London Fog Paris

Maybe it’s the rain, a week’s worth, pretty much non-stop, but Paris seems drab.  It rains in Paris in the winter and early spring and everyone knows that, so there’s nothing peculiar about this week or this year.  But something is getting to me, and I think I know what it is.  It’s the law. It is not an accident that the buildings in central Paris are all some shade of tan with grey roofs.  The sheet metal-and-lead or the slate roofs are required north of the Loire, with red tile, the Mediterranean style, to the south.  Each locality, with its plan local d’urbanisme, can set the rules for the exterior appearance, and the powers of Paris have come down hard—and evidently eternally—for tan. But if they have (and they really have), they have not been bullies about it.  Other cultures might feel a need to define tan or to understand a Kantian pure perception of “tanness” and then apply it without a quiver of second thought or a doubt about its rightness or an allowance for any exceptions: so many units of this tint and that, and voilà, you have tan, the one and only.  The Parisian powers have not done this. The result is what I think of as the London Fog version of tan (it could be the weather that conjures this image for me).  For more than 80 years, the color of the standard raincoat has been set by London Fog, a Baltimore company with a would-be British name.  The first raincoats they made (when the firm was called the Londontown Clothing Company) were tan.  When they caught on as fashionable apparel, first for men and only much later for women, they established tan as the right color—and even to this day black, dark green, or grey raincoats inspire in most right-thinking folk a certain deep queasiness, a sense that the person wearing the imper of dubious color is himself (these thoughts do not apply to women who are allowed a much broader and brighter palette) a bit dodgy and might just try to borrow money from you on very short acquaintance. But the various makers of raincoats, if originally aping London Fog, have gone their own way in their understanding of tan, the result being that a street full of men on a rainy day may be (and probably will be) a kaleidoscope of drabness, with the brightest coats being nearly white and the darkest nearly brown.  It is how men express their powerful masculine individuality and turn up their noses at the dictates of fashion. And so it seems to be with the owners of Parisian real estate.  A decree is a decree, but within its spectrum there is more than enough room to go absolutely wild with the idea of tan paint, stone, or concrete.  After all, beige, sand, taupe, and putty are all upstanding, individual concepts and identities—no possibility of confusing them.  And just as a fashionable man might have a moleskin raincoat and another the color of birch and wear them depending on the rest of his outfit or mood, so the owner of several buildings might do the same, depending on the arrondisement, the angle of the sun on the building on the day of the autumnal equinox, or the adjacent buildings. And yet despite this much too subtle distinction, there is something lively about the buildings of Paris.  Rainy days do little for any cities I know: a bright red door in China, or at least the nearby Chinatown, is not especially cheery on a rainy day, overcast days can make turquoise and orange trim look dirty, and glass-and-steel skyscrapers look themselves like curtains of rain when it rains on them. Paris’s London Fog tans weather the weather better than anything else I know.  When the sun is shining, they seem to glow, picking up and increasing light somehow rather than just reflecting it.  The glow is warm and welcoming. And this is the best. Imagine the color and heat of the busy streets of Paris, the brilliant store fronts, the people dressed (when it’s not raining) in whatever colors suit them.  Paris is a bazaar—and the buildings have the good manners to remember they are the backdrop, the sets, the scenery for the daily drama, or farce, of the streets.  The various shades of tan show off the flower boxes people hang on their balconies come spring and set off those chic people dressed all in black to great and stylish advantage.  The buildings of Paris are not drab, not really.  They just know better than to upstage the life of the city. © Joseph Lestrange