How the French Really Feel About the Style of Emily in Paris

20.01.2023 - 21:03 / glamour.com

chambre de bonne; the endless sequence of overly attractive Frenchmen popping up like marionettes on every street corner. There are the personal-brand-building selfies with the onscreen likes ticker. And then, of course, there are the American-in-Paris Barbie outfits.For anyone who has ever spent extensive time in Paris, however, the styling on the Netflix series Emily in Paris, which has been renewed for a , is bound to be the most cringe-worthy trigger of them all.

In the three years that I lived in France, I never once witnessed sartorial amalgamations like Emily’s on the streets of Paris, let alone French offices (Paris Fashion Week being the sole exception). In fact, my own prework routine often included the tried-and-trusted (and Coco Chanel–coined) adage “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off,” if for no other reason than to ward off commentary from my colleagues. Emily never takes anything off.

Instead, she layers on accessories by the truckload, sending our eyes darting around the screen, absorbing fragments of her looks (the beret! the gloves! the white go-go booties!) without ever getting a sense of the full picture. As I gobble down the series with the greed I normally reserve for Haribo candy, the only thing running through my mind is this: I wish I could hear some French commentary on these looks. And so I reached out to a few Parisiennes to get their take. “Hum…allergic? Epidemic?” quips Stéphanie Delpon, the cofounder of Parisian creative agency Pictoresq, before cutting back on the sarcasm in favor of more objective analysis.

“To put it simply, Emily is not my style. It’s not the items she wears per se that I don’t like. It’s the accumulation—the pink foulard, the pink and