Avenue Montaigne: From Widows' Alley to the New Look
Why is it significant?
Here the avenue is calmer, lined with chestnut trees, guarded by doormen in dark suits. Shop windows hold a single handbag each, lit like a jewel. It is hard to imagine that this was once one of the most disreputable lanes on the edge of Paris.
Key Facts
| Place | Avenue Montaigne: From Widows' Alley to the New Look |
|---|---|
| Address | Avenue Montaigne, 75008 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.86610, 2.30400 |
| Part of Walk | Triumph and Guillotine: The Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to Concorde, Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Here the avenue is calmer, lined with chestnut trees, guarded by doormen in dark suits. Shop windows hold a single handbag each, lit like a jewel. It is hard to imagine that this was once one of the most disreputable lanes on the edge of Paris.
Until 1850 it was called the Allée des Veuves, the Widows' Alley. Some say widows came here to mourn discreetly, away from the eyes of the city. What is certain is that by the eighteenth century it was a dark track lined with dance halls and taverns, where it was not wise to walk at night. Then it was renamed after the philosopher Montaigne, and slowly turned respectable.
On the twelfth of February 1947, at number thirty, a young designer named Christian Dior showed his very first collection. After years of war, rationing and square shoulders, the women walked out in tiny waists and enormous skirts using metres and metres of fabric. The editor of an American fashion magazine exclaimed that it was a whole new look, and the name stuck. From that day the fashion houses came to this avenue, one after another.
A little further down the avenue stands a bare, white building with flat reliefs on its front: the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, built in 1913 by Auguste Perret in reinforced concrete, a scandal in itself at the time. On the twenty-ninth of May 1913, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes premiered Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring here, with Nijinsky's choreography. The music opened with a bassoon squealing in a register nobody had heard before, and the dancers stamped with their feet turned inwards.
Within minutes the audience was laughing, whistling, shouting and fighting, and the dancers could barely hear the orchestra. It became the most famous riot in the history of music, and a year later the same score was cheered in concert. Now head east through the quiet side streets, towards the giant glass roof you can see catching the sky above the trees.