Did you miss the opening ceremony of the Rugby World Cup on September 8, before the France-New Zealand match? If so, you missed an enchanting fresco of rural France. You missed the Rooster Man and Jean Miche, the baker on a bicycle whose name is a play on the French word for loaf, miche, and the typically French name, Michel. You also missed two stars of the chanson française, Zaz, as a chanteuse, and Vianney, as a troubadour. The accordion, too, made an appearance of course.
You also missed one hell of a fashion show. Miche the baker, played by French A-list actor Jean Dujardin, wasn't dressed for a big night out, but rather for an early morning spent kneading dough in the boutique's basement. He wore a white undershirt, or Marcel, symbolic of manual labor, imbued with the perspiration of the working man, the scent of patriotism. Indeed, it was a Frenchman, Marcel Eisenberg, the owner of a hosiery factory, who designed the tank top in the 19th century.
On his head, or rather mostly in his hand, Miche the bread king also had a flat cap. The British call this a newsboy cap, because once upon a time it was the headgear worn by young boys delivering newspapers. The Americans call it a golf cap, because it used to be such a common sight on the course and New Zealanders call it a cheese cutter cap, because the local cheesemongers used to wear them. In France, it's called a casquette plate (just a plain old flat cap), but the term gavroche is perfectly acceptable and far more evocative – you're thinking Les Misérables, aren't you?
For one night only, Dujardin also returned to the accessory that made his name in The Artist: the pencil mustache. Experts would no doubt have called it a double pencil mustache, as it was made up of two sections of hair, and moreover saluted the obvious effort made to achieve such a clean result. As for Dujardin, who is about to shoot a Zorro series for French TV, he'll have plenty more time to enjoy revisiting his facial hair.
Alongside this panorama of days gone by, the omnipresence of the plastic bottle was jarring. The four visible in the picture above alone signify how hot it was in the Stade de France that night, as Paris melted under a heatwave, and that the newfound reusable bottle reflex is not quite cemented in place yet. Or perhaps this too was a nod to nostalgia – there was a time when plastic bottles, first marketed in 1947 and popularized in the 1970s, were seen as a major advance in civilization, bringing down prices and making everyday life easier. Times have changed, not that you'd know it from this ceremony.