PARIS: In a city yet to name a back alley after Coco Chanel, Parisians stepped out on Sunday to do their organic shopping at a street market named after fashion designer Sonia Rykiel.

Hours earlier the city’s mayor Anne Hidalgo — something of a fashionista herself — had declared Allee Sonya Rykiel open, with her label staging its Paris fashion week show between the twinkling lights of the market stalls.

The “allee” is in the middle of a grand Left Bank boulevard where the late designer, who died in 2016, did her fruit and vegetable shopping.

It is the first time the French capital has named any kind of thoroughfare after a fashion designer.

“Sonia Rykiel gave us a taste for freedom, she was the most Parisian of Parisians,” said Hidalgo. Indeed, the designer opened her first shop a stone’s throw away in Saint Germain des Pres just as French students rose up in revolt in May 1968.

But the authorities in the French capital would not be drawn on whether there were any plans for a Boulevard Karl Lagerfeld or Avenue Christian Dior.

A street named after Chanel would be politically tricky in a city which mostly votes for the left because of the designer’s “horizontal collaboration” during the Nazi occupation. Chanel spent much of the war in the Ritz hotel with her lover, German intelligence officer Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage.

Published in Dawn, October 1st, 2018