The story of these \u201cblousons dor\u00e9s\u201d all began on one of Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet\u2019s nocturnal wanderings in Manhattan in 1949. \u201cI had been at someone\u2019s house for business. At midnight, I found myself in the street without having eaten dinner, lost. I suddenly noticed a light coming from a small store. I went in to ask the way. In two minutes, I was able to get a hamburger, a toothbrush, a newspaper, a pack of cigarettes. To get the same thing in Paris, I would have had to hunt down a tobacco store, go into a caf\u00e9, and give up on the toothbrush for lack of an open pharmacy. At that moment, at midnight, I had everything I needed.\u201d The words \u201cdrugstore\u201d were no doubt marked on the front of the shop in question. Six years later, Publicis moved its corporate headquarters to 133, Avenue des Champs Elys\u00e9es. Around that same time, Marcel set off. The new store opened where a faded palace once stood – the Astoria – who\u2019s monumental dining room apparently made for an excellent drugstore. Like Paris\u2019 famed \u201cIncroyables\u201d or \u201cParnassiens\u201d before them, MMB laid the way for the future drugstore crowd.<\/p>\n
The Drugstore group of the 60s was made up of young people, more or less well-off, who used the drugstore as their HQ. On the Champs Elys\u00e9es more so than in Saint-Germain-des-Pr\u00e9s, a tribe of pretty young things, always a step ahead, united by their anglomania, with English language music in the background. This was the hotbed of Parisian life that served as their setting. While others were going off to war to change the world, they preferred to let their hair down and show off their belonging to a specifically defined style, their unique dress culture. With them, lines were pure and outrageously proper. The equation: tight velvet pants, a gabardine, mini Shetlands, Weston moccasins, and an English college hat. They wore black with a pronounced taste for bright white. Their clothing was simple but always close to the body. As for their hair, the boys wore it mid-length with a side part. For the girls, long hair and bangs. On the bridge of the nose, these knit activists never went out without their Ray Bans. A single generation has never ushered in quite so many sociocultural changes within clothing customs; these cool kids sported their appearance as an emblem of counterculture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The story of these \u201cblousons dor\u00e9s\u201d all began on one of Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet\u2019s nocturnal wanderings in Manhattan in 1949. \u201cI had been at someone\u2019s house for business. At midnight, I found myself in the street without having eaten dinner, lost. I suddenly noticed a light coming from a small store. I went in to ask…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6406,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[11279,11276,11278,11275],"class_list":["post-6410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hotels-chefs-2","tag-dandies-of-drugstore","tag-drugstore-60s","tag-drugstore-champs-elysees","tag-publicis-drugstore-look-60s"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n