My Paris Dream: A fashion journalist on style and slang

As a young Princeton graduate, Kate Betts dreamed of moving to a different country to be a foreign correspondent.

She set her sights on Paris and with the encouraging words of her mother, “You can always come back,” she left and didn’t look back.

Betts caught the attention of John Fairchild, editor and chief of Women’s Wear Daily.Since then, Betts has worked in the fashion industry at Vogue and at Harper’s Bazaar.

She now has a book about her experience in fashion journalism called “My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine.”

Betts realized that she wanted to pursue fashion journalism while talking to Yves Saint Laurent.

“That was a real moment for me because I realized that this is such an interesting subculture and such an interesting group of people and characters and that you didn’t necessarily have to be reporting from Hanoi to be considered a serious journalist,” she says.

“You could really write about anything, and if you did it in an interesting way and if the characters were compelling enough, then that was enough for journalism.”