by Lisa Chaney
As each of the biannual collections approached, the atmosphere at Chanel heightened and Gabrielle grew more nervous. As for many an artist working under pressure, these tense conditions were what often provoked her most successful pieces. Marie Pavlovna was repeatedly amazed at how the chaos in the days prior to a show was miraculously transformed into a collection just in the nick of time. On the eve of a show at rue Cambon, Gabrielle had a “dress rehearsal” for herself and her personnel in the salon below her studio. Anything considered unfit was “banished altogether” or else sent back, somehow to be redone before the morrow. Marie was intrigued by the “language of the dresses,” how their different characteristics and appeal were so familiar to Gabrielle, and how it was this unified set of relationships she was most concerned with at this final stage. “Not one single detail escaped her notice. She was so concentrated upon the study that . . . she forgot even to talk.”
And all the while a “religious and respectful silence hung over the salon, around which the saleswomen sat in a row along the walls,” nodding, and no more than lifting their eyebrows by way of approval. Gabrielle’s fashion shows were becoming extremely popular, and each season the rue Cambon entrance was besieged by a crowd of indignant buyers. Only those with invitations were admitted. The largest important foreign houses, above all those from the United States, were invited first, and only then did smaller and native firms receive an invitation. This very exclusiveness, of course, made them clamor still more for admittance. In future years, the detachment of police posted to guard the front door of Chanel at rue Cambon was an imposing sight.
When Marie Pavlovna’s embroideries were first shown—probably in the spring of 1922—she joined Gabrielle and a group of her friends in what were the most uncomfortable yet most privileged “seats . . . on the upper steps of the staircase, from where we could see what was going on.” (The mirror-paneled walls of this staircase were part of a modernist refurbishment Gabrielle would have installed at some point during the early twenties.) Until the end of her life, this ritual spot was where she placed herself to survey her collection below.
This now-famous staircase has remained intact. The salon below, while updated, is decorated in the same color scheme to this day: carpeted in beige with white walls and the distinctive black cast-iron banisters. Gabrielle commented once, “I spent my life on stairs.” The mirrored staircase was the spine of her house; everything that happened at rue Cambon could be observed from it. But Gabrielle was also making oblique reference to that other staircase, central to her youth in the convent at Aubazine. Here the orphan girls trudged up and down the great stone steps several times each day.
The show including Marie Pavlovna’s embroideries lasted a full three hours—this was not untypical—but from Gabrielle’s aerie at the top of the stairs, Marie was amazed at the speed with which she had absorbed and gauged the audience’s interest. Long before the concluding piece, Gabrielle told the dazed young Russian duchess that her work was a success.
The biggest orders for these embroideries—indeed, all Chanel clothes—came from America, a tendency that would become the norm. It was the sophisticated yet pervasively casual and sportive element of American society that had appreciated Gabrielle’s “language” as quickly as France, and possibly more so.
Marie learned much from Gabrielle, not least the example of her worldliness. While, at first, the young aristocrat found the way clients were referred to “behind the scenes” quite shocking, she eventually came to the conclusion that, in fact, “any noble sentiments were wasted” on the customers of haute couture: “Mlle Chanel did much to give me more practical views on life. A number of my illusions were destroyed in the process.”
Gabrielle, with her “usual outspokenness,” also steered Dmitri’s sister away from the puritanical belief that taking trouble with one’s appearance was unseemly. She told Marie that it was “a great mistake to go round looking like a refugee . . . people will end by avoiding you. If you wish to do business, the first thing is to look prosperous.”
