by Lisa Chaney
Beginning with Stravinsky, for the next ten years and more, Gabrielle was to have a series of high-profile affairs, sometimes simultaneously. She would later say, “My love life got very disorganized, because the person I loved had died.”14 At the same time, in the years after Arthur’s death, Gabrielle was to apply herself professionally with such initiative and vigor that her name would become known far beyond the shores of France. Later, she went on to become more famous still, and even wealthier, but in this period her life took on a kind of emotional and artistic fervor in which she would become not only a discreet artistic patron but would also create the closest she ever came to a salon, where her palatial home became one of the artistic nuclei of Paris.
These years could fairly be described as the high point of Gabrielle’s life. The increase (one might say the confirmation) of her status was inseparable from the life she lived, itself reflected in her clothes. She was the absolute personification of modern woman. Indeed, during Gabrielle’s years at Faubourg Saint-Honoré, she was to become one of the most glamorous figures in the world.
19
Entirely in White and Covered in Pearls
The Hôtel de Lauzan, at 29 Faubourg Saint-Honoré, was built in 1719 for the Duchesse de Rohan-Montbazon, with very large formal gardens running all the way down to the avenue Gabriel. Perhaps it was no coincidence that its new occupant had chosen this address. It was on the avenue Gabriel that she had spent her happiest years with Arthur Capel, before the appearance of Diana Wyndham.
Gabrielle had taken the magnificent ground-floor rooms of the Hôtel de Lauzan while the owner, Comte Pillet-Will, remained on the floor above. When she declared that “the interior of a home is the natural projection of a soul,” and that “Balzac was right to attach as much importance to it as he did to clothing,” she effectively gave both her creed and a statement of intent. Her immediate response to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré was to enjoy its grandeur. The main rooms had last been altered in the previous century, and she hated the greenish, gilded paneled walls she was not permitted to change. It is said that she asked the Serts to redecorate and furnish her new home.
We know that Gabrielle was impressed by José Maria’s taste, but in the context of her future houses, including her apartment at rue Cambon and the house she would later build for herself, this is not convincing. The Serts may well have made suggestions, but by this stage in Gabrielle’s life, it is difficult to imagine that she hadn’t arrived at a pretty confident style of her own. All style was in a general state of flux in the early twenties, and for her interiors Gabrielle gravitated, like a number of those in her circle, toward a type of modern baroque. This open-ended style accommodated quite different personalities, who loosely mixed old and new with juxtapositions sometimes intentionally startling. The result was that one looked at things with more care.
In several rooms, Gabrielle covered the gilded walls with mirror glass from floor to ceiling, and then added Louis XIV furniture, combined with an underlying oriental theme. This took the form of numerous Coromandel folding screens, which became a signature element of Gabrielle’s interiors, and which she first lived with in Arthur’s apartment. In one of the salons, she had a huge Regency sofa covered in orange velvet and set in front of one of these enormous Chinese figured screens. On the side tables were lamps made of large crystal balls set one upon the other, with lampshades made of parchment. (These same elegant lamps are now in Gabrielle’s apartment in the rue Cambon, as are a number of the Coromandel screens.) A small library, with natural, pale woodwork, had fine old carpets, with furniture and curtains, all in beige. This color may sound unappealing, but Gabrielle made it work with such success it was to become one of her trademarks.
A fine classical marble torso was reflected in a mantelpiece mirror, both bought on that recent trip to Italy with the Serts, and now also in the rue Cambon. In Gabrielle’s bedroom were floor-to-ceiling mirror panels covering one wall, while her bed was spread with a dark fur coverlet enclosed by cream silk curtains falling from a wooden baldachin. Coromandel screens stood behind another velvet-covered sofa, and a huge crystal chandelier hung above a small silver table. Hanging on the mirror wall panels was an enormous Venetian mirror decorated all around the edge with crystal flowers. This astounding piece of craftsmanship, today in Gabrielle’s apartment, was bought from the sale of the recently bankrupt and legendarily stylish narcissist the marchesa Luisa Casati. That Gabrielle would keep several of these outstanding pieces of furniture confirms one’s sense that the grammar of her decorative style was already well established.
