WHERE BRITISH IS CHIC IN PARIS

A new design and fashion emporium in Paris offers every current designer must-have in a space that looks more like an art gallery than a store, and much of it is British. Stephen Todd takes a life-style decision and heads for Colette on the Right Bank of the Seine

Have You ever been shopping in Paris with a fashion editor? I have traversed that sartorial river Styx, and am here to tell you, it's not pretty. The unsuspecting boutique rises on the glamour horizon and, in a flash of Ferragamo heels, the weighed-down racks are within range. Staff stand alert as labels flicker by like radar-readings. We're closing in. And - wham! - the rail crashes down. Only the soft targets remain. We charge away in search of the next victim.

Imagine my Valkyrie-like colleague's surprise, then, as we enter Colette - the hippest, slickest, most talked-about boutique to hit Paris for some time. No wide-eyed sales staff trembling as we approach. No racks bulging with conspicuous designer booty. In fact, no racks at all. Instead, Colette is as pared down as the coolest of contemporary art galleries. In the luminous three-level interior - spread over 700 square metres - large grey boxes like minimal sculptures are scattered with neatly-folded garments and assorted objets of desire.

On the ground floor, a Bianchi bicycle sits alongside a psychedelic Pucci print shirt. Upstairs, young British designer Michael Young's arctic white sofa holds court with a Philip Treacy felt hat. There are Lucien Pellat-Finet cashmere sweaters and funky Lulu Guiness bags. Micro-electronics by Sony and Owen Gaster damask pants. Brightly coloured Perspex tables by Proctor Rihl and the latest AirMax trainers. And if the roll-call of fabulousness gets a bit too much, you can always retire to the basement cafe where they serve light vegetarian (that is, distinctly un-French) fare. My friend shakes her Vogue-ish tuft-topped head. This is Tuesday, we must still be in Paris, right? Right. But it's true, Colette just doesn't look like your usual glitzy Paris boutique.

"We deliberately kept the space extremely neutral in order to highlight the objects themselves," says Sarah who, along with Milan, is the brains behind the mega-boutique. Both are known only by their first names, like brands - high-style products of their time. Both look incredibly at ease in their street-smart clothes shuffling between the designer must-haves posed nonchalantly around the slate-tiled room. "The space is an integral part of our outlook," Sarah smiles. "It's really an expression of our personal aesthetic."

Sarah has a background in the visual arts, and worked for a time in association with French radical arts magazine, Purple Prose. Milan comes from fashion: he used to work for the French magazine Jardin des Modes and had a go at establishing his own - now defunct - clothing label. It's the overlap between these two domains that interests them. In other words, Colette is more than just another frock-and-furniture shop. For Sarah and Milan, it's a microcosm of end-of-millennium (life) style. Take one of those sparse, modernist interiors immortalised by photographer Mario Testino in the recent Gucci ads, cross it with the pages of Wallpaper, add a splash of Zen sensibility and a dose of London designer whimsy, and you'll be somewhere near Colette. Even the name effortlessly rings all the right bells. "We'd thought of trying for something Japanesey," admits Sarah, "but nothing sounded right. In the end, Colette felt good - it's streamlined and modern, but at the same time very Parisian."

In terms of the current consumer goods aesthetic, Colette - the name and the space - is just about perfect. As fashion, furniture and object design move unerringly towards Modernist purity mixed in with (paradoxically retro) futurist Sixties and Seventies style, this pared-down showcase could hardly come at a better time. All of a sudden, those opulent bijoux boutiques that are the Parisian norm - their wood and metal curlicue fixtures jammed with over-decorated stock - feel extremely, well, bourgeois. What Charlotte Perriand, the woman who designed for Le Corbusier before embarking on her own long and controversial career, laments as "the tyranny of the beaux arts tradition in France", still holds sway. And when new design is inserted into these old contexts, the effect is jarring. Picture your dad dancing to techno - even if he was really making an effort, you'd get the feeling he didn't quite understand. At Colette, the design objects and their context are fused into a seamless whole.

