, that controlled flirtation with death, is the perfect test of this proposition. You know it's bad for you; you do it anyway, fully aware that you are taking your fate in your own hands. Maybe this is also why the cigarette has always signified rebellion—especially for women living in cultures bent on circumscribing their choices. Even as our cultural mores and our health standards evolve, the cigarette retains this symbolic power. A blueberry-flavored vape (currently exempt from the new law) could never carry all this meaning. That Godard-and-Truffaut version of France that I'm pining for was obviously already a thing of the past even when I lived there. And that past is even further in the past now. A little less than a quarter of the country's population takes a drag every day. And young French people, thankfully, are not buying my romanticism—the trend line curves downward more dramatically for them. As for the new law, which carries a 135-euro fine, a survey of French people (conducted, I'm imagining, over zinc countertops and demitasses) found that 78 percent said they were happy to be done with cigarettes in public places. Maybe they're tired of the 2 billion butts that collect on the streets of Paris every year. That might convince me. These days, when I'm feeling sentimental, instead of smoking, I'll just mainline a film from the New Wave era, such as Godard's existentialist drama Vivre sa vie. Anna Karina is there, playing Nana, a woman who leaves her husband and becomes a sex worker (strangely, a common storyline in French movies of the period). She is sitting in a café, puffing away. 'I think we're always responsible for our actions,' she says. 'We're free.' Free to do any number of things, she says, dreamily invoking the Sartrean credo as smoke curls around her black bob. She is free to close her eyes, to be unhappy. And she takes responsibility for this. 'I smoke a cigarette,' she says, a mischievous smile on her lips. 'I'm responsible.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Is France Even France Without Cigarettes?
On my first weekend living in Paris, I decided I had to learn how to smoke, and quickly. I sat in the dismal studio apartment I shared with a roommate and lit up Gauloise after Gauloise until my face turned a shade of chartreuse. I was an exchange student in the mid-'90s, and this was the intensity I applied to most activities that held the possibility of transforming me into the person I wanted to be. Parisians smoked, and if I aspired to be a Parisian, which I desperately did, then I would smoke. By the end of the weekend, I could sit in a café with a cigarette dangling from my lips like a shorter, swarthier, coughier Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless. When I learned recently that France will soon ban smoking outside —banishing it from under lonely streetlamps and on park benches, where a last puff could be shared between lovers—it seemed that some essential part of French national identity was ending. If you are forbidden from lighting up in almost every social situation, then smoking, mon ami, is effectively illegal. Russians have their vodka. Americans have their McDonald's and AR-15s. Japanese have a concept called karoshi, which apparently means 'working so hard that you die.' Every self-respecting nation has a fatal habit that helps define it—a guilty pleasure its citizens indulge in despite the scoffing of foreigners, and because doing so almost proves that their identity is worth dying for. The French—Sartre and Bardot and Gainsbourg and Houellebecq —have their smoking. 'I drank the coffee, and then I wanted a cigarette,' thinks Meursault, the antihero of Albert Camus ' novel The Stranger and, after the Little Prince, likely the first French person in literature many students of the country's language will encounter. 'But I wasn't sure if I should smoke, under the circumstances, in Mother's presence'—he's sitting vigil over her dead body. 'I thought it over; really, it didn't seem to matter, so I offered the keeper a cigarette, and we both smoked.' Before I go much further, let me be clear: Cigarettes will kill you. I'm old enough to remember a 13-hour flight during which I experienced the slow asphyxiation of being stuck in the smoking section. The world does occasionally improve, and fewer people dying of lung cancer is certainly one of the ways. But nostalgia does not come with health warnings. What was most alluring about cigarettes, besides the notion—okay, the fact—that I looked cooler holding one casually between two fingers, was the quality of time that opened up in the space of a smoke. It's been a while—maybe 20 years—since I've touched a cigarette, but what I still remember, more than the nicotine, is the sensation of pressing 'Pause.' For the few minutes it took a cigarette to become ash, I had nothing to do but enjoy the silence or the chat I was having outside a bar. These moments of idle nothingness—or acute presence—are a source of nostalgia for me in part because they belong to the aimlessness of youth, and because our phones have since become a constant portal to somewhere else. But they also make me wistful because this sense of time out of time feels so very French. Think of the languidness of a French meal, with its aperitif, entrée, plat, fromage, dessert, café. Or the nation's incredible shrinking workweek—now 35 hours, by law—in favor of more leisure time for love affairs and philosophical debates. Or the month of August, when no one is around. Or strikes, when everything stops. Or the years it takes to make good cheese and wine. Or that glorious description of the concept underlying the country's internet-privacy laws: ' the right to be forgotten.' This whole cultural preference seemed to have been hand-rolled into every cigarette. Smoking was like a type of punctuation—life's em dash—forcing me to slow down, and putting everything else in relief. Sartre once contemplated quitting (really), but he couldn't bear what that would do to the rest of his existence. 'I used to smoke at the theater, in the morning while working, in the evening after dinner, and it seemed to me that in giving up smoking I was going to strip the theater of its interest, the evening meal of its savor, the morning work of its fresh animation,' he wrote in Being and Nothingness. 