Gabrielle loved gold, and the colors beige and black. Like Misia, she also loved crystal. However, as for Misia’s own taste, Gabrielle later described her apartment before her marriage to Sert as “all that pile of objects.” Misia’s very busy interior had at first led Gabrielle and Arthur to the conclusion that Misia must be an antique dealer. And Arthur had unashamedly asked, “Is it all for sale?” Gabrielle loathed what she called “the doctrine of clutter.” Speaking of Misia’s, she said, “It wends its way along walls, piles up underneath tables, proliferates on the stairs, the cupboards no longer shut.”1 Nevertheless, Paul Morand, a man of most particular and snobbish tastes, described Misia’s apartment’s “crystal, its lacquer, its general air of exquisite rococo,” without criticism. No doubt Gabrielle did owe something to Misia and Sert’s aesthetic, but she now practiced a doctrine of luxury, size and space whose elements were her own.
Into the magnificent setting of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré she transported Joseph Leclerc, now chamberlain of a bevy of servants looking after his mistress and her steady stream of visitors. By day, Gabrielle perfected and sold the clothes that were making her so quintessentially modern, and by night, she was establishing herself as a sought-after Parisian figure. Preferring, on the whole, the company of artists, it was in this period that she became close to Jean Cocteau. If Cocteau’s following, or “school,” is hard to define, while both loved and reviled, he had, nonetheless, positioned himself as a spokesman for modernist art. His famous personal charm and dazzling conversation were evanescent but almost impossible to replicate, and even Cocteau haters thought “his life was his masterpiece” and that “his talk was the best part of him.” For his detractors, he was full of gimmickry, artifice and vacuity. He, meanwhile, said, “A poet owes it to himself to be a very serious man, and yet, out of politeness, to appear the opposite.”2 For more than fifty years, Gabrielle would oscillate between love and dislike of Cocteau.
After the recent war, artists had continued arguing back and forth: what should their subject now be, and how should it be presented? A savage, nihilistic atmosphere, emerging from the brutalities of the war, meant that many artistic and cultural values were now unceremoniously hurled out, until the artists arrived at the anarchy of Dada. One of its founders, Gabrielle’s friend Tristan Tzara, said that Dada meant nothing and this was the point: nothing. Dada was to be “an inventory of the ruins of art and society left by the void of war.” While Gabrielle was in one sense party to these sentiments, she was also more interested in asking herself what she could do to move with her chaotic times. And at the center of events, she made her own definitive contribution. She lived an unusually progressive and unbourgeois life, her independence and sexually liberated attitudes reflected in Gabrielle’s short hair and ruthlessly simple clothes.
At the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, she threw herself into what became the most expansively sociable period of her life, and one of her first undertakings was to have a fine piano brought in and placed in an otherwise empty room. Seldom relinquishing the luxury of friendship with a former lover, Gabrielle was by this stage once again on close terms with Stravinsky. And Stravinsky now came to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré along with society and artists. These included Diaghilev, his lovers, Ballets Russes dancers, Misia and José Maria Sert, Erik Satie, and a series of other performers and composers, including Les Six, who in turn included Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud and Franci
s Poulenc. The musicians played and partied with Gabrielle’s society and artist friends, including the likes of Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Juan Gris and Francis Picabia, long into the night.
On the upper floor, meanwhile, Comte Pillet-Will found the clamor of their contemporary music unendurable, and he and his tenant came to an amicable accommodation. She would pay handsomely for the rest of his vast residence, and the count would take himself elsewhere.
