by Lisa Chaney
The gossips, meanwhile, assumed that Gabrielle’s feelings for Marie-Hélène went beyond simple affection. The other models believed, too, that they were lovers. One of them says, “At any rate that’s what was being said in the cabine (the model’s dressing room). It didn’t shock me at all, I thought it was very natural.”8 Gabrielle stoutly denied the rumors, saying, “You must be crazy — an old garlic like me. Where do people get those ideas from?” This was not the first time such rumors had been abroad about Gabrielle, and over the years, they would persist. Neither does one believe that Gabrielle really cared that much. For more than fifty years she had been the subject of gossip, and she had never let it make any difference to the way she chose to lead her life. And while Women’s Wear Daily journalist Thelma Sweetinburgh would say that Gabrielle’s bisexuality “was a sort of known thing,” a young French woman on the staff of American Vogue at the time remembers, “I had to go once to see her, and was told to be careful. I believed, and all others did, too, that Chanel was bisexual. One assumed it to be the case. British and French laws were different. It wasn’t illegal in France and people were just less fussed about it really.”9
Assisted by her atelier and her mannequins, Gabrielle had returned from Switzerland with the intention of overcoming her opponents: those who reviled her war record and those who believed her work was now part of history. And during the course of 1954, what had at first appeared a disaster was set to become Gabrielle’s triumph. In November 1954, Elle put Suzy Parker on its cover in a seductive red Chanel suit and a pillbox hat, all trimmed around in fur.
As Gabrielle’s success became undeniable, she was asked why she had returned. She replied, “I was bored. It took me fifteen years to realize it. Today, I prefer disaster to nothingness.” Laying bare the drive that almost became her curse, in the years without work, Gabrielle had been lost, up against her demons and her loneliness. But by 1957, she was sailing triumphantly for America.
This was supposedly to accept what was then America’s greatest fashion accolade, the Neiman Marcus Fashion Oscar, in Dallas. However, while Dior had been awarded the Oscar before her, and Gabrielle had refused to follow in his footsteps, she allowed herself to be enticed to America because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Neiman Marcus stores. As ever, alert to a publicity opportunity, she agreed to an interview with The New Yorker. Gabrielle informed the reporter that, in 1954, her reaction to her initially poor reception — everywhere except America — had been defiance: “I thought, I will show them! In America, there was great enthusiasm. In France I had to fight. But I did not mind. I love very much to battle. Now, in France they are trying to adapt my ideas. So much the better!”
Succumbing to Gabrielle’s wiles, the reporter wrote:
We’ve met some formidable charmers in our time, but none to surpass the great couturier and perfumer, Mlle Gabrielle Chanel, who came out of retirement… to present a collection of dresses and suit designs that have begun to affect women’s styles every bit as powerfully as her designs of thirty years ago… She was fresh from three strenuous weeks here in Dallas… at seventy-four, Mlle Chanel is sensationally good-looking, with dark-brown eyes, a brilliant smile, and the unquenchable vitality of a twenty-year-old… “I liked very much Texas. The people of Dallas, Ah, je les aime beaucoup. Très gentils, très charmants, très simples.”
