Living the dream

There’s a scene I think about a lot from Keeping Up Appearances. Hyacinth is dragging Richard to an auction at a stately home. He’s worried that she will overspend. He accuses her of thinking that just because an item once belonged to an aristocrat, it’s worth more. She responds, having not been listening to her husband for a change, that she thinks things are worth more if they once belonged to aristocrats.

It me, but with a twist. I have no interest in owning noblemen’s discarded wares. But I do think any item is inherently more compelling if bought anywhere other than where I live. Thus the souvenir as a concept, I realize, but I don’t necessarily mean those. More like, if I need to own socks anyway, it’s more fun to have them from somewhere else. I find that this is the most enjoyable and practical approach to shopping while travelling, a way to make sure the things I buy are ones I’ll have some use for back home. Beauty and utility, things and experiences, all in one.

I try to avoid vacation-specific purchases, i.e. beach coverups, because this is not relevant to my life. But if I see that a special French drugstore eyeliner, same gist as the kind I brought on vacation but has almost run out, is three euros instead of 25 Canadian dollars? Yep.

Guiding my selections was the aforementioned aesthetic reset. The change of surroundings affirmed many of my thoughts about interior decorating but meant that, clothing-wise, I suddenly saw far less appeal in y2k nostalgia, in purple-and-orange pairings evoking that moment. I started to question my admittedly newfound commitment to things needing to flare.

But I also wanted to take into account the way that looks get lost in translation. Clothing and accessories are communication, and communicate different things in different contexts. An ordinary, well-dressed woman in Belgium or France would, in Toronto, come across as formally dressed or, I suppose, foreign, in that out-of-context sense. It wouldn’t be a problem exactly but would communicate something more specific than ‘she looks nice.’

And then there’s the thing, with how buildings and people look, where the light, the surroundings, impact what makes sense where. There’s no law against white-linen-everything in Toronto, but the Riviera it ain’t, and if you dress as though you’re under that impression, you just look like you belong in Yorkville, the mini-Cannes (I now know!) that tries its darndest despite being, like the rest of Toronto, covered in snow and ice for much of the year.

Below are some things-and-experiences vignettes.

Not long after we decided on Nice as a destination, I looked up whether it had a Petit Bateau, the kids’-and-women’s t-shirts-and-underpants store. I saw that it did. I cannot overemphasize the significance of this fact.

As mentioned previously, I have a recurring dream about trying and failing to locate a Petit Bateau. This is because when we were in Paris two years ago, we went to one (a rare open-in-August establishment) and got some kids’ stuff but I skipped t-shirts for myself and regretted it profoundly ever since. I had this notion that I no longer wear that kind of top, but I do, I do wear that kind of top. Kotn, the Canadian brand, makes similar, and I avail myself, but it’s not quite it.

If it were not a recurring dream then whatever. But it is extremely persistent. It had to come first, before anything more Nice-specific. Priorities!

When we first arrived, we had a late lunch in the hotel. Everyone else went up to the room to rest but not I! I ran (?) the 20-something minute walk in 90 degrees or thereabouts to the Petit Bateau, which was not where the map said, but a bit further. I mean I would have moved mountains. I (correctly) figured I’d take in Nice more holistically on other occasions in the week ahead and tried to do a bit of scenery-admiring but mainly eyes-on-the-prize.

It felt unreal to arrive at an actual honest-to-goodness open branch of Petit Bateau. I went in and saw that it was not exactly as I remembered it. They seem to have caught onto the thing where grown women buy “18 ans” and now sell the more affordable kids’ clothes only up to 12 years, as well as a separate line of women’s. This is probably for the best, all told, because kids’ clothes look off on me even when they technically fit my 5’2” self. There were some sale items, in not-quite-it colors and styles, as well as the packaged t-shirts and tank tops and cotton underwear and OMG OMG there it all was. Not in as full of a range of colors as I might have imagined but more than enough to choose from. Enough that I had trouble deciding. Enough that I dragged the family back, later on the trip, to get a couple more of the tops.

Are they spectacular? I don’t know, they’re top-notch t-shirts/tank tops, at prices comparable to or lower than what I’d pay in Toronto. It is only partly about the t-shirts, more so about THE DREAM.