Everyone Wants to Be Brooklyn Right Now

The French have been fighting a rearguard action against English for decades—Académie française decrees, banned anglicisms in official communications, the whole performance—and somehow, in the middle of all that, Paris acquired a functioning artisanal hot dog scene. This is the contradiction that photographer Eugena Ossi has been documenting.

Ossi is based in Paris, and her photo essay on the city’s Brooklynization is both a document and a mild alarm. The evidence is familiar to anyone who’s spent time in a European capital recently: specialty coffee shops run by people with very specific opinions about extraction ratios, American Apparel storefronts, brunch menus, the beards, the general atmosphere of a neighborhood that has decided irony and craft beer are essentially the same thing.

Berlin went through this first, or at least most visibly. It became the European destination for young Americans who found New York’s costs and pressures unsustainable, and the city absorbed them and changed accordingly. There’s even a New York Times piece about it, which is either diagnosis or symptom depending on your mood. The question is whether Paris, with its much stronger sense of itself, bends the same way or eventually pushes back.

My instinct is that it’s already doing both simultaneously, which is very Paris. The Brooklynization is real, but so is the French capacity for dismissal. A few more years and the backlash aesthetic will probably be just as photogenic as the thing it’s reacting against. Ossi will presumably still be there, camera in hand, waiting for the next wave to document.

What gets me isn’t the coffee or the beards or even the branding—it’s how a very specific slice of one city’s culture became the universal shorthand for "alternative" across the entire Western world. Brooklyn didn’t do anything wrong. It just became a mood board, and now every city with a vacant warehouse district and a population of recent graduates is trying to pin it to the wall.