After years without a store in Paris, Marks and Spencer brought one back last week. But the shop on the Champs-Elysées doesn't quite fit, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet outside the Marks & Spencer's on the Champs-Elysées Photo: ALASTAIR MILLER
Like every Parisienne, I was pretty chuffed when I first heard Marks &
Spencer were coming back to Paris. We'd never understood why they'd gone
away in the first place.
They used to have this wonderful huge store just opposite Galeries Lafayette, in the shopping haven segment of Boulevard Haussmann that's Paris's answer to Oxford Street.
After going through the gauntlet of stand-offish sales counsellors at the Galeries and Au Printemps – shiny places all about designer brands, It-bags, big-name scents and eye-wateringly expensive size zero dresses – M&S was a refuge with acres of sensible knickers, tactful knit black trousers that went with everything, and the Food Hall, which to us was the height of exoticism.
You didn't go to Marks and Sparks to make your normal French Sunday lunch; you went to stock up for a party, for Christmas dinner, for a kid's birthday, for a treat. (Buying your Christmas cake, not the very morning from your neighbouring boulangerie, but in September? In a tin? This was more outlandish than anything they could dream up in Papua-New Guinea.)
The calorie count, for once, went out the window. The streaky bacon sizzled gloriously with our farm oeufs Label Rouge. The tea was organic (which at the time wasn't readily available here) but the biscuits and cakes were seemingly entirely made of additives, processed sugar, and improbable chemical colourings approved by the Brussels Commission.
Our kids loved it. We loved it. My friend Nadalette's twin daughters religiously celebrated their birthdays, year after year, with the M&S caterpillar-shaped chocolate cake, gaily sprinkled with multicoloured M&M shavings. They cried when they were told they couldn't have it any longer.
You'd decorate a sophisticated dinner table with M&S toffees, wine gums and caramels in their wrappings. Ad agencies would serve M&S sandwiches during their brainstorming sessions – it was so décalé, so creative.
They used to have this wonderful huge store just opposite Galeries Lafayette, in the shopping haven segment of Boulevard Haussmann that's Paris's answer to Oxford Street.
After going through the gauntlet of stand-offish sales counsellors at the Galeries and Au Printemps – shiny places all about designer brands, It-bags, big-name scents and eye-wateringly expensive size zero dresses – M&S was a refuge with acres of sensible knickers, tactful knit black trousers that went with everything, and the Food Hall, which to us was the height of exoticism.
You didn't go to Marks and Sparks to make your normal French Sunday lunch; you went to stock up for a party, for Christmas dinner, for a kid's birthday, for a treat. (Buying your Christmas cake, not the very morning from your neighbouring boulangerie, but in September? In a tin? This was more outlandish than anything they could dream up in Papua-New Guinea.)
The calorie count, for once, went out the window. The streaky bacon sizzled gloriously with our farm oeufs Label Rouge. The tea was organic (which at the time wasn't readily available here) but the biscuits and cakes were seemingly entirely made of additives, processed sugar, and improbable chemical colourings approved by the Brussels Commission.
Our kids loved it. We loved it. My friend Nadalette's twin daughters religiously celebrated their birthdays, year after year, with the M&S caterpillar-shaped chocolate cake, gaily sprinkled with multicoloured M&M shavings. They cried when they were told they couldn't have it any longer.
You'd decorate a sophisticated dinner table with M&S toffees, wine gums and caramels in their wrappings. Ad agencies would serve M&S sandwiches during their brainstorming sessions – it was so décalé, so creative.
You'd never try to pass off a ready-made M&S dish as your own if you served it at dinner; on the contrary, you'd triumphantly announce "Ce soir, dîner anglais! Je suis allée le chercher spécialement chez Marks et Spencer!"
At the other end of the scale, in the Septième and Seixième Sud, to Madame Figaro-reading bourgeois families, whose traditional values include an Anglophilia preserved in a kind of ideal 1950s Sloaney aspic - a hazy mix of tartan skirts, cashmere twin-sets, good boarding schools for girls, Prince Charles and le five 'o clock - M&S was the Source, the Ur-provider of The Right Stuff, when they barely knew about Mulberry or Fortnum's.
They'd stock up on tea, scones, muffins, shortbread and chocolate mints before driving off to the country on Friday afternoon. They were the people who wrote messages of bleak despair on the visitors' book set up by the redundant employees of Boulevard Haussmann when M&S abandoned us in 2001.
