Yes, there are rather graver matters at hand, but bustling its way to the front in Paris is civic concern about the growing use of artificial flowers. Shops and restaurants have increasingly resorted to flora made from le plastique to improve their Instagramability – and not just to spare themselves the faff of watering, feeding and dead-heading.
Thanks to the hit Netflix series Emily in Paris, which festoons every outdoor scene with extra frou-frou, traders have found artfully garish garlanding can raise their takings by up to 15%.
The horrified Conseil de Paris is drafting rules to ban false flora as an affront to culture and heritage. It’s yet another chapter in the local ambivalence toward the already hyper-touristed city’s Emily-wrought visitor boom. Since 2000, the series has been doing to Paris what Disney did to London in the 60s hit movie Mary Poppins. While nobody then minded cheery Cockneys and Pearly Queens with dodgy accents tapdancing across mistily sooty rooftops, today’s Parisiens are less inclined to think their city needs extra set-decorating.
But the initial cries of quelle horreur diminished when the Emily tourists’ faux flower selfies started directly benefiting traders’ bottom lines. The artifice can be made to look extremely fetching, especially at night with clever lighting.
Just to confound these matters of taste and authenticity, no less an authority than the Financial Times has declared that artificial flowers are acceptable – “friend rather than faux” – with fashion houses and royals embracing them with enthusiasm. The paper showcased several high-end purveyors, one of whom entered the business during lockdown when the live-flower trade did a freeze.
This follows the lockdown surge in dried flower-selling, the fragile preserved bouquets now often fetching huge prices.
A whizz through social media affirms that the beauty of faux and dried blooms can easily rival the sometimes sterile perfection of farmed floristry. And unlike one’s own lovingly grown flowers, they won’t fall to bits, shelter nipping earwigs or leave manky slime in the vases.
Although often made of plastic, polyester or silk – all crimes against sustainability – artificial flowers can have a lower carbon footprint than real floristry, depending on respective lifespans and provenance.
A plastic floral shop frontage could last for years, needing little maintenance. Getting the same year-round effect from real plants is impossible, and while the live display lasts, it requires water, fertiliser and daily labour – while possibly impairing the premises’ watertightness.
Live plants and bouquets typically entail much plastic packaging as well as road and/or air mile crimes that falsies generate only once.
Silk and polyester replicas can last years (although they’re sods to dust).
Home blogger India Knight prescribes a slew of rules to avoid false flowers looking naff, including not placing them in direct line of sight or making them a focal point, using opaque vases (the stems are usually unconvincing) and even mixing them with real flowers and foliage.
She says they work best in non-minimalist rooms where they add to the ambience without standing out.
For those who still shudder at the memory of last century’s frowsty thick plastic roses, it’s worth remembering that the bounds of good taste have just thudded to a new low. One can now buy former US president Donald Trump’s signature scent, Victory 47 – US$99 to “own every room you step into” – and his blindingly gold US$399 “Never Surrender” sneakers.
The repeat presidential candidate also claims to have earned at least US$100,000 from digital trading cards depicting him as a cowboy, superhero and astronaut.
Provided Trump doesn’t next appear with a polyester ranunculus in his lapel, even those ubiquitous neon plastic gerberas suddenly seem quite classy.
