Mersci

After the rigours of the New Year I decide to be brave and expose myself to the further rigours of French cuisine. All this talk of Channel links with the French has given me a tremendous appetite.

The girl at the car rental desk at Nice airport puts down her baguette to help me with directions to our hotel: ‘The Hotel Westminster is easy to find. Tout droit along the Promenade des Anglais.’ She forgets to mention that if you hesitate for one moment in France, all the other drivers honk as if they are ambulances carrying life or death patients on their back seats. I hesitate – am honked – lose my nerve and swerve into a confusion of side streets. It’s now pouring with rain, which makes me feel even more panicky.

At last I find the hotel but there is nowhere to park. I may as well be in London. I leave it in the delivery entrance at the rear and hope the car looks like a vegetable truck.

Find a charming small restaurant (no bigger than someone’s front room) and begin the serious business of eating. I can forgive the French any amount of honking once they sit down to eat.

SATURDAY

Over breakfast, which we eat in the sunshine on the balcony facing the sea, we discuss the problem of where to have lunch. Near the Chagall Museum or near the Picasso Museum? The talk of culture is, of course, a blind to disguise the vulgar need to eat at all after last night’s large meal.

Go to the car to find I have my very first French parking ticket. It begins: ‘Desole ..’ and I am disarmed. How can one be angry with a ticket that is worded so gently?

The Nicois certainly know how to diffuse the pain of driving a car in the Riviera. The Flower Market car park lift is disguised as a little villa with painted windows, shutters and even trompe-l’oeil pigeons. The main town car park – a huge edifice like a cliff – has been cleverly covered in palm trees, plants and a children’s playground.

SUNDAY

It’s raining heavily tonight so we stay in and watch TV. Gone With The Wind (Autant en emporte le vent) is showing with dubbed French voices. There is an awful fascination in watching Clark Gable speaking French, but the French-speaking Negro mammy is too unlikely. I suddenly crave for British television.

MONDAY

The sun is shining again and I stop missing British television. The coast road is dramatic and the signs that say ‘Monte Carlo’ seem to beckon and signal wickedness and glamour. I recall Cary Grant swooping along these roads in To Catch a Thief and change gear with a certain dash that I lack on the M20 to Folkestone.

Stop in Monte Carlo and shuffle around a supermarket looking for shoe polish and shampoo. I wonder why I’m not throwing away the family fortune on the green baize. I guess I don’t know how to live properly.

THURSDAY

The Matisse Museum in Nice is unspoilt. Some of Matisse’s furniture is arranged in the rooms and his old palette is there; you can almost imagine he has gone out for a walk and will be back shortly to continue his painting.

The young curator tells me he plans to make the building even more like a home with plants and caged birds. Matisse was fond of birds, he says. What about a few attractive women as well. I want to say. I’m sure Matisse would have approved of a few naked young women running about the rooms.

Supper in an unusual restaurant in Old Nice. It’s owned and run by Mme Helene Barale. The rooms are filled with all kinds of antiques and bric-a-brac: gramophones, old cameras, flat irons, kitchen utensils, brass scales, lamps and even a small vintage motor car. Madame runs around swiftly; checking, serving, throwing wood on to the open fire, greeting guests and resembling an old general laying siege to an unwary enemy. I feel both nourished and surrounded.

As soon as I draw breath, reinforcements are thrown in and I have to prepare myself for another delicious sample of authentic peasant food. Madame chides me for not finishing up my ravioli and I feel like a naughty child at my grandmother’s table.

At the end of the meal, Madame hands out song sheets and we all sing ‘Nissa La Bella’ – a sort of national anthem to Nice.

It’s wonderful but, for some strange reason, it reminds me of school dinners.

Denise Dubois of the Chambre Syndicale in Paris explains that its selected members pay an annual subscriptions. For the haute couture houses this is a percentage of their turnover. For the rest it is a flat fee. But the Chambre won’t disclose the size of its annual budget, which runs to supporting a permanent staff of about six who organise the shows and the promotions abroad.

The cost of putting on a show in Paris is high – this season it’s between pounds 7,000 and pounds 12,000 per designer, per show, to cover the use of the facilities. On top of that, the models are supplied by the designers. By contrast, in London the designers had to fork out just under pounds 2,500 for their shows, the rest of the money coming from sponsors. Denise Dubois says the Chambre is completely self-funded by its members – though there is often commercial sponsorship for an overseas promotion. But the real point about the Chambre, according to fashion publicist Percy Savage, who worked there for many years, is that it is sufficiently well funded (it’s been going on for 100 years) to think ahead – about, for instance, how and where to promote its members.

The younger French designers are banded together in the Federation Franchise du Pret-a-Porter Feminin, who show at the same time, on the Left Bank. This organisation is again funded by members’ subscriptions and is well off enough to have mounted a pounds 1/2 m fashion festival on the Avenue Foch earlier this summer.

New York is loosely organised through a Fashion Council, which numbers 50 designers, all paying a subscription. It organises dates and fashion show scheduling, but the designers themselves deal with the buyers and press who want to see their shows.

‘The New York designers seem to be better able to work together than the British,’ says Julie Buddy, who ran the collections there for two years. ‘The British underestimate the importance of presentation. British disorganisation was cute for a bit – but no longer.’

The Milan shows, which ended earlier last week, are organised by Bepe Modenesee, regarded by many as the ambassador of Italian fashion. Designers pay a subscription to a central fund but there is also some sponsorship from the manufacturers.

British designers have never elicited much support from the British public – the domestic market for designer clothes is growing but is nothing like as big as in Italy or France – nor from the government or industry. Undoubtedly the vast bulk of the pounds 1.4 billion of clothing we will export this year (it’s probably our third or fourth biggest export industry) is in mass-market ready-to-wear, but the glamour end of the rag trade is tremendously important in creating interest in the rest.

The London Designer Collections group has already tried, and failed, to find commercial sponsorship, though it did have more luck in attracting the attention of Norman Lamont when he was minister for trade and industry. Since his departure the LDC is still waiting to hear what, if anything, is to be done about the proposals for a British Designer Executive. The paper outlining these was prepared at his request and sent to the Department of Trade nearly a year ago. A fashion think tank comprised of individuals such as Sir Terence Conran and Beatrix Miller of Vogue has also been formed.

‘Basically,’ says Annette Worsley-Taylor, who has run the LDC for 10 years, ‘we propose some pump-priming finance from the government to start with, perhaps matched by manufacturers in the clothing area. I think most of the money must come from the designers and manufacturers.’

In the end it boils down to who is prepared to pay for such a UK body. Yes, the designers would like something as well organised as the Chambre Syndicale. Yes, yes, the manufacturers (and Mrs Thatcher) pay lip service to the glories of British fashion. But who is prepared to put their money where their mouth is?