de Bourvallais at numbers 11 and 13. Place
Vendome is therefore a site of high civic
and national seriousness; nevertheless,
chocolates and couture are sold there, and
this was my focus in the summer of 1972.
I have revisited Place Vendome many times
since, entranced by the extreme elegance
and exclusivity of its shops and hotels:
Chanel, Charvet, the Ritz. I remember
buying delicious coffee truffles at Godiva
and Fouquet. Christopher Hyland says
of Charvet, "Their shirts last forever and
can be passed on from one generation to
another."
Shopping is an intensely visual activity. The
precincts in which it is carried on should
be ceremonious in structure, attended by
architecture that takes aim at posterity, at
history in the making rather than yesterday's
ephemera. (There is nothing grimmer than
the specter of a "dead mall," although,
perversely, there is a nihilistic nostalgia for
these caverns among young people born
after they were constructed in the 1980s
and '90s.) H