Not long after this, Bettina Ballard wrote of her disappointment that many women no longer appeared to think for themselves, that “their very conformity in wearing what the stores or magazines tell them to, proves their lack of personal interest. They don’t mind spending money; it is the time and the boredom of shopping they resent. If anyone will take the burden off their shoulders they are happy.” Ballard cites the then new notion of personal dressers, describing it as like “eating pre-digested breakfast food. Imagine a Daisy Fellowes or any of the pre-war ladies of fashion allowing anyone to choose a handkerchief for them! Fortunately for those who work in fashion, women now ask for nothing better than to be led, bullied, dictated to, and given as little freedom of choice as possible.”10 Ballard appealed to them, saying that they were the ultimate critics, they shouldn’t always listen to the “experts’ and should think for themselves. She went on to say:
Another proof of this hidden power is the way women took the Chanel look to their hearts and bodies. It is true that the press, particularly Vogue, spread the word… that Chanel was back designing after fifteen years, but left to the press, the rebirth of the Chanel look would have lasted at the very most two seasons. By the very laws of change, the press, the manufacturers, and the stores, would not have dared to go on promoting this look season after season, if women hadn’t found Chanel completely to their taste and stubbornly demanded more of her type of clothes.11
Meanwhile, Gabrielle continued beguiling the New Yorker reporter with her undimmed allure. Flicking the ash off the last drags of her cigarette, she said:
As for myself, I am not interested any more in 1957. It is gone for me. I am more interested in 1958, 1959, 1960. Women have always been the strong ones in the world. Men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them in her arms as an infant. Women must tell them always they are the ones. They are the big, the strong, and the wonderful. In truth, women are the strong ones… It is the truth for me.12
Having first said she was “too tired, too bored,” Gabrielle agreed to attend a dinner given for her by the famously suave and yet eccentric Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, whom she had known since the thirties. Gabrielle would only attend on condition that the evening would be intimate and she wouldn’t feel obliged to speak. Accompanied by someone Vreeland described as a “very charming Frenchman,” once there, Gabrielle spoke without ceasing. Halfway through the evening, she asked if “Helena” could join them. When Helena Rubinstein arrived, she and Chanel withdrew to Vreeland’s husband’s study. After some time, their hostess went in to see if they were all right:
They hadn’t moved… and stayed in there the rest of the evening talking about God knows what… They never sat down. They stood — like men — and talked for hours. I’d never been in the presence of such strength of personality… Neither of them was a real beauty. They both came from nothing. They both were much richer than most of the men we talk about today being rich.13
While saying that Gabrielle had “an utterly malicious tongue,” Vreeland also had great admiration for her, and added, “But that was Coco — she said a lot of things. So many things are said… and in the end it makes no difference. Coco was never a kind woman… but she was the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”14 Vreeland mixed with some of the most interesting people of her day.
Gabrielle had told the New Yorker reporter, “I am not young, but I feel young. The day I feel old, I will go to bed and stay there. J’aime la vie! I feel that to live is a wonderful thing.” And over the coming seasons, this youthful septuagenarian made strapless evening dresses of embroidered organdy and quantities of others in satins, chiffons, brocades, velvets, lamés and some of the most avant-garde, man-made fabrics, plain and printed Then there was the lace Gabrielle used to such effect for effortlessly chic and alluring below-the-knee cocktail dresses, or a longer, black-lace, boned, strapless sheath, with a trumpet-shaped skirt over stiffened, black-net petticoats.
As the fifties wore on, and her success continued, in each collection there were always the variations on the suit: these were soon selling more than seven thousand a year. More than twenty years later, Diana Vreeland would say, “These postwar suits of Chanel were designed God knows when, but the tailoring, the line, the shoulders, the underarms, the jupe—never too short… is even today the right thing to wear.”15
And a new generation of the best-dressed women in the world was wearing Chanel Nº 5, once more the most popular perfume in the world. Not only Gabrielle’s old friend Marlene Dietrich and other luminaries, such as Diana Vreeland, but also younger celebrities wanted to be
come her clients. These included the actresses Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman. In the sixties, Gabrielle would attract to 31 rue Cambon yet more young women from the stage and screen: Anouk Aimée, Gina Lollobrigida, Delphine Seyrig, Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve. And while Gabrielle was particularly attached to Schneider and Moreau, she saw Elizabeth Taylor and her then husband Richard Burton on their visits to France. When Gabrielle was asked whether she didn’t think Elizabeth Taylor wore her Chanel suits rather too tightly buttoned — over that famously ample bosom — she replied, “There is one… who can do anything, that is Elizabeth Taylor… She is a real star.”
