Imagine your shopping list runs like this: jeans, magazines, shampoo, CDs, mineral water. If you're in Paris, you can get them all in one store, Colette on rue St Honore - so long as you like your jeans by Chloe with embroidered leopards on the back pockets, your magazines seriously avant-garde and in Dutch or Japanese, your shampoo by Kiehls, your music new French disco and your water from a Peruvian leyline spring. Oh, and you don't mind splashing out the best part of £500 sterling (€770).
This is lifestyle boutique shopping and it is probably the future, so get with it. All over the world, the phenomenon is springing up in various guises - in the grandscale new DKNY store in New York, which stocks vintage flea market finds alongside the clothes, the candles and the magazines; on a smaller scale in London, where Soho's The Pineal Eye stocks everything the truly cutting-edge household needs, from cult Japanese polaroid cameras to "difficult" clothes by the cream of Belgian design talent.
In Paris, lifestyle boutiques are everywhere already. And while the phenomenally successful Colette caters for the very wealthiest and hippest, it has spawned many imitators since it opened two years ago, so there are plenty of equivalent stores for less haughty tastes and bank balances, if you're too old to hang out with the Day-Glo backpacked euro-kids in Les Halles but too poor to feel comfortable browsing in Hermes.
Best of all, these stores are fun. You have to have a pretty warped idea of happiness to enjoy spending time in the traditional acerbic boutiques of the rue de Faubourg St Honore, where the assistants are either sycophantic or supercilious, depending on your shoes.
I'm happy to report that I visited each of the shops mentioned here wearing trainers (not a common sight in chi-chi Paris), looked at almost every price tag and didn't buy a thing, and in every shop, the assistants were friendly. Some of them even admired my trainers: one of the brilliant things about newly hip Paris is that the trainer shops are still, on the whole, rubbish, so they are very easily impressed. Paris's lifestyle boutiques divide roughly into the minimalist - white walls, Helmut Lang and clothes-as-art - and the eccentrically kitsch.
The first genre includes Onward, 147 boulevard St Germain: the windows currently feature pink tulle skirts painted with toy cars, by Tokunaga Shunichi, and the ground floor is offbeat accessory heaven.
As I walk in, the assistant is explaining to a customer who can't work out how one is supposed to carry a bag that it is, in fact, a scarf. There are Dolce & Gabbana diamante belts (£105) and bags (around £200) by hip French duo Isabelle Puech and Benoit Jamin. Upstairs in the clothes section, I am left in peace to stroke a floorlength pink mohair poncho by Tom van Lingen (£480).
Similarly cool, calm and cavernous is Zampa, at 10 rue Herold. As you walk in, the first display is of candles and glass candlesticks for around £5 - putting the cheap stuff by the door to stop you feeling intimidated might be an easy ploy but it works for me. Beauty products by French company Nuxe and oxblood leather bags by 75000 (around £70) sit alongside ChiChi Carlotta glam hair-clips (£5), postcards and magazines.
There are more white walls at Spleen, 3 rue des Rosiers, where young French designer Paola Frani sells her clothes. Here, what I think is a yellow pen turns out to be a cartridge for a lightstick necklace (£50) by Parisian jewellery designer Olive. At Sisso, 20 rue Malher, a rolled-up sleeping bag turns out to be a puffa cape by Nom-Dit (£85), the jewellery is set under glass panels in the floor and there is a good selection of sought-after Louison bags (from around £60).
The real fun starts when you move on to the incense, stetsons, silk and pink flamingos world of the kitsch, eclectic and colourful stores. The most inexpensive is Antoine et Lili, at 87 rue de Seine - the original store in Montmartre, at 90 rue des Martyrs, is bigger, but this one is worth visiting as it's a stone's throw from the rue de Buic, one of the nicest bits of the city. (Catherine Deneuve shops at the morning rue de Buci market, apparently, though she wasn't there when I went.) e is said to be MC Solaar's local, though he didn't show either.)
The street smells of baguettes; inside, Antoine et Lili smells like Camden market, unfortunately, but the eclectic and cheap bounty - Alexandra de Haenon denim bags with mirror beads for under £40, Chinese lucky charm bracelets for £2.50, Antik Batik Chinese silk jackets for £80 - make it well worth it. There are ponchos for around £60 - in fact, there was a poncho in every store I went into, though I didn't see a single person actually wearing one.
Gas, 44 rue Etienne Marcel, and Absinthe, round the corner at 74 rue JJ Rousseau, are also well worth a visit. Both are small, sweetie-coloured - Gas has pink walls and Absinthe lavender - and packed to the rafters with never-seen-before items, like the junk shop of your dreams. At Gas, I discovered where all the models buy the exquisite Carmen-esque shawls in ivory and sky-blue (£120) that they wrap around their jeans. There are little dyed lace camisoles (£28) and romantic Marni-ish bustle skirts in pink tulle (£89).
At Absinthe, there are essential multi-striped long wool scarves by Sissi Helleis (£58) and Jamin Puech feather boas hung, charm bracelet-style, with mother of pearl trinkets and coins. The stock in both of these stores makes Matthew Williamson look like Next. Definitely the most fun you can have in Paris in trainers.
