les bobos de paris

PARIS—

Pick up a Paris newspaper anytime and you’ll notice an obsession with bobos.  Paris is increasingly a city of bobos—in French, that means "BOurgeois BOhème".

Bobo sightings began in the French press around 2000, but most reports failed to acknowledge that the term didn't have its origins in France.

It actually began with author, to David Brooks, who coined the phrase in his book "Bobos in Paradise" Bobos are "highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success." 


Bobos are noted for their aversion to conspicuous consumption while emphasizing the "necessities" of life

What They Do:

Bobos—the real ones, anyway—work almost exclusively in fashion, marketing, advertising, and the music and art industries.

Photo Source

The Paris bobos took advantage of the cheap housing and restructured the neighborhoods from the inside out. Run-down buildings were transformed into posh apartments and office buildings. New restaurants and businesses appeared. Wealthy foreigners and families moved in. It was thus that the fabric and population of East Paris began to change drastically.

Many years ago, the streets of the Left Bank or around St Germain de Pres would have had you directly in the heart of the Bobo epicentre but these days, both of these arrondissements and the surrounding fringes are more taken over with copies of Bobo as hundreds of tourists flock to cafes along the Boulevard St. Germain only because this is where every travel book tells you to go as it is where the Bobo crowd used to be. Nowadays, these Bobo pockets are getting harder and harder to find or stumble across because you really need a local Parisien to be by your side and on my last visit to Paris. These days you might want to head for the Ninth Arrondissement — citadel of bobo cool.

Source: