Wearable technology may be all the rage but wearable publicity is a lot more fun! I must be one of the luckiest of authors as I have had a scarf designed especially to accompany my latest book, Les Parisiennes; How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940’s. It’s a fabulous pure silk scarf made in Italy but dreamt up here in London by a brilliant young designer, Emma Greenhill. Emma offered to design the scarf as she started her fashion career in Paris and spent a year there working for John Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld, really getting to grips with what it takes to create a Parisienne! Having learned that luxury matters, (she subsequently worked in fashion PR for many years for a variety of big names, most recently Hussein Chalayan), now that she is setting up her own company she is determined only to use luxury fabrics and has her scarves made in the same Italian factory that manufactures items for Gucci and Alexander McQueen – as you can tell as soon as you touch them.

It is entirely appropriate that she has made a luxury fashion item to accompany this book as being stylish, even during the Occupation when shortages were dire, was anything but trivial for Parisian women; they believed that looking your best at all times was crucial initially as a way of showing support for their husbands and sons at the front, just as the magazines told them they must, but then, when defeat overwhelmed them, continuing to try and look their best as a way of not succumbing to their German occupiers. It was even a form of resistance, to show that they had not been ground down, and it kept thousands of frightened and impoverished women employed in their ateliers, beading, attaching fur or inserting pockets and linings. So, when shortages of fabrics meant new clothes were almost impossible, women spent hours cutting down old clothes, sometimes the suits of their missing husbands, or turning two bags into one, covering wooden shoes with fabrics and creating extravagant creations on their heads that passed as hats. Many people commented on the vegetables, flowers and cascades of ribbons that now appeared on the brims of hats. So keen were Parisiennes to appear fashionable at all times that, even as they arrived in the brutal camp of Ravensbrück, the other women prisoners already inside muttered and whispered about “Those Frenchwomen”…one woman smuggled in a powder compact – an unheard of luxury – while another wore an Hermès silk scarf.

The beautiful limited edition scarf Emma has designed for Les Parisiennes has at its heart a woman on a bicycle since women in wartime Paris went everywhere on bicycles – private cars were impossible to maintain and there was no fuel. Yet, as women were legally not allowed to wear trousers at the time (too masculine!) many designers made a form of divided skirt or culottes, which were really trousers in disguise! There are many other symbols in Emma’s scarf such as the caged bird with plumage in the three colours of the French tricolour which was a brooch designed by Cartier to represent how Parisians felt during the Occupation. But, come the Liberation, the bird was freed as the cage doors were opened. As I wear my scarf I shall proclaim to the world Parisian women certainly know how to do fashion.

Les Parisiennes can be bought at all good bookshops and on line in all the usual places www.emmagreenhill.com to see a selection of Emma’s scarves.