Kate Betts has worked at some of fashion’s most influential magazines but there was a time when she didn’t know what career path to take.

She’s happy now that she picked Paris.

The award-winning fashion journalist moved to the City of Lights while in her 20s.

She’d just graduated from college and knew she wanted to be a journalist, but that was it. How and where she would do it evaded her.

“I had travelled to Paris after high school and had fallen in love with the city and culture and the whole French way of life,” the 51-year-old said.

“I had that in the back of my mind and when I graduated from college I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have a plan.

“I didn’t want to go to law school or medical school or work in an ad agency like my friends. I knew I wanted to work as a journalist, but didn’t have a job, so I thought I would go to Paris.”

Ms Betts will give a talk at Rosewood Tucker’s Point tonight and sign copies of My Paris Dream, the book she wrote based on her five years in the world’s fashion capital.

She fell in love with the European city on her first visit as a teenager. By the time she moved there to live in 1986, she was desperate to find herself. “That’s an age where you feel a tremendous pressure to plant a flag in the ground and say, ‘This is who I am’, but [the reality is] you don’t know who you are yet,” she said.

She landed an internship at International Herald Tribune and started writing a column for a small, weekly newspaper. She also got jobs freelancing for American magazines but there were times when she wanted to give up. “I wouldn’t say I was waiting around or wasting my time, I was working my butt off, but it was difficult and very hard,” she said.

Two years later she’d improved her French sufficiently that she was able to get a job at one of the world’s fashion authorities, Women’s Wear Daily.

That position opened up many doors when she returned to the US.

“Paris was then, and still very much is, the capital of fashion, so I met a lot of very valuable connections there and that helped me a lot when I came back to New York,” she said.

“I learnt a lot from the couturiers in Paris and designers and those kinds of things in fashion.

“You can only learn those things in France. You can’t learn that in American fashion. They have a great value for the craftsmanship and the really true high fashion.

“I tried to absorb it all. The French have such a specific taste level and their social codes are so entrenched so it’s hard not to absorb it.”

The fashion magazine world isn’t “all about parties and fashion shows and champagne”, she said. Getting to the top was harder than many people would likely assume.

“It is glamorous, but also very tough,” she said. “It’s a tough business, but I was very determined to compete. I was very ambitious.”

Ms Betts learnt a lot about life while there. She didn’t just write about fashion but also French culture, food, arts and travel.

Once she returned to the States, she went on to work at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. There, she reached a milestone as editor — the youngest ever of a national fashion magazine.

In 2003, she was named editor-at-large at Time magazine.

Her work with the influential fashion magazines enabled her to return to Paris a handful of times each year.

“So I got to keep in touch with my life there,” she said. “Obviously I was covering fashion shows and things like that, but I also got to visit my French friends and spent time with them during my trips.”

She’s looking forward to visiting the Island — and even has some family connections here.

“My father’s side of the family is Bermudian,” she explained. “My father’s aunt, so my great aunt, was married to a Bermudian. Her name was Janette and his name was Vail Zuill. One of their children is Cummings Zuill who still lives in Bermuda.”

Ms Betts’ message to readers of My Paris Dream is that it’s okay to get lost, take risks and make your own rules in life. “I think more than ever young people are on this intense treadmill to succeed — get into a better school and get a better job — and I don’t think that career paths are necessarily linear,” she said.

“They involve a lot of mistakes and wrong turns and that’s what I really learnt from my career and I hope they take that lesson from this book.”

She’ll sign copies of her book at 6pm. For more information e-mail callan.bassett@rosewoodhotels.com or telephone 298-6914.