by Lisa Chaney
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 And, just as de Gaulle had sounded out of touch to those political reformists, so Gabrielle now sounded out of date to many of her fellow couturiers, intent on their own rebellion.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, said 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
Gabrielle was, though, no longer the first to be consulted about style. Instead, she had become a public figure, whose time was bound up with serving her legendary name. How else was she to absorb that still remarkable physical and emotional energy? But while her frequently abrasive manner drove others to see less of her, there was a small group of young admirers who were more patient.
Gabrielle had always refused to be interviewed for television, but in 1969, her friend the Opéra Comique dancer Jacques Chazot, who had made himself into an indispensable young society figure, wanted to make Gabrielle the first subject of a television series on famous women. He was overjoyed when she agreed. Gabrielle saw much of Chazot and believed that she could trust him. Without any rehearsals or script, in that soft, low voice, belying the incisive authority of her manner, Gabrielle held forth on camera for twenty-five minutes. She concluded with the pronouncement “Well, if they’re not pleased with this, what do they want ?”25
Editing the interview, Chazot was in a torment of indecision, until eventually he decided he would cut nothing. Bringing along his friend, the rebellious and already iconic writer Françoise Sagan, they watched it with Gabrielle. Her trust in Chazot had been well placed; she pronounced it “very good.” Having been rather slow off the mark, the French television service now realized the interview’s potential and readjusted their programming schedule with it in a prime slot.
The response was tremendous. Chazot received all kinds of filming offers, and Gabrielle was gratified to receive a huge quantity of approving mail.
Meanwhile, the younger designers, irritated by Gabrielle’s lack of indulgence over their work, were unable to see that much of their “rebellious decade” was simply a mass-culture version of the cataclysmic changes Gabrielle had experienced with that small and extraordinarily creative group of people either side of the First World War. And while her complaints were not all justified, essentially they were more farsighted. And at the heart of her complaints was something more significant than an irritable old woman’s aversion to change.
Gabrielle had not been uniquely responsible for changing women’s appearance during the first decades of the century. Whil
e undoubtedly one of only a handful of initiators of a new, easy kind of female glamour, Gabrielle was different in that she herself lived the emancipated life her clothes were made for. Talking of having “liberated the body,” she had “made fashion honest.” More than any other designer, Gabrielle had been responsible for the democratization of fashion, making it more accessible to the majority than ever before. Her own radical life and work had gone hand in hand with the rise of political democracy, yet as a fashion designer, she had overcome the dilemma this created for the couturier: how to be exclusive. An American’s compliment, that she had “spent so much money without it showing,” delighted her.26 Of all the couturiers, Gabrielle had walked the finest line in dressing the rich as the poor, in other words, with simplicity.
While often contradictory, the source of Gabrielle’s reaction to the sixties was that she had never been interested in attacking culture. She had espoused a different—and in some ways more serious—kind of liberation for women. Gabrielle was now old, and critical, but she also understood that jeans (originally workwear) were subtly different from her appropriation of fishermen’s tops or her lover’s polo shirt for women. Their new glamour was based upon living more emancipated, modern lives. In Chazot’s interview, for example, her point was serious when she said, “I do not approve of the Mao style; I think it’s disgraceful and idiotic . . . the idea of amusing oneself with such games, with such formidable countries, I think it’s dreadful.”27
When it came to miniskirts, while Gabrielle’s objections revealed her age, she was also capable of saying, “I have no right to criticize, because [the time] isn’t mine. Mine is over . . . Frequently I feel so alien to everything around me. What do people live for now? I don’t understand them.”28 And then she made one of those typical comments, requiring a moment’s trouble and reflection to understand, and revealing her comprehension of those tumultuous times : “I’m very well aware that everyone is out of date.”29
Age had some time ago crept up on the woman who had remained so perennially youthful, and her arthritis and rheumatism now grew more painful. To counteract the pain, and “inconvenience,” she swallowed quantities of vitamins, painkillers and sedatives. Then, despite her doubts and apprehension about the sixties, and while she had enough self-knowledge to be able to say, “Sometimes I realize I’m ridiculous,” she continued, driven by work. Gabrielle had understood long ago that work is vital to who we are. However, setting aside the striving involved in creativity, work consumed her, was her raison d’être. In the process, it had become her demon master. But as with the drugs—the only means by which poor Gabrielle could find any rest at night—she needed to dull her sense of isolation; in her waking hours, it was only through work that she found some sense of peace.
In a quieter moment, she would also confide to one of her last intimates her belief that “a woman is a force not properly directed. A man is properly directed. He can find refuge in his work. But work just wipes a woman out. The function of a woman is to be loved.” And she confessed her feeling that “my life is a failure. Don’t you think it’s a failure, to work as I work ?”30 This formidably powerful yet always feminine woman, who had found consolation in work, also believed that women “ought to play their weakness never their strength. They ought to hide that . . . One ought to say ‘yes but’ . . . in other words play the fish.”31
31
I Only Hear My Heart on the Stairs
Gabrielle’s aversion to any kind of constraint had not diminished with the years; she was defiant: “I never settle down anywhere, I’ve chosen freedom.” Stimulated by the unpredictable, she remained irritated by much organization, and “loathed people putting order into my disorder or into my mind,”1 declaring, “Order bores me. Disorder has always seemed to me the very symbol of luxury.”2 And while the houses she had owned were beautiful and innovative in their design, she also said, “It’s not the houses I love, it’s the life I live in them.”
