Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life

by Lisa Chaney

  In Gabrielle’s years without designing, she almost never spoke of it. Events, however, were leading her toward it once again. While she was in New York, she made a point of being introduced to Alex and Tatiana Liberman, who had escaped France to safety in America in 1940. Liberman was both talented and tremendously ambitious, and had risen to become the art director of Vogue. He recalled how Gabrielle’s business manager, Count Koutouzof, introduced to her by Dmitri Pavlovich, had “brought Chanel to our house, and we became great friends.” This was that same Alex Liberman who had charged his Parisian friends to break off their friendship with von Dincklage, shortly before the war.

  Liberman enjoyed Gabrielle’s company: “I loved the Proustian aspect… the stories, the legends, and her involvement with Diaghilev and Picasso and Cocteau and Reverdy. She was a constant lesson in refinement… Tatiana and Chanel got along well on the surface, although I don’t think there was ever much warmth between them.”1 Quite possibly this was because of Gabrielle’s liaison with von Dincklage, who had deceived Tatiana’s close friend Hélène Dessoffy so badly.

  In 1950, Schiaparelli’s sensational style had run its course, and she was obliged to close down her house. Between the First and Second World Wars, some of the most distinguished and influential Parisian couture houses had been directed by women, but several were now gone. Jeanne Lanvin died in 1946; the great Madeleine Vionnet had closed her house in 1939. Admired by Gabrielle, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo, Vionnet had described herself as “an enemy of fashion,” stating that her interest was in expressing a timeless vision of woman.

  The postwar designer Christian Dior, who had shot to overnight fame in 1947, would write that the earliest twentieth-century designers gained variety largely by “trimmings of exquisite craftsmanship.” After the creation and decoration of Poiret:

  It was Madeleine Vionnet and Jeanne Lanvin who finally transformed the profession of couturier, by executing the dresses in their collections with their own hands and scissors. The model became a whole and at last skirt and bodice were cut according to the same principle. Madeleine Vionnet achieved wonders in this direction: she was a genius at employing her material, and invented the famous cut on the cross which gave the dresses of the women between the two wars their softly molded look. Freed from the trimmings of 1900 and decorative motives of Poiret, dresses now depended entirely on their cut.2

  Another woman, Nina Ricci, was one of the best designers for elegant older women, and Germaine Krebs, known as Madame Grès, was a sculptress whose house had opened in 1942. The last of the couturiers to develop a ready-to-wear collection, Grès called it “prostitution.” Christian Dior knew his subject well, describing the interwar period as “the age of the great couturiers. Outstanding among them was Mlle Chanel, who dominated all the rest… In her personality as well as in her taste, she had style, elegance, and authority. From quite different points of view, she and Madeleine Vionnet can claim to be the great creators of modern fashion.”3

  Meanwhile, Marcel Rochas, Lucien Lelong, Jean Patou, Edward Molyneux, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Mainbocher and a handful of other young male designers were now the dominant figures in the couture. At the same time, many commentators agreed with Dior that postwar fashion lacked purpose and was often rather ugly: “Hats were far too large, skirts far too short, jackets far too long, shoes far too heavy… and worst of all there was that dreadful mop of hair raised high above the forehead in front and rippling down the backs of French women on their bicycles.” Appreciating that this zazou style had originated in the desire to “defy the forces of occupation and the austerity of Vichy,” nonetheless, as fashion, Dior found it repellent.4

  Paris had become cut off and impoverished during the war, while American ready-to-wear designers and manufacturers had forged a place amongt the leaders of female taste, and were absolutely set on making New York the world’s new fashion capital. At the same time, with backing from the textile magnate Marcel Boussac, a young Dior set out to reinstate France’s premier role. In February 1947, it was freezing cold and the French press was on strike, yet word had got around that something unusual was about to happen. Dior’s first show, at his elegant avenue Montaigne premises, was oversubscribed. On the day, the crowded salon was tense with anticipation. Society, fashion’s attendants and its commentators were there, including Carmel Snow, the omnipotent American editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Close by was the Vogue team, led by Michel de Brunhoff, his famous joie de vivre never to return after the Nazis had shot his son.

