Serial Shoppeuse

Do you like shopping? Do you like French? How about cute cartoons? Then stop whatever you are doing, go here and buy a copy of Tokyobanhbao's first book, Serial Shoppeuse!



My copy arrived in the mail today (so for the record, Amazon France > Amazon US, seeing I only ordered it a week ago) and I am LOVING it. It's so charming and funny, and so full of shopping truths. For the record, I understand only a very small amount of French, but I'm not having any problem understanding the book very clearly. In fact, if anything, it's increasing my understanding of French. (So there's another reason you should buy this book - it's a pictorial guide to learning important French shopping words for your next trip to Paris.)

Here are a couple of sneak peeks at a few pages.



How a vintage jacket is made. OMG, this is so, so true. One time my mum and I were in a thrift store and she bought back a pair of her old shoes that she had donated a year earlier (they really were hers, they had her initials on the inside, because she's a dork) because a) she missed them, and b) they were much more stylish then than they had been when she donated them. And she paid $20. FOR HER OWN SHOES. Yikes.



Shopping survival kit, and armour for sales. Does anyone else do this, dressing for sales in a certain way? I have done this before, with the leggings and easy on/easy off shoes to facilitate trying things on without a changeroom. (At a big warehouse clearance I mean, not in the ladieswear at David Jones. Sheesh.)

I've been a reader of Tokyobanhbao's blog for about a year now. If you haven't read it yet, stop reading this, go open a new tab and subscribe to her RSS feed. I'll wait. Back? She alternates between posting pictures of her own daily outfits, sketches of her alter-ego Tokyobibi, and reviews of different restaurants she's been to. She's always very cute, funny and insightful (and she translates her posts into English, which is helpful.) You might occasionally see her with her friend Betty, aka the Other Coolest Young French Blogger. (Oh, and Garance Dore. My, there are a lot of cool French fashionistas blogging these days.)

One of my favourite things that Tokyobanhbao does in her sketches is replacing brand names with sort of knock-off sounding names - for example, Chamel, Repettou, Zoro, Aio (as opposed to Vaio - and then in another sketch, Maio), Chloo... even Facebouc. It's these cute little details that really make you feel like you're sharing a private joke with her.

Anyway, I hope I've convinced you to spend €8,55 and get a copy of this book. I promise that if you like to shop, you will see a lot of yourself in this book (and your boyfriend will probably see a lot of himself, too.) If you need help with amazon.fr, leave me a comment and I'll help you out. If you've used regular amazon.com before, though, it should be pretty straightforwards for you.

Bon shopping!
-Hayley xoxo