'Whatever unexpected happening was going to meet my eye, it seemed to me that it was fundamentally impoverished from the moment that I could not welcome it while smoking.' This is an eloquent description of a severe addiction. Smoking is a disgusting habit, and I don't miss it, not really. But I do worry a bit about France. What Sartre was articulating—a life of enjoyment, of savoring those evening meals and the theater and mornings spent lost in thought—can be hard to come by in our world. Did smoking help those moments materialize out of our otherwise hectic lives? Maybe. For the French, I always sensed that smoking, even when its dangers were well known, was almost an illustration of existentialism. The act seemed in some way to distill the central idea of that most French of philosophies: True freedom is terrifying because it means taking responsibility for every single choice we make. But not taking responsibility is worse—it is to live in bad faith. Smoking, that controlled flirtation with death, is the perfect test of this proposition. You know it's bad for you; you do it anyway, fully aware that you are taking your fate in your own hands. Maybe this is also why the cigarette has always signified rebellion—especially for women living in cultures bent on circumscribing their choices. Even as our cultural mores and our health standards evolve, the cigarette retains this symbolic power. A blueberry-flavored vape (currently exempt from the new law) could never carry all this meaning. That Godard-and-Truffaut version of France that I'm pining for was obviously already a thing of the past even when I lived there. And that past is even further in the past now. A little less than a quarter of the country's population takes a drag every day. And young French people, thankfully, are not buying my romanticism—the trend line curves downward more dramatically for them. As for the new law, which carries a 135-euro fine, a survey of French people (conducted, I'm imagining, over zinc countertops and demitasses) found that 78 percent said they were happy to be done with cigarettes in public places. Maybe they're tired of the 2 billion butts that collect on the streets of Paris every year. That might convince me. These days, when I'm feeling sentimental, instead of smoking, I'll just mainline a film from the New Wave era, such as Godard's existentialist drama Vivre sa vie. Anna Karina is there, playing Nana, a woman who leaves her husband and becomes a sex worker (strangely, a common storyline in French movies of the period). She is sitting in a café, puffing away. 'I think we're always responsible for our actions,' she says. 'We're free.' Free to do any number of things, she says, dreamily invoking the Sartrean credo as smoke curls around her black bob. She is free to close her eyes, to be unhappy. And she takes responsibility for this. 'I smoke a cigarette,' she says, a mischievous smile on her lips. 'I'm responsible.'
New York Times
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Should Men Wear White Jeans?
You clearly have not been watching the back catalog of French New Wave movies. Onscreen, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon are practically poster boys for men in white jeans, especially on the Riviera. Which may be why, despite the fact that white denim was introduced by Lee in the 1960s as part of its Lee Westerner collection (the material used was officially called 'white cotton satin') and made appearances in the much celebrated 1990s collections of Helmut Lang and the wardrobe of the British graphic designer Peter Saville, it has become a perennial style statement among French and Italian men. I know at least three Frenchmen in fashion who have made white jeans their personal signature: the photographer Gilles Bensimon, the Purple magazine founder Olivier Zahm and the showroom impresario Christophe Desmaison, who told me he wears white jeans pretty much '365 days a year.' When I asked him why, he said: 'They look equally good with a dress shirt, blazer and dress shoes as a polo and boat shoes. They are the most versatile basic in my wardrobe — a bit casual, yet elegant and certainly more distinctive than khakis.' By the way, he gets his jeans at Polo Ralph Lauren but also recommends Todd Snyder, Sid Mashburn and Levi's 501s. This brings up an issue regarding white jeans, however. As much as any other single item in a man's wardrobe, they flirt with stereotype. National and otherwise. Jacob Gallagher, our men's wear reporter, called white jeans 'the pants equivalent of a shiny going-out top. Something that can come off as too intentional, too contrived, too forced caszh.' 'The exception to this are the French,' he said. 'In Paris you see guys wear them without care or thought. This is a self-fulfilling cycle. Because white jeans are a more quotidian style for men in France, they don't come off as a contrivance. But for American men, they too easily make you look like you're 'doing a thing,' which is perhaps the ultimate men's wear no-no.' The exception to this rule is, of course, the annual White Party given by the Fanatics founder Michael Rubin, where everyone has to wear white and white jeans proliferate; and the yacht club, where white pants, including jeans, are part of the shtick. (Indeed, white jeans are the only jeans allowed in the club houses of many yacht clubs.) But white pants bring with them a host of associations and preconceptions about elitism, privilege and, in the case of boating, retrograde Boston Brahmin values, that anyone considering a pair of white jeans may want to consider. (All of this is less true for women, who seem to benefit from the halo effect of white gloves and wedding dresses.) Such are the risks, anyway. As for the benefits, Tonne Goodman, Vogue's sustainability editor and a woman known for her white jeans chic, said: 'Given the reality of atypical weather, and the cultural advocacy for gender equality, men can certainly wear white jeans, not only in the summer (before Labor Day) but all year round. The crispness elevates almost any look, provided they are paired with classic pieces, like a blazer.' Whatever you decide, remember there's only one universal rule when it comes to white jeans: Cleanliness is next to, if not godliness, pretty much everything else. Your Style Questions, Answered Every week on Open Thread, Vanessa will answer a reader's fashion-related question, which you can send to her anytime via email or Twitter. Questions are edited and condensed.
