The Frequent Flier

Paris When It Sizzles...
By: Christine O. Cunanan

Battle-ready women, long lines, secret destinations, and great bargains—it’s the madness of the Paris summer sales

For as long as I can remember, my Japanese friend Keiko and I have traveled to Paris at the end of June for one week of good food and great bargain-hunting. The annual summer sale kicks off on the same day for all stores, and not a few avid shoppers travel from all over the world to unabashedly indulge themselves in a sea of 50% discounts.

There is absolutely nothing high-brow about these June trips. We reserve the museums, the historical walks, and the opera for visits to Paris at other times of the year, when the city is less populated by battle-ready women in slacks and flats, armed with the all-essential credit cards, roaming the streets
with the determined look of hunters searching for currentseason items at half-price.

Keiko and I have our routine down pat, arriving five days or so before the sale proper and staying at a hotel within walking distance to the Faubourg St. Honoré, the department stores around the Place de l’Opera, and also to the Left Bank. I always fly into Paris from my Tokyo home, and then continue onto elsewhere in Europe for summer holidays with my husband. Meanwhile, Keiko heads to Tuscany in mid-June to stay in countryside inns tracking down amazing delicacies, before ending up in Paris for one last fabulous shopping hurrah. We deliberately arrive earlier than the sale to leisurely check shops, choose items, and plan our respective first-day routes. At places where we’ve become regulars, the shopgirls will keep highly coveted items for us. We also take advantage of the lull before the consumer storm to indulge in our common love for food—something impossible to do once sale madness begins. In between store browsings, we have long lunches at Michelin three-star restaurants, where a proper three-course meal at noon is often a bargain compared to the astronomical prices at dinner; and then we walk off the calories
in the afternoon.

On the sale’s first day, many stores open at 8am. After an early, hearty breakfast—our next meal will be dinner at 9pm, after all—Keiko and I part ways for the day, wishing each other luck. She joins the throngs at Printemps and Galleries Lafayette. Meanwhile, the Hermès sale is always my first stop, followed by visits to Chloé, Missoni, and Christian Louboutin’s tiny workshop/store.

Every year I reach the Hermès sale—which, unlike most other brands, is held off-site on the ground floor of an ordinary building in a nondescript neighborhood with no signs to attract attention—at 8am, and am subjected to a tortuous three-hour wait just to enter. I know I should arrive earlier but I never do; instead I watch impatiently as Japanese early birds leave the sale laden with so many paper bags they can hardly walk. Some of these women take the last Air France flight out of Narita Airport the day before, arriving in Paris at dawn and heading straight to the Hermès sale to sit on the pavement until 9am in the same clothes they left their Tokyo apartments in. The diehards who can’t afford time away from work spend the whole day shopping and then taxi back to Charles de Gaulle airport just in time for the last flight back to Tokyo. It’s literally a shopping daytrip to Paris from across the globe.

The Hermès sale is probably the least publicized of the designer sales, and the way Keiko and I discovered it long ago deserves to be told. It was a fine morning in June when we set out from Park Hyatt Paris for our usual pre-breakfast circular walk through the Tuileries, along the Seine, and then finally past the Champs-Élysées and typical working districts on the way back to the hotel.

In one of these districts, we saw dozens of women waiting in a line that snaked several blocks down outside a subway exit. Most of them were either French or Japanese. Unable to contain our curiosity, we asked a Japanese girl in line exactly what this was all about. She stared at us as if we had just asked the silliest question in the world. “This is the Hermès sale,” she replied. “No leather bags, but lots of scarves, shoes, and clothes.”

That was all we needed to know. Unable to find a taxi, we ran the last three kilometers to our hotel to pick up our credit cards and dashed right back. I had never seen Keiko run like this before—but this is exactly what sale season in Paris does to you!