by Lisa Chaney
Next day, newspapers across the world announced the death of “one of the greatest couturiers of the century,” and tried to encapsulate her achievements as the woman who had become a legend in her own lifetime. Claude Delay returned to pay Gabrielle her own respects and found her “very small under the white Ritz sheets drawn up to her heart.” On Gabrielle’s bedside table was the beautiful icon Stravinsky had given her in 1921.
On January 14, a funeral service was held for Gabrielle in the Madeleine, the great parish church of the Parisian elite, close by the rue Cambon. Gabrielle’s small coffin was covered in a mass of white flowers, with the exception of two wreaths of red roses, one from the Syndicat de la Couture, the other from Luchino Visconti.
Whatever the personal feelings of her fellow couturiers, virtually all of them were there to render her homage, including Balmain, Balenciaga (whose graciousness and forgiving nature sent him there “to pray for her” despite her having destroyed their close friendship with unkindness), Castillo, Marc Bohan and Yves Saint Laurent. Notwithstanding Gabrielle’s criticism of most of them at one time or another, they cannot but have been conscious that her remarkable life’s work had brought great credit to their profession. Gabrielle’s friend Michel Déon made a plea for compassion in one’s final judgment:One shouldn’t turn one’s back on Coco but, on the contrary, help her to erase everything that had embittered her so much it was making her suffocate. Between the imaginary world where she was taking refuge and the cruel world which had hurt her . . . the gap remained impassable. 30
Meanwhile, standing in the front row for the entire funeral ceremony were Gabrielle’s models, all dressed in Chanel suits. Behind them were the forewomen and foremen, the seamstresses and numerous assistants who made up the team at rue Cambon, without whom Gabrielle’s ideas would have been impossible. A fascinated crowd joined Paris society, and Gabrielle’s friends, who included Salvador Dalí, Lady Abdy, Antoinette Bernstein, Serge Lifar, André-Louis Dubois, Robert Bresson, the Mille brothers, Jacques Chazot and Jeanne Moreau, whose friendship Gabrielle’s defensiveness had made her reject.
A much smaller group of mourners, including Gabrielle’s great-niece, François Mironnet and Lilou Marquand, later followed Gabrielle’s coffin to Switzerland, where she was laid to rest in the cemetery of Lausanne. Why Switzerland? While deeply French, Gabrielle was also ambivalent about her compatriots, just as some of them were about her. She had said, “The French don’t like me, it can’t be helped.” She had also said, “I have always needed security,” and in Switzerland, apparently, she felt secure. A marble headstone was raised to her, with the heads of five lions, her zodiac sign, carved in bas-relief. Below them is a cross, below that, simply:GABRIELLE CHANEL
1883–1971
However many words were written on Gabrielle in the weeks after her death, typically, in death as in life, she would manage her legacy. In that remarkable memoir she had given to Paul Morand just after the war, she had “written” her own epitaph:My life is the story—and often the tragedy—of the solitary woman. Her woes, her importance, the unequal and fascinating battle she has waged with herself, with men, and with the attraction . . . and dangers that spring up everywhere.
Today, alone in the sunshine and snow . . . I shall continue, without husband, without children, without grandchildren, without those delightful illusions . . . My life has been merely a prolonged childhood. That is how one recognizes the destinies in which poetry plays a part . . . I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be.31
AFTERWORD
Those on Whom Legends Are Built Are Their Legends
Gabrielle once said to Morand, “Contrary to what Sert used to say, I would make a very bad dead person, because once I was put under, I would grow restless and . . . think only of returning to earth and starting all over again.”1
When one of her managers was asked if Gabrielle had thought about the future of Chanel, he retorted, “Certainly not. She was much too egocentric.” Yet while Gabrielle had told her Zurich lawyer that she “longed for peace” and wanted no publicity after her death, she had also been thinking for some time about her successor, and her personal fortune. With regard to that fortune, she did her best to avoid giving any of it to the French state. Taking her lawyer’s advice, that Lichtenstein was a superior tax haven to Switzerland, in 1965 she set up a foundation there—named Coga, after Coco-Gabrielle—and then made her will. This stated: “I establish as my sole and universal heir the Coga foundation.” Having thus bequeathed the majority of her personal estate, Gabrielle made certain bequests to a handful of people. Her added verbal instruction to help the needy, and gifted artists, was sufficiently vague that it is possible nothing has ever been put into effect.