Bettina Ballard wrote:
There was an unorganized revolt building up in women against the whimsy changes of fashion, many of which ridiculed the wearers, and Chanel came along… to be the leader of this revolt. The young joined as her followers… and now there is a whole new generation aware of the good-taste connotations of the “Chanel Look.” She will certainly go down in history as the only couturier who spanned the taste space of almost half a century without ever changing her basic conception of clothes.16
In 1959, Vogue wrote:
If fashion has taken a turn to the woman, no one can deny that much of the impetus for that turn stems from Coco Chanel — the fierce, wise, wonderful, and completely self-believing Chanel… it is not that other Paris collections are like Chanel’s… But the heady idea that a woman should be more important than her clothes, and that it takes superb design to keep her looking that way — this idea, which has been for almost forty years the fuel for the Chanel engine, has now permeated the fashion world.17
This acclaim, from one of the most influential fashion magazines in the world, was also a precise rendering of Gabrielle’s mantra: that clothes, rather than dominating a woman, should be the background to her personality. Gabrielle’s comment that “the eccentricity should be in the woman not the dress” had been central to the most austere version of this philosophy, the now-legendary “little black dress.” And while Gabrielle herself was sufficiently characterful that she had always outshone her clothes, they also acted as her “shield.” Her assistant, Lilou Marquand, would say, “Maybe that was Mademoiselle’s genius: her clothes were a protection. In my suit, I was certain to look my best. No more worrying about one’s appearance, image, and line: I could think of something else. Living in Chanel gave a safety which, for Mademoiselle, was worth all the holidays in the world.”18
Although Gabrielle vehemently denied the criticism sometimes now leveled, that her collections didn’t change, her suit, in particular, was endlessly refined and had become unfailingly recognizable as “a Chanel.” While this description irritated Gabrielle, she did indeed repeat a formula with different materials, and surrounded the changes with the details — the buttons, the braids, the linings. But this was the point: wearing a Chanel suit, one had no need to worry about one’s appearance. It has been said many times before that these suits were a kind of uniform. But as with a uniform, where everyone apparently looks the same, as Gabrielle said of her “black Ford” dresses, in such clothing, the individuality of the wearer is brought out rather than submerged.
By the late fifties, Gabrielle had created all her signature elements: the little black dresses; the smart trousers; the costume jewelry; the slingback shoes with contrasting toe caps; the pert hats; the delicate lace evening dresses; the comfortable yet elegant jersey dresses; the suits of bouclé or the Prince of Wales check with their distinctive Chanel buttons, all with chains to ensure the jackets sat well, the linings often matching the accompanying blouse; the 1955 quilted leather or jersey bags with those gilt chain shoulder straps and now the big bows gathering up Gabrielle’s models’ short bouffant hair. And no matter what may have been said about how often these elements appeared, they were also thought worth emulating by other designers, and by women across the world.
After Gabrielle’s long hiatus, despite her seventy-one years, in 1954, her thirst for work seemed as unquenchable as ever. And as had been her custom, she drove her models and her staff as much as she drove herself almost to distraction. If those who worked for her were not strong enough, or didn’t have enough respect for her, they left. It would be said that Gabrielle ruled by intimidation: “As to really contradicting her… only her friend Maggie [van Zuylen]… dared to throw a glass of beer in her face; for the rest, her employees were too afraid of her.”19 Gabrielle’s small court — that kind that typically grows up around a couturier — of course had its sycophants, but all those who worked for her did not fear her. Like her friends, several had made the decision to accept her for what she was.
When the French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes wrote his essays on the language of fashion,20 he nailed Gabrielle as a classic rather than an innovator. While also declaring her a rebel, he described her recent declaration of war on the other designers: “It is said Chanel keeps fashion from falling into barbarism and endows it with all the classical virtues: reason, naturalness, permanency, and a taste for pleasing rather than a taste for shocking.” Barthes described Gabrielle’s unwillingness to take part in the annual fashion “vendetta,” where what has gone before is now dead. However, while his critique of Gabrielle is a good one, in the past she had been an innovator, and “reason, permanency, [and] a taste for pleasing rather than shocking” are not the attributes of a rebel.
By 1964, with the advent of a new designer, Gabrielle did indeed feel that barbarism was walking the streets. André Courrèges was a former cutter at Balenciaga and had created a sensation with his “modernist” clothes. Breaking with tradition, both in his styles and his use of fabric, such as plastic, he called his 1964 collection Space Age and had his mannequins dancing “the jerk” as they moved down the runway. In 1965, Courrèges, along with Mary Quant in Britain, would claim to be the inventor of the miniskirt. Soon Gabrielle’s favorite bête noire, Courrèges, refused to accept her criticisms and said, “I am the Matra, the Ferrari, Chanel is the Rolls-Royce: functional but static.” Courrèges’s challenge to Gabrielle’s notion of dress was genuinely original. And she sensed that his style was closer to the new spirit of the age than her own was.
