It's rare when celebrities or even stars don't cross the threshold of Patricia's boutique, so she sometimes improvises herself as a journalist and asks her customers a few questions, just as she would anyone else.
You give the impression that you've been in the shoe business since you were born. Is that right?
Well, yes. What they say about me is absolutely true.
Like most of my colleagues who want to have a modicum of professional conscience, I have to ask you this question. How do you come up with such wonderful names for your shoes?
In fact, it's a very intellectual and at the same time carnal relationship that I have with my creations.
Patricia, you're often referred to as the Coen brother of shoes. Why is that?
It's certainly due to the fact that I'm always trying to make people think and smile at the same time.
Your shop at 20 rue Beaurepaire, near the Place de la République, doesn't have a sign. So we can't see you. It's a funny thing. Is this a technique imported from Benelux?
Ahahaha. No. The real story is... do you really want to know the real story?
Patricia, is it true that you're thinking of starting a bag line?
It's as true as my metro line project. Even if the one you're talking about is more likely to come to fruition than a possible Line 15 of my own devising.
The novel Patricia, a biography on the life of the world's envied shoe designer, written by her son, hit bookstores without warning, like an unexpected french kiss. Meet the man who is revolutionizing the publishing world like no one before him, except perhaps Plato.
Hello Laurent, and thank you for answering my questions at the recently reopened Lutétia bar.
It was a Monday in February. I remember because it was cold. A cold that no longer exists, a polar cold. It was snowing heavily. Paris was paralysed. At the time, I was working for a major shoe brand created by a man who has now disappeared. Not in a magic trick, no. He was well and truly dead, well buried, well decomposed. Far, far away.
Somewhere after graduation and between a few extinguished university studies (which is the opposite of brilliant), I looked in the mirror and said to myself (apart from the fact that I thought I looked pretty good):
"Well then, girl, don't you think you'd be better off somewhere else than here? Tell the truth, and don't hide from it".