City Series
A look at the Paris Portrait features
Here & There Magazine's City Series features a collection of local entrepreneurs, neighbourhood highlights and city experiences. From fashion to food, the series invites you to explore the local scene, gaining the inside tips and tricks to discover all the city has to offer - from a local's perspective. For those who have visited the city, this is a lovely reminder of your time there and a perfect souvenir; of course, if you haven't made your way to Paris, this is an amazing look into the city – you can explore the streets through our lens, learn about the culture and discover places you may have never heard about!
Portrait features in the Paris City Series:
Pieter Ceizer
Pieter Ceizer is a Paris-based typographer and artist known for clean, retro designs, and hand lettering. His work is often colourful, abstract, and type-inspired shapes created within various mediums: canvas paintings, metal letter cuts, wood-shaped panels, and wood sculptures. His works incorporate poetry, word, shape, and colour with an overarching theme of comfort and escapism.
Léoma Blanc - BLEU•M
Bleu M is a local family story. The brand was born from the sheer will of a mother and son duo, to launch a concept around local upcycling in order to create unique pieces of clothing. ‘Le 93’ is where everything started. Passionate about Montreuil’s diversity and challenged by all the changes happening around the neighbourhood, “we felt the need to express all the emotions this town sparked in us,” Léoma explains when asked about their motivations.
Behind the Scenes with Crazy Horse Paris
On May 19th 1951, an iconic cabaret opened its doors for the first time on Avenue George V. It all began with Alain Bernardin. He created a show entirely as an ode to the beauty of a woman’s body, magnified and loved in one of the most modern cabaret shows in the world. Nefarious and enigmatic, Crazy Horse is a genuine Parisian institution where performers transform femininity and sensuality into art without ever being vulgar. The cabaret offers a magical and unique moment in the heart of the French capital.
Margot Lecarpentier
Margot Lecarpentier is the owner and head bartender of Combat Belleville. She is an author and winner of the 2019 Cocktails Spirits Paris Awards for Most Influential Bartender and Most Influential Bar.
Margot chose to settle in Belleville two years before the opening of Combat. She acknowledges that seven years ago Belleville was very different, a popular/working-class neighbourhood. “I was attracted to this melting-pot, and also the fact that a cocktail place didn’t exist in the neighbourhood. I wanted cocktails to be for everyone. There were very good restaurants and wine bars. It was the heart of the first truly great ‘bistronomique’ addresses. But you couldn’t go and drink a good whiskey or digestif anywhere.”
PonPon Café
Céline Chung, Hélène Zheng, and Wenxu Wang are the founders of PonPon Café, the first mochi doughnut shop in Paris. As its name suggests, a mochi doughnut is the blending of a doughnut and a mochi. Imagine the smoothness of a mochi –a Japanese rice cake– with the crispy, warmth of a doughnut. If the idea alone doesn’t excite your taste buds, their Instagram content will surely invite you in.
Holybelly Cafe
When Holybelly opened in 2013, people struggled to put this up-and-coming location in a category because it’s not a coffee shop, yet it has really good coffee; it’s not a restaurant, per se, but it has really good food. Quickly dubbed by locals as ‘a place for tourists’, the two founders, Sarah Mouchot and Nicolas Alary took it at heart to show their creation was different. It just so happened that tourists – or travellers as we like to call them – were attracted to the place.
Image Gallery: Behind the scenes
Words by Alexa Bouhelier-Ruelle
Photos by Aleyah Solomon
