Alice Pfeiffer

L’abstention: the third option for France

This weekend, France will again go to the polls in the final round of voting. The choice is between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. And while the polls look very much in Macron’s favour, many fear that Le Pen could still be in with a chance. Not so much because of the votes she

Marine Le Pen is using fashion as a political weapon

In September, Marine Le Pen travelled to Brachay, a microscopic right-wing commune in northeastern France. Despite its diminutive size, this French locality has the greatest percentage of Front National voters – 72 per cent – so its politicians consider it emblematic. With her raucous gusto, produced thanks to decades of smoking, Le Pen regaled the local, mainly

Women must be free to wear the bikini – and the burkini

‘Let’s play a game. Yohji or Burkini?’ a friend and fellow fashion writer in Paris lazily suggested. We were sitting by Paris Plage, on deckchairs on the edge of the river Seine. Tourists, families, screaming infants and the usual Paris bobos, clad, this year, in impeccably chic austerity, with hardly a square centimetre of skin revealed, all