Jean Cocteau’s offering for that year, 1921, was Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, a parody of a Parisian wedding, again with the anarchic high spirits of his ballet Parade. Olga Picasso had insisted that she and her husband take a villa outside Paris for the first months of their baby son’s life. Picasso was now invited to join Misia’s box as Gabrielle’s escort for the ballet’s premiere. Picasso was always in two minds about Cocteau, whom he infuriated by teasing him. But he and Gabrielle enjoyed Cocteau’s verbal sparkle, his spiteful tongue and his urgent and shamelessly insincere need of the friendship of the haut monde. Had Picasso and Gabrielle seen Cocteau’s diary, they would have reveled in his remark about “the actresses without theater that are society women.”3
By this point, Gabrielle had known Picasso for some time. Indeed, she was one of the small group of guests at his wedding in 1918, when Olga wore a Chanel dress and Cocteau had written, “Olga in white satin, tricot and ulle—very Biarritz.”4 When Picasso became claustrophobic in his villa and came into town in search of his friends, he wouldn’t stay alone at night in his and Olga’s apartment. He was apparently terrified by the prospect of loneliness. So Gabrielle had one of her light, airy rooms at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré made permanently available to him. She saw a good deal of Picasso at this time and was, in her own words,. . . seized by a passion for [him]. He was wicked. He fascinated me the way a hawk would; he filled me with a fear. I could feel it when he came in: something would curl up in me; he’d arrived. I couldn’t see him yet, but already I knew he was in the room. And then I saw him. He had a way of looking at me . . . I trembled. 5
Misia had observed this attraction between her two friends, and did her best to foil any real intimacy developing between them. But any control she might previously have exerted over Gabrielle had evaporated when Gabrielle wrote the check for Diaghilev’s presentation of Rite of Spring. Characteristically, Gabrielle was not particularly concerned by the idea of Picasso’s wife in the background, and saw Picasso at his apartment on the rue de la Boétie. Developing her “passion,” they spent the odd night—perhaps more—together at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. But with Picasso always quick to demand sexual and emotional subservience from his women, and Gabrielle being in many ways just as intense and formidable a character as he was, this affair could have been only a brief one.
In 1921, when Vogue commented that “the couturiers are still embroidering their way to success,” Dmitri Pavlovich’s sister, Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, took advantage of the trend. Marie Pavlovna was short of funds—like all the Russian émigrés—and on the spur of the moment suggested to Gabrielle that she could make the embroidery for her clothes at a better price. Gabrielle was surprised at the suggestion but agreed that Marie should try. Despite Marie’s personal hardship and losses, her attempts at adapting to her fate were impressive. Describing the Russian nobility’s plight, she said they had been “torn out of our brilliant setting . . . still dressed in our fantastic costumes. We had to take them off . . . make ourselves other, everyday clothes, and above all learn how to wear them.”
In only three months, Marie Pavlovna had set up what became a highly successful wholesale workshop, Kitmir, with Russian women machine-embroidering clothes for couture houses and, in particular, the House of Chanel. Marie designed many of the embroideries herself, basing them on her memories from art school, a number of Russian motifs and new research.
It has been customary to say that Gabrielle began embroidering her clothing under the influence of her Russian lover, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. This is quite wrong. Gabrielle had come under the influence of the Russians—Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes and Stravinsky—before her affair with Dmitri; she had been decorating her clothes with embroidery since at least 1917. In addition, from contemporary descriptions, we see that it wasn’t only Gabrielle who used embroidery to decorate her clothing; so were some of her fellow couturiers.
While Marie Pavlovna marveled at seeing her embroideries worn by Gabrielle’s clients, sadly, there are very few examples of them still around. What is left to us from Marie, however, is one of the very best descriptions of Gabrielle at work. As Marie evokes the scene, we see how Gabrielle’s method of creating, first described by Marie-Louise Delay, in Biarritz, has remained quite unchanged. Gabrielle’s cutting, pinning and sculpting of a material on a real woman’s body would become famous—much later, in an age of male couturiers, designing by making drawings alone—for its singularity. In fact, this had been the traditional dressmakers’ accustomed method of working.