Gabrielle’s abhorrence of amateurism impressed her employee. In this same spirit, Marie was taught how to use makeup and instructed to lose weight. Still despairing of Marie’s long hair, one day Gabrielle declared, “No, I really cannot see you any longer with that unattractive bun . . . it will have to come off.” Deftly removing Marie’s hairpins, she “snatched up a pair of scissors and was cutting off my hair by the handful.” While subsequently having this “cut” improved, from that day, Marie Pavlovna was more modish and wore her hair short.10
In early 1920, Cocteau had invited Gabrielle to a “spectacle concert” of art, music and popular entertainment called Le boeuf sur le toit (The Ox on the Roof ). Financed by Comte Etienne de Beaumont, the show was Cocteau’s, music was by Darius Milhaud (of Les Six) and sets were by the painter-designer Raoul Dufy. Le boeuf sur le toit reflected the fascination with all things American and proved a great success with its avant-garde audience. In January 1922, when the patron of a bar called The Gaya, a focal point for artistic Parisian gatherings, launched his enlarged restaurant-bar on the rue Boissy d’Anglas, he had been given permission to call it, after Cocteau’s spectacle, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Often known to English enthusiasts as The Nothing Doing Bar, overnight, Le Boeuf sur le Toit became one of the most fashionable meeting places for artists and their cronies. Quickly rivaling the reputation of the Moulin Rouge or Maxim’s, Le Boeuf was noisy, smart and “amusing”; it was the place to be seen. And with her artist and society friends, Gabrielle soon became one of its regulars.
Le Boeuf was one of the first bars hosting what came to be known as café society, both leading and reflecting a new kind of salon—a public one. Here sexual preferences were openly indulged, and Le Boeuf appeared to be for everyone. As well as beautiful women and men, and beautiful boys, and boys dressed as girls, and girls dressed as boys, there were the poets, painters, musicians, actors, dancers, the titled, the rich and the famous. Anyone could speak to anyone. They talked, they danced, and the atmosphere was alive with possibility.
Opium, morphine and cocaine were acquiring a certain ubiquity at the time. And while it wasn’t only the social and artistic elite who regularly used one or more of these preferred narcotics, a good many became hopelessly addicted. Just three of the more famous examples would be Jean Cocteau; the lesbian princess Violette Murat, hostess to a salon of prominent artists and musicians; and another of Gabrielle’s friends, Misia Sert. Confirmed opium smoker that Cocteau would become, he, like Princess Murat, also used cocaine, while Misia Sert’s need for morphine was to get the better of her in the end. Despite Diaghilev’s absolute veto of any drug use in his company, it has been said that he was a cocaine user himself.11
Le Boeuf sur le Toit aficionados soon read like a list of the contemporary avant-garde combined with the fashionable elite of Europe. On any night of the week, one might come across André Gide swathed in a black cape; the wunderkind writer Raymond Radiguet; Jean Cocteau; and Max Jacob, the brilliant semialcoholic, semitramp, homosexual, Jewish Catholic-convert poet. Then there were the “nonpainters”: the Cuban Dadaist Francis Picabia; Dada’s Hungarian founder, Tristan Tzara; and any number of musicians and composers, including Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric; Marie Laurencin, painter-printmaker and future illustrator for the surrealists another painter, Valentine Hugo; Misia and José Maria Sert, whose booming voice could always be heard above the hubbub; Stravinsky the dandy, with his “mustard-yellow trousers, black jacket, blue shirt, yellow shoes, clean-shaven and with slicked-down blonde hair”;12 more Russians; and Erik Satie, the “faun with the little beard and cracked laugh.” Then there might be Diaghilev and his entourage ; the protosurrealist André Breton and his cronies; Maurice Sachs, with some beautiful boy, or girl, in tow; and then numbers of now-forgotten minor luminaries and colorful unknowns.
Le Boeuf came to represent not only the turmoil, disenchantment and excesses of the period, it also reflected every aspect of the i
ntense, almost febrile creative atmosphere of those interwar years in Paris. In those same years, Gabrielle and Cocteau’s friendship was cemented. While Cocteau was accused of having no path of his own and of walking along everyone else’s, in writing about his spectacle Le boeuf sur le toit he also epitomized the mood of the times when he said, “Here, I avoid subject and symbol. Nothing happens, 13 or what does happen is so crude, is so ridiculous, that it is as though nothing happens.” Cocteau’s dizzyingly varied artistic activity antagonized many, yet it was the ever-perceptive English poet W. H. Auden who captured what Cocteau had to offer and saw that it was important. Here one sees how modern Cocteau was, and also why Gabrielle had so much time for him:Now and then an artist appears . . . who works in a number of media and whose productions in any one of them are so varied that it is difficult to perceive any unity of pattern or development . . . Both the public and the critics feel aggrieved . . . His fellow artists . . . are equally suspicious and jealous of a man who works in several [media]. His first concern is for the nature of the medium and its hidden possibilities . . . a person who is open to the outside world, so little concerned with “self-expression,” is naturally responsive to the present moment and liable, therefore, to incur the charge of wanting, at all costs, to be chic. To this one can only answer that to be “timely” is not in itself a disgrace: Cocteau has never followed fashion though he has sometimes made it.14
In 1919, Cocteau had met and fallen for the precocious sixteen-year-old writer Raymond Radiguet, whose “cool insolence, now spontaneous, now calculating,” people found either repulsive or alluring. His quite remarkable callousness aside, Radiguet’s astounding precocity and association with the great socializer Cocteau meant that he not only became known, he made it his business to know all Paris. This included frequently being present at Gabrielle’s table.
