The Giraffe Who Enchanted Paris (and Took the Fashion World by Storm)

The French, bless their hearts, can create fashion out of just about anything or so it seems to me. Take for instance - giraffes. Long neck. Stubby ossicones. Tufted hair. Pouty mouths.

What can be fashionable about a giraffe, you say?

Central Africa, 1824: A baby giraffe is captured in the Ethiopian highlands by Arab hunters, then put on the back of a dromedary (one-humped camel) and sent to Sennar in Sudan. She is a baby and too young to walk and her mother has been butchered. She now needs around the clock care as well as love and milk. Thereafter, she is put on a felucca to Khartoum.

Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.

Khartoum, where the White Nile meets the Blue Nile.

Khartoum, where a slave trade flourished for many, many years.

Zarafa grows up to be a beautiful Numbian twelve-foot giraffe, who happens to be at ease around humans, who have cared for her her whole life. But her life - like her capture - is an unreal, unnatural, and dangerous adventure and soon, she will travel again.

This time, cross a sea on a brigantine (two-masted ship) to go to another land.

Zarafa and her handler

North of Sudan, in Egypt - trouble is brewing. Muhammed Ali, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, is in a political & diplomatic hot spot. Muhammed Ali is in a war against the Greeks and fears becoming unpopular with the Europeans. When his French consul general & private advisor, Bernardino Drovetti suggests a royal gift from Egypt to France, Muhammed Ali jumps on the opportunity. To appease France, Muhammed Ali decides to bequeath an exotic, delightful hitherto unseen gift. He decides to send a giraffe to the new King of France, Charles X.

Zarafa begins a journey again - this time from Egypt to Paris. After sailing down the Nile from Khartoum (Sudan) to Cairo (Egypt), Zarafa boards another ship to cross the full width of the Mediterranean, which is no mean feat. According to sources, it took a full three weeks. On the ship are Zarafa, her handlers, cows, and lucky charms and amulets for good luck. More than that, to accommodate her neck, a cutout is made on the deck of the ship.

From central Africa, down the Nile, onto the streets of fashionable Paris.

One can only imagine how Zarafa must have felt - her head sticking above the deck of the ship and the rest of her body below deck as the ship rolled through the waves.

She survives the voyage to dock in Marseille. Then begins her walk from Marseille (south of France) to Paris (north of France) through a magnificent countryside, past the glorious fields of sunflowers Van Gogh would paint 60 years later, roughly 550 miles. She wears a two-piece taffeta raincoat to protect her from the spring rains and the founding professor of France's natural history museum, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, accompanied her. Zarafa could have wished for no greater regard, respect, or care. With her were guards, cows, and handlers.

From Sudan to Egypt to Marseille to Paris... to the royal French court.

And after a journey of 4000 miles, she entered Paris and immediately created a sensation. A crowd of 30,000 gathered to take a look at her. They wondered what sort of creature she was - a cross between a camel (the long neck) and leopard (the spots)?

So many people saw her that King Charles X felt he was the last Frenchman to see Zarafa.

People named their hotels and establishments after her. They embroidered a fleur-de-lis on her raincoat. Sometimes, she would walk in the afternoon and in the evening so folks had a chance or two to see her. In the palace, she ate rose petals straight out of the royal hand.

Read what Ellena Passarello (a brilliant writer) writes about Zarafa.

When the party neared Paris, King Charles complained he’d be the last Frenchman to lay eyes on his royal gift. He wanted to meet her on the road, but his wife advised him to act like a king and let the giraffe come to him...

Though she stayed at the Jardin for her remaining seventeen years (with a live-in handler who slept by her every night), Zarafa’s first year in residence was a mob scene. A steady stream of artisans arrived at her tower to sketch her. One ink-drawn headshot has Zarafa in profile, peering under her eyelashes, gamine like a twelve-foot Natalie Portman...

By that fall, everything in Paris was à la girafe: serving ware, confections, songs, and skits. George Sand noted in a letter that her son’s stuffed giraffe toy looked “exactly similar” to the belle of the Jardin. Flaubert once wrote to Sand after a laborious day that he was as tired as Zarafa’s handler must be, post-grooming. Plans were made to erect giraffe-shaped gas lamps around the stock exchange, and, in a strange bit of slang, those stricken with that year’s winter grippe were asked, How goes the giraffe?

A magazine spread on that season’s cravats featured a high-necked collar and a low red silk knot, and ladies stepped out with ribboned amulets at their necks, modeled after the charm Zarafa was given for her sea voyage and that she still sported in Paris. Journal des Dames touted the season’s hot color—“giraffe belly”—and said the must-have sleeve was a yellow puff gathered at the elbow (an homage to Zarafa’s knobby knees). Hats were ordered in giraffe-belly moiré and plush, or trimmed in satin giraffe-yellow cord. Parisians didn’t just want to own the giraffe image; they wanted to become her.

So they combed that giraffe onto their own heads, ordering the friseurs to pile their hair forward and grease it with bear-fat pomatum. They held rods in the fire and curled wet locks around them—piling their tresses up and up from the crown to the ceiling; hair giddily bolstered with wire, toupees, and ribbons; tall enough so that they had to sit on the carriage floors when they rode to parties—lifting themselves toward the beast of the world that France had the greatest desire to see.

And there we have it.

The giraffe who enchanted Paris and took the fashion world by storm.

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