After Gabrielle had draped her mannequin with a fabric, in order to see its fall and movement, she would then work in another material, such as a fine calico, until she was satisfied with her design on the girl’s body. From this first model, called a toile, the real material would be cut out by the premières and made into the final garment. In Marie Pavlovna’s description, we see how a real and beautiful female body was and would always remain an essential part of Gabrielle’s inspiration. The girl’s shape and coloring were all part of the inspiration for her transformation of a piece of material into something that could be worn. (She insisted that her mannequins be very slim, and almost all were dark haired, like her.) Marie Pavlovna described her fascination with the way her embroidered materials were transformed into clothes: For several years to come I watched Chanel’s creative genius . . . She never designed anything on paper and would make a dress either according to an idea already in her head or as she proceeded. I can still see her sitting on her stool . . . with a log fire burning . . . she would be dressed in a . . . dark skirt and a sweater, with the sleeves pushed up above her elbows . . .
The models would be called in one by one from the landing outside . . . sometimes for hours in various stages of undress . . . A girl would walk into the room and up to Mlle Chanel, who sat . . . with a pair of scissors in her hand.
“Bonjour Mademoiselle.”
“Bonjour Jeanne.”
This was the only moment when Chanel would look up at the model’s face . . . As the girl approached, Chanel, with her head slightly bent to one side, would take in the first impression. Then the fitting began . . . The fitter standing beside her handed her the pins. No one spoke except Chanel, who kept up a steady monologue. Sometimes she would be giving instructions, or explaining some detail. Sometimes she would criticize and undo the work . . . already done. The old fitter listened to all, in silence, her face impenetrable . . . Chanel, intent on her work . . . talked on without taking notice of anybody.
I had seen people occupying great offices ... had listened to orders being given by those whose birth or position gave them the right to command. I had never yet met with a person whose every word was obeyed and whose authority had been established by her own self, out of nothing.6
At about five o’clock, coffee was brought in, sometimes with sandwiches. If the day’s work was complete, Gabrielle stood up, stretched, and the models, condemned to wait outside, were finally permitted to leave. If the pressure was on, Gabrielle gulped down her coffee then took up her work once more. One or two “obsequious executives and an occasional friend sat around on the carpet” while Gabrielle held forth indefatigably. “Discussing everything and everybody with immense assurance, she dispensed strong opinions on people and events; these opinions could just as quickly be reversed. Forging on, her power of persuasion was amazing.”
Maurice Sachs, an ambitious young con man who sometimes acted as Cocteau’s secretary got himself small writing commissions and, later in the decade, became an astute chronicler
of his times. In his portrait of Gabrielle, he said that she “created a feminine personage that Paris had not known before.” He was surprised at “how small she was. She was very slim; the line of thick black hair was low, her eyebrows met over the nose and when she laughed her eyes [were] hard and sparkling.” Commenting that she “almost always’ wore simple black clothes, he said:She put her hands in her pockets [then still an unusual thing for a woman to do] and began to speak. The flow of her words was extraordinarily fast, rushing forward, but she laid out clearly what she had in mind. She had none of the circumlocution, and fabricated asides that so often make a woman halt at incidental subjects and never reach the target of their conversation. Her train of thought was utterly clear . . . She had great practical sense; she liked to manage, to organize, to put in order and to be in charge.7
Gabrielle had a redeeming contradictory trait, and one particularly rare in people who are controlling. An old employee would say that “she hated things which were planned. She didn’t have this notion of organization like we do.” And Jean Cocteau once said, “She has, by a kind of miracle, worked in fashion according to rules that would seem to have value only for artists.”8
At the same time, Sachs believed that in giving her orders with such certainty and authority, Gabrielle “was a general: one of those young generals of the Empire in whom the spirit of conquest dominates.” Gabrielle shared another trait with military men: “a shyness which overcame her as soon as she left the battlefield.”9