by Lisa Chaney
At the dress rehearsal, almost everything was wrong. In Gabrielle’s case, this meant half the costumes. Serge Lifar would later say, “They were not costumes conceived for dancing.” Gabrielle simply hadn’t appreciated the necessity of adapting her clothes to encompass the choreography. Unable to try them before the dress rehearsal, the dancers discovered it was impossible to move in them properly. The female lead, Lydia Sokolova, wore Gabrielle’s bright pink knitted swimsuit, but it was loosely fitted and made it difficult for her partner to get a hold on her in the various throws and catches. (Sokolova — real name Hilda Munnings — became the first English member of the Ballets Russes in 1913, dancing the demanding female lead in the 1920 revival of The Rite of Spring.) Sokolova’s fake-pearl stud earrings — to become one of the fashion accessories of the twenties — were so heavy that, apparently, she could barely hear the music. And the head-hugging bathing cap Gabrielle had her wear soon became a must for any fashionable swimmer.
Diaghilev would also ask Gabrielle to step in on a number of productions to update the dancers’ costumes. This included bringing right up to date the fashionable hostess in Diaghilev and Poulenc’s Les biches (1924) and redesigning the three muses’ costumes for Apollon musagète (1929). These were beautifully simple tricot tunics, with neckties from the House of Charvet winding around the dancers’ bodies. In these productions, for the most part, Gabrielle was uninterested in personal glory and became just as involved as the rest of the company in contributing to their success.
The problems with Le Train Bleu’s dress rehearsal appeared insurmountable to Diaghilev, and he had fled up to the last row of the balcony, asking what on earth they could put on that evening instead. However, all the dancers and the stagehands, and Diaghilev, Nijinska, Cocteau, Gabrielle and the dressers, stayed on in the theater that afternoon and effectively remade the ballet. Among the radical changes, Gabrielle pulled apart and redesigned half of her modish beach clothes. These were then resewn by the dressers in a very few hours. Somehow, everything was done, the curtain went up and on that evening of June 13, 1924, Le Train Bleu was judged as “distinctly new and modern,” and a great success.
With le tout Paris and a good number of artists in the audience, Cocteau and Diaghilev had brought off a mix of theater, dance, music, pantomime and satire. It fell way outside any classical definition of ballet, whose traditional siting had been in the unreal worlds of myth or fairy tale. It wasn’t simply that these two agents provocateurs, Diaghilev and Cocteau, had freed ballet and produced a spectacle based on “the powerful charm of the pavement.” As in Parade, they had once again created a new and entirely modern kind of theatrical performance. They had made another firm step in the development of modernist art, based above all on aspects of contemporary life. In this context, it was entirely appropriate that the couturier Coco Chanel, who was synonymous with modernity, should be the person who designed the ballet’s costumes.
Integral to Diaghilev’s obsession with every aspect of his company’s performances was his fierce perfectionism about his dancers’ costumes. As a result, during the twenties, Gabrielle and Misia Sert became his extra “eyes.” Acting in a sense as superintendents of taste, they had the last word on the “correctness” of colors, lengths, decoration and the general design of the costumes. And following Gabrielle’s first mistakes, most important, they asked the question, did the costumes “work” in movement?
Between 1922 and 1937, Gabrielle designed the costumes for several more Cocteau productions, including Orpheus, Oedipus Rex and The Knights of the Round Table. She was also invited to make the costumes for several films, such as Jean Renoir’s famed La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) in 1939. Renoir’s biting satire of French upper-class society, evoking the country’s disjointedness in the lead-up to the Second World War, is regarded by many as one of the greatest films ever made. Gabrielle could present herself as opinionated in the extreme, yet she spoke very little of the work she carried out for the theater and films. Over the years, interviewers would ask about some of the remarkable performances for which she had made the costumes, an activity so different from her accustomed working life. But Gabrielle remained frustratingly unforthcoming, hardly referring to the illustrious company present at opening nights or to her involvement in these important works of art. When asked later about the first night of Le Train Bleu, for example, she wanted only to recall the artists. By implication, when it came to art, for Gabrielle, high society didn’t matter.
21. At the Center
For Gabrielle there was an absolute distinction between the skills and technique of the artisan, as opposed to the workings of an artist. While she herself was always staunchly opposed to calling herself an artist, one also remembers she was a woman of paradox.