And now M&S were back. Round the corner from me, in fact. On the Champs-Elysées. Where the Esprit shop closed in under two years. And the shop before that. And the newspaper whose offices are on the fifth floor, the ill-fated France-Soir, bought by yet another Russian oligarch, Sergei Pugachev, for his 25-year-old son, Alexander, now nearly in receivership. (The paper, not the son.)
Ever since they tore down the Sélect café yonks ago at the corner of rue de Berri, this has been something of a jinxed location.
I also wondered what your normal M&S shopper had in common with the chav zoo the Champs have become.
Every weekend there are about a quarter of a million people on the avenue, in hoodies, baggy jeans, short skirts or Adidas trainers (big Adidas store at number 22), dodging pickpockets, intrusive beggars, and football fans (huge Paris Saint-Germain football club store, at number 27, complete with the odd optimistic David Beckham picture) to queue up for the latest Tom Cruise movie, get a Big Mac (McDonald's at number 140) or buy sprayed-on jeggings for €9.95 at H&M (number 90).
I know my Champs-Elysées: I have lived in the area half my life; and was in fact born about 100 metres off what the Paris Tourism office likes to call "the most beautiful avenue in the world", a tag duly picked up by the M&S advance publicity.
Long before the actual opening last Thursday, you had to question how they would manage to fit a complete M&S into a store with the footprint of a family flat.
I dropped by on my way home on Friday. There was a long queue patiently waiting outside in the nippy late November evening, with bewildered middle-aged shoppers admitted one couple at a time.
Through the windows, you could see near-empty clothes aisles. You had to wonder if the queue – spotlighted by every daily newspaper after the opening, Blitz spirit, free tea and biscuits, so Anglais – wasn't a bit of publicity stunt.
When I put this to the store manager, she blanched and went all elf 'n safety on me. There Were Rules, she explained. Which were Essential. It got a bit like pulling teeth, until I managed to get out of her that only 420 people are allowed inside the 14,000 square ft store at any time.
Most of these were queuing again, inside, for the "food hall" – which is more like a food grotto, in the back, the average size of your local newsagent. The food was in fact added as a bit of an afterthought: originally, the store was supposed to establish M&S as a fashion retailer.
It was only after something of a spontaneous email campaign, once the rumours started in Paris, that some space was freed for it. It apparently already accounts for 35 per cent of sales this first week, instead of the projected 10 per cent. "There will be Simply Food outlets in Paris soon," the nice publicity woman told me.
It's very obvious they can't open fast enough for us. Harried shop executives were helping the assistants continuously restocking the shelves, as the oeufs écossais, the poulet à l'Indienne, the sandwiches au bacon and the scones got grabbed in quasi-wartime scenes.
When we came back on Saturday morning to take pictures, the queue was still there, but the inside of the store was fuller. It was still the food that attracted the most customers – very few seemed to have found their way to the lingerie department, occupying most of the entire first floor – but the women's clothes now also got some attention.
The choice, I have to say, is very stylish and covetable. There was a €25 Autograph gold lamé tank top that looked just as good as something nearly similar I recently bought from Max Mara at €200, scrumptious shearling gloves in buttery suede for €62, a cashmere hoodie for €120. Not cheap by any standards – my favourite Per Una £15 nightie was €32.50 – and certainly more than the 10 per cent mark up on London prices announced.
I went looking for some of my favourite M&S items, the five rolled up cotton knickers for £6, but they obviously had been deemed too down-market to cross the Channel. Ditto the opaque black tights at £8.
M&S Paris have gone chic on us. They should be a success – I espied on a whiteboard, as we were dropping the photographer's heavy kit bag in a back office, that 3,100 customers have visited it the last two days, each spending an average basket of €36.50.
If the objective was to create a buzz in advance of the normal-sized stores scheduled to open within the next two years outside central Paris, they probably have achieved that.
All the same, as I walked home past my local supermarket, whose manager was hugely miffed that M&S are allowed to open on Sundays while he cannot, I thought I couldn't see myself or anyone queuing for half an hour under the baleful eye of a basketball-player-sized security guard for a sandwich or a Chicken Tikka Masala.
As for the sensible knickers, I'll still get them in London.
© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2011