  Suddenly, stepping out fast, the first girl made her entrance; others followed in quick succession. The audience was stunned. The pace of fashion shows was traditionally extremely sedate, as the models gave journalists and buyers time to take in the new collection. Instead, Dior had instructed his girls to walk fast and seductively, heightening the sense of drama. Each girl moved “with a provocative swinging movement, whirling in the close-packed room, knocking over ash trays with the strong flare of her pleated skirt, and bringing everyone to the edge of their seats in a desire not to miss a thread of this momentous occasion.”5

  The response was unanimous: the show was a triumph. Madeleine Vionnet, now in her seventies, told Dior, “It has been a long time since I have seen anything as beautiful.” But it was Carmel Snow’s comment that traveled like lightning around the world: “It’s… a revolution. Your dresses are wonderful: they have such a new look!” she told Dior. She had named it. The clothes trade was in an uproar. Millions of dollars had been invested in new stock which, if outmoded by this New Look, would be made obsolete overnight. Buyers cabled the States from Paris predicting “catastrophe. Women will go for this look like bees for honey.” Carmel Snow was interviewed on NBC: “God help those who bought before seeing Dior’s collection. He is a genius. He has changed everything.”6 And he had.

  After years of austerity, with strictly regulated yardage for clothes, Dior’s New Look (actually titled “Coralle,” after the petals of a flower) did away with the hard, squared-off padded shoulders and short lengths of the ubiquitous military influence almost overnight. He presented instead softer, feminine, waisted jackets, and dresses and skirts using yards and yards of fabric. Molded shoulders, flattering flared skirts, tightly corseted bodices and provocatively defined breasts helped signal the impression of bodies that were archetypes of the female form.

  Describing his couture as “ephemeral architecture, dedicated to the beauty of the female body” for his first collection, Dior was violently criticized by the establishment for not working in the spirit of austerity. Britain’s president of the Board of Trade objected; there were accusations of decadence and “lowering the standards of public morality.” Some women complained about covering up their legs, and during a photo shoot in a Paris market, the models were attacked by women stall holders over the profligacy of their dresses. But all that really mattered was that both women and men fell in love with Dior’s glorification of all that was delicate and feminine.

  With great speed, the New Look reestablished Paris as the epicenter of the world’s fashion. Recalling the response to these luxurious and exaggeratedly feminine clothes, one socialite said, “Women had been deprived of everything for years and they threw themselves on fashion like hungry wolves.” Indeed, the New Look was so successful that by the beginning of 1950, approximately 75 percent of French couture exports came from the House of Dior. Within a year, he had become the most famous designer in the world.

  Gabrielle was curious. Angry at what she saw as unwarranted attention, she came back to France to see this New Look for herself. Meeting her friend Christian Bérard, who had illustrated Dior’s collection, she berated him for working for someone participating in “the ruin of French couture.” Now hopelessly addicted to his opium, Bérard was also a classic Parisian celebrity, noted for his theatrical decors, his fashion sketches, his gossip and his wit. Annoyed by Gabrielle’s arrogance, he retorted, “Oh stop taking yourself for France and crowing �
��cock a doodle doo!’”

  Much more, however, than Gabrielle’s pique at the brilliance of Dior’s success, she was appalled at the reintroduction of so many aspects of women’s dress from which she had worked so hard to free them. It was ironic that Dior, a gifted, gentle and retiring homosexual, had returned women to an updated version of the Belle Epoque. Woman was once again to be worshipped as an image. She was an immensely elegant, padded, corseted and constrained symbol. With her tiny waist, voluptuous breasts and elegantly female hips, she was costumed as a beautiful ideal. For all its undoubted beauty, this image presented woman as an adored object who moved with less freedom than she had done for many years. Some of these lovely and graceful costumes were so structured that they could almost stand up on their own. Whatever else it did, Dior’s couture symbolized the more reticent role women were expected to revert to in the years following the war.