As the twentieth century wore on and the distinction between artist and craftsman became ever more blurred, Gabrielle found this mistaken and pretentious, insisting ever more vehemently that she was only an artisan, a dressmaker and not an artist. She declared that fashion should be discussed “without poetry, without literature. A dress is neither a tragedy, nor a painting; it is a charming and ephemeral creation, not an everlasting work of art.”1 She insisted that while couture may have an awareness of art, it is only a technique, a business. Whatever the success of their creations, Gabrielle believed that did not “justify couturiers persuading themselves or thinking of themselves — or dressing or posing — as artists.”2
She drew a clear distinction between craft and art. And while, paradoxically, Gabrielle had a good deal of the artist in her, she singled out the couturier’s instinct for their times:
Creation is an artistic gift, a collaboration of the couturier with his or her own times… It is not by learning to make dresses that they become successful (making dresses and creating fashion are different things); fashion does not exist only in dresses; fashion is in the air, it is borne on the wind, you can sense it, you can breathe it, it’s in the sky and on the highway, it’s everywhere, it has to do with ideas, with social mores, with events…
Fashion should express the place, the moment. This is where the commercial adage “the client is always right” gets its precise and clear meaning; that meaning demonstrates that fashion, like opportunity, is something that has to be grabbed by the hair.3
She would add that “fashion roams around the streets, unaware that it exists, up to the moment that I, in my own way, may have expressed it. Fashion, like landscape, is a state of mind, by which I mean my own.”4
If one is searching for what made Gabrielle stand out from her contemporaries, the source of her originality won’t be found by looking for any one particular thing. It lay in a combination of elements, at the heart of which was Gabrielle’s profound instinct for her own period. Her powers of observation, her intuitiveness, her inherited shrewdness as the trader’s daughter — these gave her an unusually alert sense of “what was in the air.” In combination with her intelligence, these qualities made her a remarkable adept at interpreting and presenting their own epoch to her contemporaries.
Gabrielle’s great gift lay in paying ruthless attention to the texture of the moment. If fashion can be said to illuminate or articulate that, then that was Gabrielle. Acting as a barometer, she gave her world what it wanted, just before it recognized the need. Her work was always just that one step ahead because she intuited her times better than most of those around her.
For Gabrielle, the genius of the couturier lay in that quality that kept her so vibrantly alive. This was the ability to anticipate: “More than a great statesman the great couturier is a man who has the future in his mind… Fashion is not an art, it is a job. If art makes use of fashion, then that is sufficient praise.” And then she justifies the necessity to follow fashion, the necessity to follow one’s own times: “It’s best to follow fashion, even if it is ugly. To detach oneself from it is immediately to become a comical character, which is terrifying. No one is powerful enough to be more powerful than fashion.”5
These intelligent pronouncements, some of the best ever made about fashion, also reveal much about Gabrielle’s motivation. They arose from a certain modesty about her own work, and a deep respect for what she believed was the work of the real artist. At the same time, she was never in awe of the great artists of her day. Associating happily with them, she was correct in her belief that in some important sense, she was their peer.
Gabrielle’s sense of invention now led her to develop a rich new seam of creativity. In 1924, she set up her own jewelry workshops, and Comte Etienne de Beaumont — who for some time had had jewelry made to his design by the best artisans, as presents for friends — became her manager. Gabrielle also asked François Hugo, already the director of her jersey factory at Asnières, to make her some jewelry designs. As there was already an extensive demand for replica jewelry, Gabrielle could turn to a wide range of highly skilled artisans, such as Madame Gripoix and her husband, famous costume jewelers, originally for Poiret. Gabrielle’s inspiration was diverse. For all her austerity of design, she loved the exotic, and was also fascinated by Renaissance and Byzantine designs. During the twenties, she added many strings of fake pearls — and great colored stones in the form of necklaces, brooches and pendants — to her understated clothes. And in the late twenties, she even sparked a fashion for asymmetrical earrings: one black and one white pearl. (One of the ways she signaled that her jewelry was imitation was by the unnatural size of some of her stones.)
Carmel Snow, who would become the highly influential editor of Harper’s Bazaar, wrote of her sister Christine’s return from Paris in that decade. When she showed the female members of the family her Parisian wardrobe, her mother was appalled at the Chanel dress made of jersey and decorated with some dubious fur:
Worse than that, Christine festooned her dress with ropes and ropes of artificial pearls. In the first place, no lady wore anything but a single strand of pearls before eight o’clock in the evening. In the second place, they were real. Christine admitted that Coco Chanel herself wore fabulous jewels with her own jersey dresses and sweaters, but that everyone in Paris who couldn’t afford such a display was now wearing Chanel’s imitation jewelry.6
But Gabrielle also wore this imitation jewelry. Indeed, she famously made a habit of mixing it with her own fabulous jewels, many of them received as gifts from her lovers. Imitation jewelry had been made for the less well off for thousands of years. But where these jewels had traditionally copied the “real thing,” Gabrielle’s oversized jewelry was different in that it was ostentatiously fake. And her prestige was such that her clients followed her; women who usually owned valuable collections of precious real jewels wanted Gabrielle’s imitations. She believed that
Expensive jewelry does not improve the woman who wears it… if she looks plain she will remain so… the mania to want to dazzle disgusts me; jewelry is not meant to arouse envy; still less astonishment. It should remain an ornament and an amusement… Jewelry from jewelry shops bores me; I had the idea of getting François Hugo to design clip-on earrings, brooches.. 7
In order to look right, it had to be imitation. Typical of Gabrielle’s capacity for paradox, she believed that too much money killed luxury. She also had many of her priceless gems dismantled and reordered to her own designs. Later, the renowned jeweler Robert Goossens would say, “I took apart a lot of Mademoiselle’s jewels. I don’t know if they were Grand Duke Dmitri’s or the Duke of Westminster’s, but I remember a ruby necklace… from Cartier, out of which I made earrings. Mademoiselle would give them away as presents… They were unique pieces.”8
During the daytime, Gabrielle often wore a mass of jewelry, while in the evening she might wear none at all. She had a more sophisticated understanding of luxury than many of the wealthy, and said, “Jewelry should be looked on innocently, naively, rather as one enjoys the sight of an apple tree in blossom by the side of the road as one speeds by in a motor car. This is how ordinary people perceive it; for them jewelry denotes social standing.”9 So it does for many of the rich. While Gabrielle was at pains to turn the snobbery of jewelry on its head, she was also ahead of her time in challenging the idea of what is “real.”
