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Last year, I was having dinner at a very cool place in Paris’s 20^th arrondissement when the most divine woman walked in and stood at the bar with her son and husband. She was wearing a louche white linen pantsuit, wonderfully messy hair and one of the freest and freely given smiles I’d ever seen.

I couldn’t stop looking at her. I was struck by just how self-possessed she was, not because of some item of clothing (though the suit was great) or beauty trick (I have always loved a slightly dishevelled ‘do), but for the radiant smile that she wore. It looked like it felt so good to her, and I decided then and there to channel “that woman at the bar in Paris” and smile more.

It’s a work in progress. I grew up in the era of Anna Wintour’s reign at Vogue, when the editor’s sunglasses came to represent a level of inscrutability and distance. I’ve had a sort of serious resting face for as long as I can remember, and I do hold back from smiling. Maybe it’s because I read someplace that it gives you wrinkles, that serious equals intelligent, that my teeth should be whiter or that smiling makes you just a little too vulnerable. At times, I felt like a smiling fool, an eager politician, like I was faking it or doing a “monkey smile” as my partner calls it, which is that forced smile that people put on when they really mean to say “Don’t eat me.”

Stepping away from playing it cool – “Blue Steel,” pouty duck lips or the pervasive limited-emotion face – takes practice. While a smile for a photo is nice, it’s important to take it one step further and think more about bringing one into every room you enter. In a world of unceasing bad news, there’s something quite revolutionary about an authentic smile. Now more than ever, it feels important to betray what makes us happy. The smile has become counterculture.

Wintour’s stoicism was a contrast to one of her predecessors, Diana Vreeland, who was known to cheer and clap when a mannequin emerged in an ensemble that moved her. Some of fashion’s most memorable images, from a young Kate Moss on the cover of The Face magazine to decades of Benetton ads, feature wide, infectious grins. I once did a laughter yoga class, where you induce laughter, which becomes, by way of the brilliant ridiculousness of the whole idea, real laughter. I was told the body doesn’t know the difference. I felt fantastic for two days.

When the fashion model Awar Odhiang closed Matthieu Blazy’s debut Chanel collection for spring 2026 in October, she did it with a smile on her face that could have launched a thousand ships (it had no trouble launching tens of thousands of Instagram posts). It was a moment of pure joy that led to a collective smile for a new moment in fashion. Having met Odhiang years ago, at a gala in Calgary when she was just breaking into the modelling business, I knew the finale moment was not a ploy, affectation or choreographed stunt. It was totally her, and smiles have been sneaking back onto the runway ever since.

The smile muse that my woman in Paris reminded me of is the late singer, actor and director Jane Birkin. Her distinct gap-toothed grin became a signature element of her effortless style, a mix of English innocence and ’60s cool, which formed a look that would become the embodiment of French chic. Even as she aged, her authenticity always shone through, beautifully bucking cosmetic trends. “Keep smiling – it takes 10 years off,” she once quipped.

I met Birkin once, after a concert in Toronto in 2011. The moment is immortalized in a grainy photo I have printed out and stuck to my entryway mirror. The concert was glorious and I had waited after the show in hopes of meeting her. For reasons I’ll never understand, my then-boyfriend and I were the only ones. She eventually emerged in a North Face parka, her namesake Hermès bag and her beautiful smile, an expression that made me feel as if we were old pals reuniting.

Looking at that photo, I see how I’m holding back a proper smile, even though I’m bursting with joy. And then there’s Jane, next to me, almost goading me to let it out.