Many of those new design objects - among both the furniture and the fashion - are British. Although as Ms Super-Shopper whisked around Colette, she was also able to gurgle in glee over names like Watanabe, Atsuro Tayama and Yoichi Nagasawa. There are Dutch, Italian, Belgian and American-designed items on display, too, and there are even some French designers, although not very many. "It's not that we have anything against French design in general," Sarah insists. "But in choosing for the store we searched long and hard, considering all the options that represent today's design. This is what we ended up with." What, no Philippe Starck? "It's not the name that counts - we're not looking to create brand-snobbism. Actually, we did want to take a re-editioned Starck radio - we liked the shape - but it was green!" And green, you understand, just wouldn't fit with the overall aesthetic, which right now leans towards white, orange and blue. Even the butterflies which filled the two-metre high fine net box sculptures (a wink in the direction of Damien Hirst) at the opening were orange and blue. This is nothing if not a total concept.

"It's the kind of extremely pure environment that hasn't existed in Paris for a long time," muses Sylvie Grumbach, the local agent for Vivienne Westwood and Kohji Tatsuno, and all-round life-style doyenne. "And it is great to see this kind of commitment to design. In that sense, it reminds me of a space which existed in the early Seventies called Createurs et Industriels." Launched in April 1971 by Didier Grumbach (Sylvie's brother who, at the time, was also Yves Saint Laurent's partner in Rive Gauche, and is now president of Thierry Mugler), Createurs et Industriels' showroom was designed by the chic Modernist Andree Putman. As well as showing French designers, it was the first place that Parisians caught sight of British designers such as Ossie Clark and Jean Muir. It lasted less than two years. "The French don't always know how to relate to this kind of minimal aesthetic," shrugs Sylvie Grumbach.

That, maybe, is the real reason why Colette is where it is. Right on the chi-chi rue Saint Honore, between The Louvre, Place Vendome and the hyper-chic Hotel Costes, Colette is bang in the middle of fashion's true stomping ground. Six times a year - for the haute couture and the men's and women's ready-to-wear shows - the fashion pack descends on this part of town, ready to devour the latest designer je ne sais quoi. The rest of the time, a continual wave of style-conscious Japanese tourists sweeps over the first arrondissement. The French, meanwhile, still head up to the grands magasins - the department stores like Printemps and Galeries Lafayette - where designer "homewares" and fashion are kept safely apart, and in the fashion departments, even labels are neatly compartmentalised into discreet corners. "It is exactly the opposite of our approach," says Sarah. "We're not proposing total 'looks', but looking for the crossovers and coincidences between various items which may well have different functional roles," agrees Milan. "In fact, we're kind of an anti-department store. We want to re-unite art, design, fashion, photography, music and new technologies."

ln doing so they have created an environment which is not precious or ascetic, but fresh and aesthetically edgy. On the gallery mezzanine, a video of New York conceptual artist Sarah Schwartz shows her naked, posing on a minimal metal table, clad only in a finely woven steel organza veil. On the shelves next to the VCR: a limited edition of the same veil, packaged in grey tubes, and stamped "The perfect veil, stopping confusion by grounding outside influences." German artists Viktor & Rolf spoof Chanel's scent ads with their own "virtual perfume, a scentless liquid that is no more than its own glamourous packaging." Next month the space will be taken up with a text-based piece by London graphics gurus, Tomato.

Clearly, while the Colette crew is deadly earnest about consumer lifestyle, there's a point at which they refuse to take it - or themselves - too seriously. Or maybe, like Schwartz's second installation - rubber bands printed with words whose definitions she wants to literally stretch - Colette is proposing an expanded reading of the notion of "lifestyle" itself. Either way, before I could even utter "to die for", my voracious Voguette had set the cash registers in a flurry of rapid-fire motion.

Colette is at 213 rue Saint Honore, 75001 Paris. Tel: 00 33 1 42 86 91 03.