Gabrielle’s manservant, François Mironnet, was apparently at first informed he had “inherited Mademoiselle,” however, the document proving this was never found. The estate did, nonetheless, make an out-of-court settlement with Mironnet. Others who made claims on Gabrielle’s estate were not so fortunate. Over the years, her bankers and lawyers have maintained a stony silence over the Coga Foundation, and its function remains a mystery. So does the extent of Gabrielle’s personal fortune. In 1971, Mironnet claimed it was worth $1.5 billion. The Wertheimer family claimed it was $30 million. It has been estimated that, at the time of Gabrielle’s death, the House of Chanel brought in approximately $160 million annually.
Gabrielle’s manager was mistaken about her failure to contemplate a successor, because several years before her death she had discussed it with more than one friend. Where her manager had been correct was in Gabrielle’s inability to put anything into practice. The House of Chanel had become her final solace, her raison d’être. If she handed it over, there would be nothing left for her but to die. In avoiding choosing a successor, Gabrielle implicitly staved off death.
When it finally came, there was much doubt as to whether Chanel could continue without her. While the owner, Jacques Wertheimer—son of Gabrielle’s partner, Pierre, who had effectively bankrolled Chanel since 1954—wished to continue, Chanel couture was to languish for some time. In 1974, Jacques’s sons, Alain and Gérard Wertheimer, took over the running of the company. With the intention of maintaining Chanel as a family business, they refused to bring in shareholders; the number of outlets permitted to sell the perfumes was drastically reduced; Gabrielle’s policy of employing Chanel’s own perfumers, craftsmen and jewelers was continued, and large sums were spent on promotion.
For many years, the Wertheimers have been well served by a number of gifted employees, the most distinguished of whom have remained with the company for long periods, sometimes for most of their working lives. These include “the eye behind the image,” the late Jacques Helleu, Chanel’s artistic director, who oversaw the changing image of Chanel. While the most famous advertisement for Chanel was Marilyn Monroe’s quip “What do I wear in bed? Why, Chanel N° 5 of course,” Helleu used some of the world’s best photographers, such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, David Bailey, Luc Besson and Ridley Scott, to photograph and film some of the world’s most glamorous women—these included Catherine Deneuve, Candice Bergen, Carole Bouquet, Nicole Kidman, Audrey Tatou and Keira Knightley—in expensive and influential advertising campaigns. With their underlying theme of luxury and mystique, these highly successful promotions fulfilled Alain Wertheimer’s maxim: “The secret of advertising is to make it real and a dream at the same time.”
By the end of the twenties, Gabrielle and Beaux’s first perfume, N° 5, had been so successful it became Gabrielle’s chief source of revenue. In more recent times, Chanel’s chief parfumeur, Jacques Polge, has ensured the continuing quality of this, the fragrance the company understandably refers to as its “treasure.” In his long years at Chanel, Jacques Polge—a gracious and abstracted man, who speaks of the “poetry of fragrance”—has admirably extended the company’s repertoire, with several renowned perfumes of his own. Among them are: Coco Mademoiselle, Chanel N° 19 and
Beige.
When Gabrielle told Beaux not to hold back on the costly ingredients for N° 5, she instructed him to make it the most exclusive in the world. Sixty years later, Alain Wertheimer was determined to follow the same principle, and he set out to improve on what had become the perfume’s slightly flagging image of exclusivity. In time, this goal was to prove successful for the perfumes, jewelry and accessories. But for several years after Gabrielle’s death, the dress designers employed to take up her baton made the mistake of trying to emulate her. Admittedly, their task was a daunting one; a friend of Gabrielle’s remarked on the fact that “in the House of Chanel everything went through her, nothing could be conceived, let alone carried out, without her.”2 As it was, Chanel couture appeared to have lost its way.
Since before the Second World War, prêt-à-porter had been a growing challenge to the far greater but more time-consuming skills of haute couture, and after the war, a growing number of couture houses would be forced to close their doors. Following Gabrielle’s return in 1954, she herself had held out, but in 1977, Chanel took on a designer, Philippe Guyborget, to design prêt-à-porter. In 1983, the Parisian-trained couturier Karl Lagerfeld, then at the fashion house Chloé, was persuaded to take over this role. His rapid success led to an invitation from Chanel to design both their haute couture and prêt-à-porter. Speaking of the Wertheimers’ brief, that he “make something of Chanel,” Lagerfeld recalls their telling him that if he couldn’t, they would sell the company.
