An afternoon in Paris...

Without me even noticing, winter has arrived to Paris. This afternoon, some drops of rain began to fall and soon became the first snow flakes... light and inconsistent, but snow at last... Now it's 6°C...

But this has not prevented Basquiat-lovers, the great American Contemporary artist born in Haiti, to wait in long lines to see his retrospective exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne.

Patient, under their umbrellas, facing stoically the weather. But nothing less would be expected, since the work of this tremendous artist, who died in 1988 at age 28 due to drug abuse, was shown here for the last time in 1984.

As for the-very-organised-me, I had my tickets pre-booked a long time ago, so luckily, I got in quite fast.

The exhibition is incredible: gigantic masterpieces that cause so much distress and pain. He was in fact a "graffiti" artist who began painting on the streets to end up on canvases. Many elements are constant in all his works: voodoo, modern advertising, american afros and words in Spanish (his mother was Puerto Rican)... all of them mixed with spontaneity and freshness. 

I imagine that 30 years ago his works must have intrigued profoundly... This year he would have been 50 years old.

To finish my afternoon and lift my spirit, I went to Christophe Robin's, my colorist for more than 10 years now, to have my hair highlighted. He has his salon now in a suite at the Hotel Maurice, one of the great "Palaces" of Paris and just crossing its lobby, with its elegant restaurant-bar and antique golden elevator, is already an event. But he has not been in this hotel forever: he used to have a minuscule salon on rue Mont Thabor. It was small but full of charm... You could come across Catherine Deneuve, his N°1 client, or Jeanne Moreau, smoking at the entrance, or Isabelle Adjani, hiding under her hat...

While Marie, Christophe's assistant, applies the product on my hair, she updates me on the latest gossips: Eva Longoria's divorce due to an alleged infidelity by her former husband Tony Parker. Or how Shakira kept cleaning the excess of product while Marie dyed her hair the other afternoon... they finished by 10 pm!

We, instead, were over by 7 pm... As I went back home, I saw the Place de la Concorde, the lights by  the Seine and Pont Alexander III...

It's so good to be back home... tonight there's a new episode of "Mad Men" on TV.

What a pleasure!