Radiguet periodically resisted his clamorous lover-mentor Cocteau and would disappear to indulge in one, or all, of his escape routes: alcohol, opium and women. Madame Warkowska, frequenter of Le Boeuf sur le Toit, introduced him to opium. Her effortlessly modish judgment on the prevalence of the drug was: “Opium? Why make such a fuss? I smoked at my first communion in Shanghai.”15 When Radiguet wasn’t fulfilling Max Jacob’s injunction “You have to do things,” the boy wrote hard. Cocteau said, “He wrote the way Beau Brummel dressed. No tics, no patina, but a special gift . . . of making the new look as though it had been seen before.” Referring to Diaghilev’s famous command to Cocteau—“Astonish me”—Radiguet subsequently countered with the remarkably adult “Elegance consists in not astounding.”16 These two injunctions—“making the new look as though it had been seen before” and “Elegance consists in not astounding”—so exactly characterized Gabrielle’s philosophy, they could have been her motto.
In the autumn of 1922, Cocteau asked Gabrielle if she would design the costumes for his modernized version of Sophocles’ Antigone. The play’s theme, defiance of the establishment, was then a most attractive one. With scenery by Picasso and music by Arthur Honegger, of Les Six, the actor Charles Dullin played Creon. (This was the same Charles Dullin who had accompanied Gabrielle to the first night of The Rite of Spring, in 1913; his lover Caryathis had wanted to attend the performance with her other lover.)
Cocteau said, “To costume my princesses I wanted Mlle Chanel, because she is our leading dressmaker, and I cannot imagine Oedipus’s daughters patronizing a “little dressmaker” . . . I chose some heavy Scotch woolens, and Mlle Chanel’s designs were so masterly, so instinctively right.”17 Indeed, Gabrielle’s costumes were powerful and convincing, and Vogue said they looked like “antique garments discovered after centuries.” However, in an angry moment during a rehearsal, when Gabrielle felt her contribution wasn’t being appreciated, she grabbed a strand of the heroine’s hand-knitted coat and pulled it so far undone that there was no time to reknit it; the heroine wore one of Gabrielle’s own coats.
Charles Dullin said, “Many society people came to the performances because of Chanel, Picasso and Cocteau.” The play was a success, and while the likes of André Gide and the poet Ezra Pound spoke in its favor, in the end, it was Gabrielle who was commended for her costumes, rather more than her collaborators.
By March 1923, elite magazines such as Vogue were writing that “Gabrielle Chanel is now famous for her treatment of the youthful short-skirted silhouette which innumerable smart women have achieved.” While a leader of fashion, at the same time, Gabrielle was almost “outside” it. Thus Vogue wrote, “She doesn’t concern herself with fashion but with her fashion, she improvises dresses which . . . do not age.”
The following month, the magazine stated, “There is not only a Chanel Collection, there is a Chanel ‘style’ made of youth, suppleness . . . [Its] somewhat sporty, yet very feminine look, met the needs of our time so well that women adopted it with enthusiasm as soon as it appeared.” Gabrielle herself was always the best advertisement for her fashions, and Vogue wrote, “Mlle Chanel . . . wears the designs her clients love with so much chic herself . . . that her daring provokes admiration; her success applause!” And in August, about a Diaghilev gala, the magazine cooed, “Snobs would have given anything to be there that night! Just think: the Marquise de Ludres is on the right . . . the Comtesse de Beaumont . . . the Duchesse de Gramont . . . Comtesse de Requena, Mme Sert, Grande Duchesse Marie, the Comtesse de Chevigné.” (All, except Requena, were dressed by Gabrielle.) Vogue continued, “And there is Gabrielle Chanel, dressed entirely in white, and covered in pearls.”
