Meet the author
“It is never the woman. It’s the cut, the length, the color.”
My dear friend,
I came to Paris from Martinique in 1982. I was nineteen, with one suitcase, and in it were my mother's scissors. She sewed madras dresses for church in Fort-de-France, and she always told me the same thing: the cloth is never wrong, chérie, only the cut.
For thirty years I lived with the clothes of a Paris couture house. First in the workroom, then in the fitting room, on my knees with pins in my mouth, looking up at women in front of a three-way mirror. Some of the most elegant women in the world stood there, and almost every one of them, at some point, looked at herself and sighed.
What I learned in that room is simple. Move a hem two inches, open a neckline, put a different color under the chin, and the same woman stands up straighter. I saw it happen thousands of times.
This book is everything I would tell you if you came to that fitting room. Nothing in it asks you to be thinner, richer or younger. You are beautiful exactly as you are. We'll simply find the clothes that know it too.
À bientôt, Mireille
Style never grows old.
About MireilleMireille Lauriette was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, and came to Paris at nineteen as a fitting model. She spent thirty years with the clothes of a Paris couture house, in the workroom and the fitting room, and retired as head of the workroom. She lives near Rue des Martyrs and shares what she learned on her YouTube channel, Mireille in Paris.