Gabrielle worked extremely hard, turning out her two large collections every year, and the orders only grew. In 1924, when she had something like three thousand workers, her perfume, Chanel № 5, had been selling steadily from her salons in Paris, Deauville and Biarritz. Exactly how much demand there was for more perfume is unclear, but Gabrielle wanted to sell more. She was now advised by an acquaintance of some years, Théophile Bader, the owner of the largest Paris department store, Galeries Lafayette. He said he wouldn’t sell Gabrielle’s perfume until she had a much larger quantity than Ernest Beaux was presently making down in Grasse. Bader said he knew just the people Gabrielle should meet. These were two young brothers, Pierre and Paul Wertheimer. Intelligent, hardheaded businessmen, the Wertheimers owned Bourjois perfumeries, the largest cosmetics and fragrance company in France, and were intent upon building on their father’s considerable success. Apparently, the Wertheimers and Gabrielle met at the Longchamp racetrack, and there they struck a deal.
While Paul was a more retiring personality, Pierre’s charm made his handsomeness almost irresistible. He loved horses, women and collecting and, in business, was said to be ruthless. Like the Rothschilds, the Wertheimers were a long-Gallicized Jewish family, who traced their roots back to Germany. They were also diligently discreet about the extent of their financial empire — a discretion that would, over the years, manifest itself in the manner of their control over Gabrielle’s empire.
For more than half a century, Pierre Wertheimer and Gabrielle were to carry on a tempestuous and complex relationship in which they alternately needed and loathed each other but were never able to part. Battling over their differences in a sometimes bitter struggle, they each tried tirelessly to wrest an atom of respect from their partner-opponent, whom they loved but also hated. Almost in the same breath, Gabrielle would be able to refer to Pierre Wertheimer as “that crook who cheated me” and “dear Pierre.”
During their early meetings, Gabrielle apparently wasn’t really interested in the details of the transaction. She would later say of herself, “I’ve conducted business without being a businesswoman,” and that it bored her to death to think about such things as sheets of figures. It wasn’t that she wasn’t capable of counting money in the till at the end of the day, but her capacity to make vast sums was more instinctive than that. Gabrielle’s moneymaking ability derived from her wily peasant ancestors and her mad urge to create. She could say, rightly, that “I am not in the least frivolous, I have a boss’s soul,” but that same soul was also deeply creative and questing. She was not an artist, but her manner of invention was, more often than not, in the spirit of one.
The woman of whom Picasso would say she was “the most practical in the world” would herself say, “Order is a subjective phenomenon.” This was the reaction of the creator who understood perfectly Apollinaire’s words: “Bringing forth order from chaos, that’s what creation is all about.”
When Gabrielle was informed by the Wertheimers that if she wanted them to distribute her perfumes, they would have to form a company, she is supposed to have said, “Form a company if you like, but I’m not interested in getting involved in your business… I’ll be content with 10 per cent of the stock.” Over time, this statement would be the cause of much disagreement. Gabrielle had meant 10 percent of the perfume’s profits, but the Wertheimers interpreted it differently. In future years, Gabrielle’s lawyer, René de Chambrun, would become convinced that it was fear of losing control over her couture house that motivated her to sign away her perfume for 10 percent of her already large business.
The partnership set up between the Wertheimers and Gabrielle in 1924 would be characterized by bickering, antipathy and a large number of lawsuits. But their relationship also came to include both mutual respect and real friendship, albeit often g
rudging. Nevertheless, Gabrielle’s leitmotif for the following half a century was to be: “I signed something in 1924; I let myself be swindled.” Certainly, there would be examples of injustices perpetrated upon her by her partners, but on discovering, for example, that on introducing her to the Wertheimers, Bader had received 20 percent of the partnership (not uncommon in business), Gabrielle felt this was patronizing in the extreme. All the same, she was forever machinating against the Wertheimers and over the years gave just as good as she got. Quite possibly, Gabrielle had been “swindled,” but she was also unwilling to acknowledge the snares involved in the bargain she had agreed to when initiating her relationship with her middlemen, the Wertheimers.
In all likelihood, notwithstanding Gabrielle’s instinct for her times, she didn’t quite comprehend the ways in which this was a novel relationship, one that would gradually make her part of a new kind of company. The complexity of her business relations with the Wertheimers went way beyond that between the market trader and his suppliers. Its ramifications were more complex than any of the biggest international enterprises of the past, where a merchant and his agents might have traveled to the farthest corners of the earth in caravans of horses or camels, or onboard ship, armed with their negotiating skills, their contacts and their ability to strike a bargain with their suppliers.