Three more of that summer’s grand events give a flavor of Gabrielle’s entertainment: the Beaumonts’ fabulous annual fancy dress ball; Diaghilev’s premiere party for Stravinsky’s ballet Les Noces, at Le Boeuf sur le Toit; and a now-fabled party for Stravinsky, given by the wealthy expatriate American socialites Sara and Gerald Murphy, said to be the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night.
Gabrielle could not only be found more than once a week at Le Boeuf, she went to other restaurants and clubs and also entertained regularly at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. One marvels at her energy and how she fitted any work into her punishing social schedule. Unsurprisingly, one finds references to her constant lack of time. A terse note to Etienne de Beaumont refers to a meeting that “wasn’t worth the trouble”; another tells him she can’t make an event: “I am sorry but not free tonight”; and yet another turns down an invitation because, finally, she admits, “I am too tired, forgive me.”18
Gabrielle’s chief competitors had been the couturiers Lanvin, Paquin, Cheruit, Patou and Poiret, but, increasingly, she had edged her way out in front. Somehow, besides the socializing, Gabrielle not only found the time to work, she was also dedicated to it. The result of this intense application was a couture that received more plaudits with every season. Again and again, the magazines put their seal of approval on what Vogue described as her “unvarying Short and Slender Silhouette.” It trumpeted the fact that Gabrielle made outfits “the modern woman of today likes best, the type which is best adapted to her life. The clothes made by this designer are simple, becoming, and above all youthful.”
The commentators were intrigued by Gabrielle’s capacity to be “beguiling and consistent without being monotonous. Witness her endless variety within narrow limits.” There were reports of long, straight coats of light wool or silk crepe, lined, for example, with a printed crepe used again for the simple frock underneath. (This was one of Gabrielle’s clever methods of simplification and would become a Chanel trademark.) Another detail that became a signature element was Gabrielle’s introduction of the camellia flower, probably first used in 1922, embroidered on a blouse.
The flower had both exotic and forbidden associations. Alexander Dumas’ passionate story La Dame aux camélias was a favorite of Gabrielle’s, and wearing a camellia had been widely recognized as a signal that a woman was available for seduction. Proust had worn a camellia in homage to Verdi’s La Traviata, itself
inspired by Dumas’ novel, and this may in turn have inspired Gabrielle. The camellia has the added advantage of being without scent, and hence would not compete with Gabrielle’s perfumes. By 1924, material renderings of the flower were often added to her clothes.
Meanwhile, Vogue described “straight taffeta evening coats . . . gorgeous with all-over embroidery and fur collars. The slender frocks worn under them are often beaded. They have a new, deep, oval décolletage in the back.” (That deep décolletage at the back, and the short, beaded and fringed dresses that became so representative of the twenties are all innovations said to have originated with Gabrielle.)
Showing that she was eminently capable of using precious materials such as silk, crepe, satin, chiffon, lace and beading, Gabrielle also continued with her innovative use of jersey, including the most novel introduction of Scottish Fair Isle tricot. Indeed, she took up this comfortable knitted fabric, smooth on one side, with greater texture on the reverse, more than any other designer. Her almost austere elegance suited perfectly the fluid movement of this material, and her use of plain and patterned tricots was most instrumental in promoting the belief that Gabrielle’s particular kind of casualness was tremendously chic. The great push toward more “active” clothes for women was not hers alone, but she was undoubtedly one of its first and most important proponents. (As early as 1921, Gabrielle had set up a “Sports” workshop.)
Gabrielle herself was never anything but slim, but she apparently devoted a good deal of time and trouble to ensuring that she remained so. She joined wholeheartedly in the custom of visiting health spas for reducing and cleansing “cures.” From one of these establishments, Gabrielle wrote to Antoinette Bernstein that she was “tired of resting . . . I think only of fighting against Fat. I feel completely stupefied,” and hoped to “profit” by her self-imposed ordeal.19