  When Gabrielle was met by reporters on her 1953 visit to the States and asked what she thought of the New Look, wearing one of her own suits from a prewar collection, she answered, “Just take a look at me.” The exquisite couture Dior and his fellow designers created throughout the late forties was the antithesis of everything in Gabrielle’s sartorial philosophy.

  For many years, the upper floors of Gabrielle’s rue Cambon boutique had been deserted. After the war, she sometimes returned to Paris and “walked through the silent workrooms where pieces of fabric, dress dummies fallen over on to tables, and rusting sewing machines, were left miserably about. Life had stopped there.”7 Without the work that had filled Gabrielle’s days, all her houses, her money and jewels rewarded her only with boredom.

  In 1954, while American Vogue would say that Gabrielle probably meant nothing more than the name on a perfume bottle to those born after 1939, for those born before it, the rumor of her return had sent a frisson around a series of inner circles. Gabrielle denied it and played coy. Then, finally, after considerable planning and guile, involving recalling some of her best premières, and the employment of some of the most well-born girls in Paris as models, Gabrielle reopened her couture house in early 1954. If she was yielding to the need to throw off the boredom of these last years, perhaps she also hoped her return might be recompense for what she had sacrificed and lost in the name of the House of Chanel. Speculation was rife. What had made her, at seventy-one, decide to reopen? What on earth would her first collection be like?

  If boredom was one of the drivers of Gabrielle’s return, so was her dislike of present fashions. But a visit to Switzerland by Pierre Wertheimer was probably the final trigger that spurred her to act. In the summer of 1953, Wertheimer came in person to give her some worrying news. Despite the magazines all quoting Marilyn Monroe’s claim — a famed Chanel Nº 5 promotion — that she wore nothing else in bed, for the first time in thirty years, № 5’s sales were down. Wertheimer was soothing. Gabrielle should not concern herself; profits were still substantial. She did not react with the anticipated indignation, instead quietly suggesting they launch another perfume. Wertheimer told her that this wouldn’t be good business. On the one hand, Paris no longer had automatic precedence in the world of fashion, perfume and cosmetics; on the other, the life of these things was becoming shorter each year. Gabrielle didn’t persist, and Pierre Wertheimer was relieved to see that, at last, she was mellowing. He was wrong.

  Very shortly after this meeting, Gabrielle returned to Paris, reinstated herself at the Ritz and set about getting rid of her buildings on rue Cambon, with the exception of number 31. Here she refurbished the boutique on the ground floor; the grand salon, where she had always shown her collections; and her third-floor apartment and workrooms above. Once again, Gabrielle spent her days working and entertaining at rue Cambon, and her nights over the road at the Ritz. She also sold her beautiful house in the south of France. La Pausa was bought by Emery Reves, literary agent and friend to Winston Churchill. It seems fitting that not only was Churchill to spend much time in his last years at this, one of Gabrielle’s most perfect creations, he would also write a good part of his war memoirs there. Gabrielle would later buy a house in Switzerland for retirement, but no longer kept a home in France outside Paris.

  She sold La Pausa knowing she would need every centime she could lay her hands on. As much as anything, however, letting it go was a return to her real life: her work. La Pausa had represented the discreet yet luxurious leisure Gabrielle had been one of the first to develop. There she had shared some of the best aspects of the life she had created. Gabrielle was controlling, but she was also its contrary, nonjudgmental, and life at La Pausa had been very nonjudgmental of its guests. Gabrielle had said, “It pleases me infinitely more to give than to receive, whether it is at work, in love or in friendship.”8 In relinquishing La Pausa, she was taking stock before relaunching herself upon the world. Paramount was her belief in the future. In the end, houses and many objects were consigned to the past. Her rebirth was to be about work, not holiday. Connected with this thinking was a more profound move.

  Returning to a hotel, to her work and the recreation of her couture, Gabrielle was, once and for all, giving up on a life that was private. Given her times, her upbringing and her own character, she had failed in her search for long-term emotional contentment. Indeed, she no longer believed it was possible. Work and her public face were the only places where fulfillment had always followed her, so she would devote the remainder of her life to living in the public gaze. From now on, she would cultivate her legend.

