When I woke up in Florence and I saw the weather rainy and all grey I brushed my teeth I cleaned my face and I made a coffee. When I lightened my cigarette and looked outside it came to my mind "Paris". I looked the last pictures that I took and it was in Cafe de Flore. This vintage cafe in Saint Germain really inspires me.. If you think about this parisienne cafe it comes to your mind the black n white movies, writers, painters, photographers, the small tables with the French people with their cigarettes and the smoke lingering through the air....
But except of all this there is a history behind it...
The birth of surrealism (1887-1930)
Towards 1913 Apollinaire with Salmon transformed the first floor into a newspaper office : « les soirées de Paris » (Paris evenings), a review, was born.
The war didn’t change anything concerning the great poet’s habits, the
Café was his office and he received people at fixed times. And, on a
Spring day in 1917, he presented Philippe Soupault to André Breton.
Later, by provoking the meeting between these two young poets with
Aragon, Apollinaire laid the foundations of the dadaist movement.
In the same year, he coined the word « surrealism ». When Tristan Tzara
arrived in Paris, his dadaist friends made him visit the Café because
Apollinaire had lived and died there (in 1918).
In 1922, the editorial staff of the erudite review « Le Divan »
regularly gathered on the Café’s benches. Malraux drank his iced Pernod
there. -
cafedeflore.fr
The Flore of Modern Times
In an article from the New York Times, 2006, Sofia Coppola was
interviewed in regards to her relationship with Paris during the time
she was filming
Marie Antoinette. The screenwriter and director listed the Café de Flore as her place of choice for production meetings.From this you can understand the new clientele that frequent the Flore.
The assortment of people are varied, with groups of fashionable women
toting their Birkin bags, the tourists, the youth, and the locals aged
and nostalgic holding onto what the Flore used to be. Though comparing
photos of the Flore decades ago to modern times, nothing really has
changed except for the fashion. The atmosphere, the energetic flow of
conversations, and the mythology of the Flore mark it as an institution
of Parisian culture.
-nyuflaneur
Let's talk about fashion
While I was searching about the clientele of Cafe de Flore I found an article from Vogue.com dedicated to
Sonia Rykiel.
Photograph by Bertrand Marignac. Published in Vogue, October 1986.
Café de Flore has named a sandwich in her honor.
This queen of knits, who never learned how to actually work a pair of
needles, is a self-taught designer who describes her method as
off-the-cuff:
“First I made a dress because I was pregnant and I wanted
to be the most beautiful pregnant woman,” Rykiel said in 2008, on the
occasion of her company’s fortieth anniversary.
“Then I made a
sweater”—the popular poor boy—
“because I wanted to have one that wasn’t
like anyone else’s.” - Vogue.com
Clientele of "Cafe de Flore"
Karl Lagerfeld,
Ralph Lauren , Kate Moss,
Johnny Depp, Steven Spielberg, Lauren Bacall,
Gérard Philippe, Tina Turner, Jean-Loup Sieff, Jacques Prévert, Jean Edern Hallier, Catherine Deneuve, Francis Ford Coppola among others.
she was the only one I could find pictures inside the "Cafe de Flore". Last pictures Kate Moss with Terry Richardson
