France’s Gold Mine

November 1st, 2009 by | Country: France | 2 Comments »

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As I stroll through the city of lights, Paris, I glaze at the windows and admire the beautiful clothes displayed in the shop windows.  One store has a pair of boots dazzled with silver sequins and another has a red coat with beautiful ruffles and flowers and another has a magnificent gray skirt fit to accentuate the curves of the body.  Looking at the voguish garments draws my mind to say, “OoooooOOooo!” or “WOW!” or “I need to take a look!”  One of the things that certainly makes Paris such a special city is that it has a wealth of unique clothing designs.  They’re so different that I can look absolutely original.

There is a history behind to why fashion is a major hype in Paris and throughout France.

“French fashions must be France’s answers to Spain’s gold mines in Peru.” -  Jean-Baptiste Colbert

When I was on the training heading back to Lacoste from Paris, I was reading a book called, Life Inc. by Douglass Rushkoff, and I came across a paragraph that explains how France became one of the fashion empires.  During the Renaissance era, France could not keep up with the “heavy competition for resources in the New World, and began to run a trade deficit.”  So, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, King Louis XIV’s finance minister, recognized that having a domestic production would be more effective which would lead to selling their goods to other countries.  Rushkoff stated:

“Colbert envisioned a France capable of competing with the rest of the world not through the acquisition of territory and resources, but through style.  He needed a way to make French exports seem special for their own sake, and took it upon himself to invest what we now think of as luxury goods.”

Timing could not have been better as my question was answered shortly after my trip to Paris!

2 Comments

November 1, 2009 at 8:54 am

Hello.

I would like to put a link to your site on my blog roll if you want to do the same for mine. It would be a good way to build up both of our readerships.

thank you.

November 1, 2009 at 9:02 am

Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.

Allen Taylor

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