Gabrielle felt further threatened when young Jeanne Moreau first “defected” to Pierre Cardin, whose work Gabrielle loathed; she even went so far as to live with him. Gabrielle broke with her young friend.
In May 1968, when student protest swept the world, for a month Paris was in chaos. And, just as de Gaulle had sounded out of touch to those political reformists, so Gabrielle now sounded out of date to many of her fellow couturiers, intent on their own rebellion. They were young and couldn’t help but be affected by the antiestablishment youth culture of the late sixties. Raw, immature, naive, self-absorbed and idealistic as it was, their rebellion was also expressed in the new street style of the young, deliberately breaking the old rules of elegance and luxuriating in a kind of theatrical “antidressing.”
Gabrielle cried out in protest, “They like the street. They want to shock. They try to be amusing. For me fashion is not amusing,” and she repeated her mantra: “The eccentricity should be in the woman not the dress.” Gabrielle’s own obsession with youth — she hated growing older — as a vital, creative thing was in opposition to what she saw as the destructive force abroad in the late sixties. But no matter how much the old lady thundered, the young were set against their elders and their elegance; it was anathema.
As Gabrielle grew more defensive about her competition from the young, she didn’t confine herself to pouring scorn on Courrèges alone. In 1969, for example, she would use the announcement of the dreadful-sounding musical Coco, in New York, with Katharine Hepburn playing Gabrielle, to denounce her fellow designers, via journalists from press and radio invited to her apartment in the rue Cambon. Sitting in her salon on the famous sofa, Gabrielle spoke of the degradation of modern fashion. Its present meandering infuriated her. She hated the miniskirt, s
aid knees were horrible, and that “fashion today is nothing but a question of skirt length. High fashion is doomed because it is in the hands of the kind of men who do not like women and wish to make fun of them. Men dress like women; women dress like men… No one is ever satisfied… Men used to woo and be tender… Boredom of every kind has become an institution.” These and more such remarks were calculated to stir up controversy.
Among fashion designers in France, there had long been a tradition of showing respect for Coco Chanel, but after Gabrielle’s latest diatribe, several no longer bothered with such politesse. Paco Rabanne, Louis Féraud, Philippe Heim, Marc Bohan (Dior), Guy Laroche, Pierre Balmain — all retaliated with comments in their own way as withering as Gabrielle’s. Pierre Balmain was more reserved and attempted to keep his comments impersonal. But he voiced the thoughts of all of them when he said:
It is regrettable that Mademoiselle Chanel chooses to ignore the history of costume. But she knows that every period has been marked by a certain style of dress, imposing the tendencies and tastes of the times, which the designers can do no more than express, each according to his manner… Mademoiselle Chanel has every right to be against the short skirt. Nonetheless, this time, she is far from having the unanimous agreement of her colleagues.
What this young man, and most of his contemporaries, did not understand was that, rather than only having reflected her times — the accustomed description of fashion’s role — Gabrielle had been among the few who had led hers.
Meanwhile, she still had a loyal following, and the voyeurs who came to her shows, because she had become a kind of monument. However, there were also empty seats, and the audience wasn’t jostling to congratulate her afterward. And while the fashion house remained a significant “motivating force for the promotion and sales of the perfumes,”21 Gabrielle also admitted, “The House of Chanel is doing well, but fewer orders are being turned down.”22 In fact, she no longer “made fashion news.” And in those moments when she dropped her guard to reveal her vulnerability, Gabrielle was apprehensive and uncertain. At the same time, she was far too intelligent not to appreciate that society was going through radical changes, and observed that “in the time we’re living in now… Nothing any more fits in with the lives people lead.”23 And her thoughts of more than half a century earlier spring to mind: “One world was ending, another was about to be born… I was in the right place… I had grown up with this new century: I was therefore the one to be consulted about its sartorial style.”24