Someone once said that the scariest place to be is the same place you were last year, and I took that on board with the enthusiasm of a woman who does not know how to sit still. Growth matters to me. It matters possibly too much. In the last six years I have moved more times than I can count with any accuracy, and the short version goes London, Paris, Milan, and now Monaco, and every single one of them did something to the way I get dressed.
Not to what my style is. I want to be clear about that, because it sounds like a story about a woman finding herself in her closet and it is not. After this many years and this many outfits and what I can only describe as exposure therapy inside the fashion industry, I know what I love and what I do not love. That part is settled. It is fairly easy, actually.
What changes is everything around it. The habits. The spots. The restaurants with a dress code and the restaurants where the dress code is unwritten but far stricter. Whether you feel safe. Whether you walk.
Jewellery in London, Paris or Milan? No thank you, and if you have lived in any of those cities you already know exactly which internal calculation I am describing, the one you run at the tram stop about how visible your watch is. Jewellery and watches in Monaco? Come one, come all. It is welcome here in a way that genuinely reorganises what you reach for in the morning.
Walking in Paris was never really the plan. In Monaco, walking is the entire plan. I walk everywhere, up and down, and you cannot overstate what that does to your footwear. A city that is vertical rewrites your shoe rack faster than any trend does.
We forget how much a place is doing to us. So let me tell you about Milan versus Monaco.
People love to say that Milan is the best dressed city, and I agree, but only about the men. Milanese men are chic. They are suited. Watching them is one of the great free pleasures of that city and I would recommend an afternoon of it to anyone.
The women put in less effort than in any city I have ever lived in. And I want to be precise, because this is not the LA thing, this is not leggings and flip flops. It is something more interesting than that. It is a Milanese woman deciding that she must not appear to be trying, because trying is what people do when they are not from Milan. Effort reads as tourism. So the whole thing gets pared down to a suit with loafers, a suit with sneakers, the occasional kitten heel, a cute top with denim if it is dinner. Day to day, it is very simple. Even the Parisians, who have built an entire national identity on not caring, look like they care more.
Monaco runs on a different logic entirely. Resort wear. Actual dress codes, printed and enforced. Riviera elegance, which is a phrase that sounds like a fragrance ad until you live inside it and realise it is a real and coherent set of rules. The moment Coco Beach collection launched I was already seeing the women wearing it at the beach club, and I mean that as a compliment to the speed of the place.
Here, women get dressed up. Tight YSL, lace for dinner, heels that are genuinely high and worn without apology. Fashion is not a job in Monaco the way it is a job in Milan, it is a hobby, and people are having a good time with it. The runway is not the statement. The Birkin is the statement. And somehow, despite the industry infrastructure being three hundred kilometres away, I find the looks more interesting.
I have said before better bad taste than no taste, and I stand by it, though I recognise I may have arrived at that position purely because I got bored. Bored of muted. Bored of the grey-beige-navy consensus. Possibly bored of quiet luxury, which I loved and defended and then, at some point around year three, could no longer look at.
Monaco got me excited about colour again. About a fun dress with no justification attached. About playful choices that serve no purpose except that I wanted to. It gave me the specific gift of never feeling overdressed, which is a thing you only understand the value of after years of feeling slightly too much in a city that prizes restraint.
And it gave me a new uniform, which is funny, because I thought I already had one.
Maybe that is the growth. Not changing what you love. Just changing the room you love it in.
xx, T
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