In her Hôtel Ritz suite, and her apartment on the rue Cambon, meanwhile, Gabrielle had created sumptuous and atmospheric surroundings, luxurious interiors filled with private symbols. Yet the apartment at 31 rue Cambon was never at heart a domestic one. Gabrielle had entertained many friends there over the years, but she also conducted business there. Someone now very familiar with the apartment describes it as “the place where she kept her memories, her links with her close friends, and her past. But if it had been a really intimate, personal apartment it would have had a bedroom. In some ways she lived her life like a man.”3 Neither was there a kitchen at rue Cambon ; Gabrielle had food brought in. And while she could juxtapose grandeur with simplicity and severity with comfort, in truth, Gabrielle had little interest in the hearth.
A hotel, where she slept and ate most of her meals, is essentially an undomestic space, and its underlying atmosphere of transition precisely served Gabrielle’s needs. Although she lived in the Ritz for more than seventeen years, in theory, at any moment she could be on her way: “In a hotel I feel I am traveling.” An echo of her nomadic childhood—in whose recollection Gabrielle often spoke of trains—this existence also represented her undaunted and slightly cracked refusal to be tied down. Her openness to the possibility of change in turn represented the possibility of creativity, leading her to say, “When I can no longer create, I’m done for.”4
By contrast, the symbols of others’ rootedness affected Gabrielle more adversely as she grew older. For example, she hated Sundays. Traditionally the family day, it was also the one when her salon was closed, making it more difficult to divert herself—with work—from admitting her sense of isolation. She professed to dislike marriage, and children, and on occasion used her unerring capacity for fantasy to erase spouses and their progeny from the lives of those around her. In the same spirit, she was quite capable of trying to destabilize a relationship. Good ones unsettled her. Gabrielle could also quietly admit to the one member of her family with whom she remained close, her namesake, Gabrielle Labrunie, “Actually, it’s you who has been right in life. You are much happier than I am. You have a husband and children. I have nothing. I am alone with all my millions.”5 Gabrielle told one of her favorite models, “I envy you because I always wanted to have children, and I had an abortion and I could never have any. It’s not true when I say that I find children disgusting.”6
In the late sixties, when Gabrielle was in her late eighties and had become more famous still, she was once again acceptable to most of France. Yet while this enabled her to go anywhere and meet almost anyone, this usually left her unimpressed. There was, however, the odd exception. Claude Pompidou, elegant wife to de Gaulle’s prime minister, had for some time been one of Gabrielle’s clients, and she realized that Gabrielle would like an invitation to the Elysée Palace. De Gaulle’s permission must be sought. Eventually, he agreed, and Gabrielle went—accompanied by her friend, ex-prefect of police and ambassador André-Louis Dubois—to dine alone with the Pompidous. Claude Pompidou found Gabrielle beautiful, wonderfully dressed; intelligently observed her complexity, her failings, her “boldness,” and yet still found her fascinating.
Gabrielle had many years ago nurtured her image, now she was tending her legend. And while saying, “May my legend gain ground, I wish it a long and happy life!”7 she had also become its victim. Unable sometimes to distinguish it from herself, she had said some years before, “My legendary fame . . . each of us has his or her legend, foolish and wonderful. Mine, to which Paris and the provinces, idiots and artists, poets and society people have contributed, is so varied, so complex, so straightforward and so complicated at the same time, that I lose myself within it.”8 Her friend the novelist Michel Déon recently recalled to me how “with time, she turned a cynical eye on her milieu . . . She didn’t care, because being a celebrity no longer went to her head. I have rarely seen someone desire victory so much and then so disdain its rewards.”9
Gabrielle’s friends were only temporarily able to hold back her solitude, in which
she had become imprisoned, and one day, she posed a mournful question to one of them: “What’s going to happen to me? What can I do ? . . . In bed at night I say to myself: “Why do you put up such a front? Why don’t you dump all that ?”10 But she couldn’t. She talked on, through shyness and through fear. Indeed, years before, she had declared with that startling self-awareness, “I prattled away out of shyness . . . How many windbags, mocked for their self-assurance, are simply quiet people who, deep down, are frightened of silence ?”11 Meanwhile, that “prattling” public self made a habit of toughness and self-aggrandizement: “So much insensitivity . . . the jewelry, the rings on her thin fingers . . . the monologues, the Chanel jargon, with the opinions, the judgments without appeal.”12 It was as if poor Gabrielle had welded her armor of self-protection to her mind and frequently to her heart. Her inner plight, accurately described by a young friend as the “truant furies,” had overtaken her.
Her solitude had deepened even further with the deaths of her oldest friends and ex-lovers. Hardly had the war ended than José Maria Sert had gone. Then, in 1950, Misia, whom she had loved, and hated, for so many years, and who knew so many of Gabrielle’s secrets that they had both long since dispensed with any pretense. In 1953, the Duke of Westminster, with whom, as with Dmitri Pavlovich, Gabrielle had always remained on close terms, died of a heart attack after only six years of his final and happiest marriage. The sympathetic, horse-mad Etienne Balsan, who had recognized that, in Sachs’s words, “Her spirit and her heart were unforgettable,” had rescued Gabrielle from her servitude, and died in South America. Following his daughter’s marriage and move to Rio de Janeiro, Etienne had gone there, too. His wish to die quickly had been answered when he was run over by a bus, in 1954.