Paris is reemerging this week from a lockdown that began in mid-March as the country was impacted by the coronavirus crisis. After two months of closures, stores are reopening and offices are filling back up with employees, but the deconfinement, as the French put it, will be slow-going. There’s a risk of another quarantine if cases begin rising again.
Designer Vanessa Seward and her musician husband Bertrand Burgalat—one of Paris’s most creative and best-dressed couples—spent their confinement at home in Paris with their daughter Jacqueline. Unsurprisingly, there was much music in their apartment. “We listened to a lot of musicals (Annie, Camelot, My Fair Lady, Oliver! etc) as our nine year old is in that phase right now,” Seward reports. “We also heard a lot of Bertrand’s lockdown single as he prepared to launch it. The song, ‘Vous Etes Ici,’ was meant to be part of his coming album, but the words were so resonant with the present situation that he decided to release it on the 28th of April.”
View the full playlist on Spotify here.
There was live music in the flat, too. Burgalat bought a chromatic harmonica earlier this year and spent quite a bit of the downtime practicing. “It caused slight damage to Vanessa and Jacqueline’s ears,” he laughs. All joking aside, Jacqueline seems to have inherited her father’s musical inclinations. “Since the lockdown she has started to enjoy playing piano and practices extensively,” Burgalat says. “I am amazed by her progress; I realize I’m going to have to work hard not to be out-runned.”
The playlist Seward and Burgalat created for Vogue came together quite spontaneously. “It’s songs which we love and [others that] have a relation with the extreme kind of moods one can go through during the confinement,” Seward explains. “Bertrand also made sure there was a balance between genres, and between past and present music.” An eclectic approach has long been part of his musical m.o., while Seward’s fashion sense is steady: Her look riffs on the 1970s bourgeois archetype. “What I’ve always loved since I met Bertrand is that he’s very free in his musical tastes, so I was able to drop all the songs and groups I forced myself to like to try to be cool,” she says. “We’ve tried to pass this on to Jacqueline.” Hence, those musicals.
Enjoy their lockdown playlist here and #staysafe, #wearamask.
View the full playlist on Apple Music here.
To hear more of our playlists, visit the Vogue channel on Spotify and on Apple Music: