My secret courtyard

The kitchen window in our first floor apartment looks across to a dressmaker’s shop. Every morning at 9:00 Madame arrives, hangs up her coat and puts on her pink work coat. At the end of each day a new dress is hanging in the window. At first I didn’t pay much attention across the courtyard. But dress making seems to be the life’s blood of this part of Paris.

Material, lace, and racks of dresses move through the streets of Montorgueil. And in the back of our courtyard is a design studio where clients, mostly Asian, come to attend fashion shows.

Well in the last few days a new person has shown up in Madame’s dress shop. It is a man with wild grayish black hair. Madame seems to always be explaining things to him. And sometimes they will gather round the dress model and have a heated discussion as they point at various parts of the model’s anatomy. Then the man leaves and Madame continues her work. We’ve decided that he is the designer.

Stay tuned for more episodes of “Secrets from the Courtyard.”