"Paris Letters"



"For my hair, I would go to Sylvie Coudray. Her atelier was just down the street from Chanel's first Paris shop on the famed rue Saint-Honoré, in the same apartment where Maximilien de Robespierre lived during his reign of terrorafter the French Revolution. In fact, she cut hair in his bedroom. I can just imagine him waking up and deciding whose head to chop first. And centuries later, Sylvie doing the same, but with hair and not heads. Sylvie is a tall, strong, blond woman. I liike her immediately. The first time I went to see her, she sat me down at a chair in front of a mirror and took me through a one-hur consultation before she even picked up her scissors. She explained that there was only one perfect hairstyle for me and she was goiing to give it to me. She pulled my hair up, pulled it back, moved it here and there to illustrate how other hairstyles woudn't frame my face as well as this one haircut. "Why do most stylists concentrate on the back of the head when they should concentrate on the front? [...] "She started snipping away at my mane and proceeded to give me the best haircut of my life. It was me, but better.
It was so lovely that I became onstantly miffed by every hairstylist I've ever had. They just didn't know what they were doing! Sylvie understood. "No thought put into what would actually look good!" She took a breath and dropped her arms in fatigue. "Don't people know how to imagine what is beautiful and what is not?" I wasn't going to trust anyone else with my wedding day hair. Sylvie was a true artist."

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