We often forget that Paris was the absolute center of an empire; those streets created in the Second Empire are the deliberate intention to make an Imperial City. It is this era that the city never seems to forget. Put it another way, Paris continually reminds tourists of an importance that is no longer.
La mode, however, remains as one of the city's temporal powers.
The photo is the top of the Grand Palais, an exhibition hall. This "wedding cake" architecture was the official style of the time; the Impressionists and succeeding waves of movements (post-, Fauvism, Cubism) must have seemed like the counterculture to the pouffed, stuffed, trussed and befeathered creatures who ordered clothes from Doucet, Callot Soeurs, and Poiret for their morning walks in the you know where.
Sometimes it is better to be correct than to be exact...exactitude can "nail" a look, a style, so well that it suddenly becomes dead and relegated to the past.
Of course, I could be wrong.
-AP
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