ELLE meets Ines de la Fressange

When you're a model, friends with Karl Lagerfeld, chief muse at Roger Vivier and known across the globe for having the kind of effortless style that makes the rest of us green with envy, your opinion matters. Ines de la Fressange is just such a person, and so prolific were the requests that she got for her tips on nailing Parisian chic and her favourite shopping haunts that there was only one solution - to write a book filled with the answers.

'Listen, it’s a boring book but it’s a huge best seller! It’s such a surprise,' Ines told us when we met her in Selfridges yesterday. We can't agree that it's boring but 'Le Parisienne' has certainly been a hit across the channel and now a translated version is hitting stores here. Written with her friend and ELLE fashion writer Sophie Gauchet, it's your need-to-know guide to injecting some je ne sais pas into your wardrobe.

So what's the secret? 'It’s true that women in France they don’t know anything about fashion and they don’t care about fashion but when you look at them in the street they have something,' Ines told us. 'In magazines like ELLE you have to show the latest trends and what’s going on in the fashion world and it’s good to see it and discover all that, but when you wake up in the early morning, even if you saw the last whatever collection you just don’t know how to dress up. And now it's easy to find great clothes everywhere but we all have this impression that we don’t know what to wear and the idea was to show solutions to women to help them. And simple solutions, it’s more about styling.'

'People are all talking about Parisian women and together we tried to figure out what was the Parisian style. Like keeping an old coat, in America for