  Gabrielle’s faith — perhaps credo is a better word — that only she knew how to dress women nowadays sounds like bombastic exaggeration. But while the couture of the contemporary stars — Dior, Givenchy, Fath — had made women look and feel beautiful in clothes that were sensational, opulent and romantic, it was also primarily about escape: escape from the realities of modern life. For some time after the war, that was exactly what the world had wanted. Male designers now dressed women either as exquisite archetypes or as experiments in geometry and color, sometimes with little thought for the body underneath. The sheath, the tent, the trumpet, the A line and the H line were executed in lemon yellows, pumpkin oranges and bright sky blue. Buyers began to complain that there was no decisive lead.

  However radical and modern these styles appeared, essentially they alluded to a past where woman was simply decorative. Subtly disempowering her, they implied that the realities of the modern life she actually had to maneuver in just didn’t exist. Skirts were sometimes so tight she could hardly walk, and corsets, jackets and dresses had returned to the underlying whalebone structure of woman’s grandmother, squeezing her into the desirable hourglass shape. These clothes were not about comfort. They transformed woman into a beautiful kind of make-believe. Good dressing was dressing up; it was once again about theater. Against this, Gabrielle’s lament “Dressing women is not a man’s job. They dress them badly because they scorn them” at first sounded a dull disgruntled note.

  Meanwhile, hearing of her projected return, one of these men, Balenciaga, a gentle and gifted man who was also a great admirer of Gabrielle’s work, declared, “Chanel is an eternal bomb. None of us can defuse her,” and sent her a heart-shaped bouquet. She was unable to let down her defensive shield; sadly, she diminished herself by scoffing at this distinguished admirer.

  Gabrielle had spent her early professional life trying to dispel the notion that dress should be a disguise. Her success had enabled her to supplant the great creator of what she called costume, of make-believe — Poiret — as the Parisian couturier par excellence. But this great coup had come about for far more interesting reasons than simply because Gabrielle was a practical realist who didn’t like “costume.” In her own life and designs she was constantly telling her contemporaries that they lived in a “practical” era. This meant fewer servants, more machines, a more urban life for the majority, and all at a faster pace.

  Out of this, Gabrielle’s great feat had been to encourage her contemporaries to accept t
he times in which they lived. Helping to dispel nostalgia and escapist fantasy about the past, she wanted them to accept, embrace and embellish this machine age, which, for all its faults and problems, was the only one they’d got. At their best, Gabrielle’s clothes made women feel enabled and exhilarated about taking part in this new world, while at the same time looking sleek, seductive and elegant in an entirely new way. Many of the elements she introduced and made fashionable have become indispensable to a modern female wardrobe: women with short hair; in raincoats; in trousers both day and night; in swimsuits, with costume jewelry and sunglasses; handbags with shoulder straps; and the rightly ubiquitous “little black dress.”

  Gabrielle had promulgated the idea that if a fashion wasn’t taken up and worn by everybody, it wasn’t a fashion but an eccentricity. This had helped bring about her greatest offering to the world: fashion that was democratic. This was also, however, her greatest dilemma. What she propounded was a democratic belief in a world (haute couture) at whose heart is the idea of exclusion of the majority (the exclusive). Unlike her fellow designers, who understood only the notion of exclusiveness, Gabrielle Chanel knew that any fashion not adopted by the majority was a failure. This, ironically, had also been the source of her waning influence before the war, when Schiaparelli and the surrealists had led the dance in outrage, antitaste and eccentricity.

  The period before the war was groping its way toward two related thoughts: an increasing disenchantment with authority and the dystopias created, ultimately, as a result of the machine. Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis had depicted this disenchantment as long ago as 1927. Emerging out of this disillusionment with the modern world, it had been feeling, emotion and the unconscious, as opposed to the rational and the nonfeeling machine, that were explored as never before.