As you know, we're rolling out an Insider's Guide to the City of Light this week (a.k.a. Paris Week) on the Feed. But what would a week-long love letter to Gay Paree be without a few old-timey black and white photos of les dames and les cafes? Pretty weak, that's what. So here are a few of we quickly dug up from the archives of Conde Nast and elsewhere:
Liz Karlson, Glamour Magazine's sportswear editor, wearing a wool coat, carrying a handbag, and reading a newspaper at a kiosk in Paris (March 1963); Photograph by Norman Karlson
Two street vendors taking time out for lunch at a makeshift table of wooden crates covered with newspaper (August, 1946); Photograph from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
Original caption: Extravagant little cakes those imaginative concoctions that delight the eye as well as the palate, are back on the shelves of Parisian pastry shops once more. French pastry chefs, their unparalleled talents hidden as they served in the Army, in prison camps, or worked at other trades during the war, have joyfully returned to their ovens and work tables to repeat previous triumphs in baking and decorating breads and cakes. Forbidden during the war, production of the decorative pastries is still curtailed considerably by sugar rationing, but the French gourmet with francs to spare is again able to pamper his palate with pastry. Fifty-six-year-old Joseph Gonidec, who has been a pastry chef since the age of fourteen and would rather not bake than use a butter substitute in place of pure butter, pours cognac into a cream frosting. (November, 1949); Photograph by Bettmann/CORBIS
Original caption: Clients of a Paris cafe were seen tasting with pleasure the very first oysters that reached Paris today, the beginning of oyster season. (c. 1900s); Photograph by Bettman/CORBIS
In front of the Paris Opera house (September 1949); Photograph by Donald Honeyman