Beret returns to France amid economic gloom

This article by Peter Allen I found on www.telegraph.co.uk 

Beret returns to France amid economic gloom

Once worn by everyone from farmers to existentialist philosophers, the black beret was as much a part of French culture as onion sellers and Left Bank cafés.

 

By Peter Allen in Paris 
Last Updated: 11:14AM BST 14 Apr 2009

Beret sales have doubled since the start of the credit crunch 

Now after years in decline, the Gallic headgear is back in fashion with manufacturers reporting a doubling in sales.

Young people in major cities including Paris are leading the revival, embracing the beret as a symbol of a rural past in an increasingly Americanised world.

 

Patricia Jourdain, a style commentator who runs a designer boutique on the fashionable Rue Jacob in Paris, said: "The beret is as far removed from the baseball cap and other manifestations of US culture as you can get. Following the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon economy young people are harking back to their roots, showing they're proud to be French.

"Rather than solely being worn by country people or intellectuals the beret is now an extremely chic fashion item. Many models wore them at this year's Paris Fashion Week. British visitors to France also love the berets, buying them in the way that their Francophile forebears used to."

Manufacturers around Orlon Sainte-Marie, once the beret making capital in the south-west of the country, confirmed sales had doubled since the start of the credit crunch.

A spokesman for Blancq-Olibet said that, after facing closure less than a decade ago, the business was now producing around 300,000 a year.

Bobos – the French equivalent of yuppies – are said to be increasingly buying the berets as a link with the villages where their grandparents lived.

Stephane Jacquet, a milliner from Bourges, south of Paris, told the Connexionnewspaper: "The beret has become an essential bobo fashion accessory and most beret-wearers nowadays seem to be the bourgeois-boheme type.

"I think they are looking for an authentic and tangible symbol of deepest France, or, la douce France, the cliché from the song by 1960s singer Charles Trenet.

"The beret is perhaps synonymous with France's rural past where life was supposedly easier and simpler than today."

As far as wearing a beret is concerned, Mr Jacquet said style could say a great deal about a wearer.

"There is a popular myth, which says the side to which you choose to slant your beret, left or right, is a sign of your political affiliations," he explained.

Both Jean Paul Sartre, the philosopher, and Pablo Picasso, the artist, were known for wearing their berets in a "straight" fashion, neither to the left nor the right.

Less impressively, so was Michael Crawford, who played Frank Spencer in the BBC comedy Some Mother's Do 'Ave 'Em.