Brooklyn in Paris

You see it immediately in certain parts of Paris: the American aesthetic has moved in. Vintage denim, those carefully casual hot dog carts, American Apparel stores, coffee shops with the right kind of neglected brick. It’s Brooklyn, more or less, except with better pastries and people who don’t apologize for smoking.

Eugena Ossi, a photographer in Paris, tracks this on her Tumblr. She documents it straight—not celebrating, just watching. There’s skepticism in how she frames it. Paris has become obsessed with American hipster culture, and the contradiction is thick: France fought for years to keep English out of the language, treated it as a threat. Now they’re importing the whole aesthetic wholesale.

What gets me is how complete the shift is. It’s not scattered cafes or one experimental boutique. It’s everywhere, systematic. Young Americans fled New York—too expensive, too grinding, too much—and moved to cheaper cities in Europe, and somewhere in that movement the cool kids decided they wanted what Brooklyn had. Paris absorbed it more than anywhere. French taste has always had this particular weakness for American cool when it’s available.

I genuinely don’t know if it bothers me. Cultures have always borrowed from each other. Maybe this era just happens to be America’s. In a couple of decades this is how people will remember Paris, and they’ll be chasing something else by then, another aesthetic from another place. For now though, if you want to seem interesting and outside the system in Paris, you’re essentially copying a look that was already exhausted in Brooklyn several years back.