Young Lagerfeld had arrived in Paris from Germany in 1953 or 1954, intent on a career in fashion. He worked first as an illustrator for fashion houses, was taken on as an apprentice at Pierre Balmain, and then became a couturier at the house of Jean Patou. Lagerfeld’s first collection, in 1958, was poorly received; the second was praised as having a “kind of understated chic, elegance,” while in the following year, 1960, the designer produced “the shortest skirts in Paris.” This collection was criticized for being “more like clever . . . and immensely salable ready-to-wear, not couture.” Lagerfeld’s work was seen as good but not groundbreaking. For the next couple of years, he effectively dropped out; he has said he spent “a lot of time on beaches.”
By 1962, he was back in Paris, and for the next twenty years honed his skills as a freelance designer, collaborating simultaneously with numerous fashion houses, such as Chloé, Valentino and Fendi on prêt-à-porter and haute couture. In 1984, a year after he took over at Chanel, this phenomenally energetic designer also created his own label, Karl Lagerfeld, and continued forging his reputation, as one authority put it, “through consistently strong work for the numerous lines he produces every year.” For the rest of that decade, while his designs were not the only reason for Chanel’s growing profile, they were a major factor in its steady progress.
Lagerfeld says, “When I took over Chanel, no one wanted to work for an old company. I accepted against everyone’s advice, to breathe some life back into a house which was more than a Sleeping Beauty, it wasn’t trendy at all.”3 From the outset, he knew that “I must blow hot and cold. I must excite and enrage the high priestesses who’d say “Mademoiselle would turn in her grave.” He recalls his first few collections for Chanel with “very short skirts, very wide shoulders, oversized jewelry, a bit ‘too much’ of everything, but it was the right time to do it.” On another occasion, he describes having “to push it, nearly, I wouldn’t say into the vulgarity, but the eighties were not really about distinction.” Creating endless variations on Gabrielle’s signature themes, as the years passed, Lagerfeld wittily combined elements of street style with the simple elegance of Chanel classics.
His ability to reflect his times, combined with skilled manipulation of the grammar of Gabrielle’s design, enabled Lagerfeld to reinvigorate her design house with notable success. Throughout the nineties, the House of Chanel grew still more successful, and by 2001, Lagerfeld was being dubbed one of “the most high-profile designers of the previous twenty years.” But this, he says, has been easy, because no other fashion house has such immediately recognizable “elements” as Chanel. These are the markers, Gabrielle’s signature pieces, long ago core elements of twentieth-century women’s dress. Indeed, a woman’s wardrobe today is virtually unthinkable without, at the very least, one of Gabrielle’s innovations: a little black dress, costume jewelry, any bag with a shoulder strap, jumpers for women, trousers for women, suits for women, slingback shoes, a trench coat, a strapless dress and, finally, that perfume in its modernist bottle, so iconic it has remained virtually unchanged for ninety years.
Lagerfeld says, “All that together makes it that I can play with the elements like a musician plays with notes. You don’t have to make the same music if you’re a decent musician.”4
Using formidable designing skills, honed with rigorous couture training, his enviable unself-consciousness has enabled Lagerfeld, for a staggering fifty years and more, to design an immense body of work with fluency and ease. (With Chanel Inc. as financer, he has also helped preserve the highly skilled—largely Parisian—couture artisans with the recent purchase of several distinguished companies, such as Lesage (embroidery), Goossens (jewelry), and Massaro (footwear), whose time-consuming and, therefore, very costly work would otherwise have led to their closure.) While Lagerfeld knows his work “has re-established Chanel’s image,” he is quite aware thatNot all this was very Chanel . . . but my job is to give the idea that this is what Chanel is. What it is in reality, what it once was or what it might have been once doesn’t matter. And it can have a certain magic which includes everything . . . the name, the myth, the woman, myself... but the whole thing must be something of today . . . which is rooted in the past.5
Enjoying his boast “I’m the first [fashion designer] who has made a name for himself with a name that wasn’t his,” Lagerfeld made it seem smart to do this and highly profitable for Chanel. As a result, several long-established houses have been revamped by new designers. Meanwhile, Lagerfeld claims he is simply “a visitor passing through,” saying, “I haven’t made an empire with my name on it,” but like a mercenary, “I go wherever they pay me. I don’t have to think about marketing, or sales, that’s none of my business.” (The pragmatist in him, nonetheless, adds, “I like to be used by people who invest . . . if you don’t invest, if you don’t spend—the box is closed.”)
Gabrielle is mistakenly portrayed as a hardheaded businesswoman, but like Lagerfeld after her, she was pragmatic and businesslike about her creativity, without its being business that motivated her. She would say, “It was thought that I had a mind for business, I don’t . . . Business matters and balance sheets bore me to death. If I want to add up I count on my fingers.”6 And while her fights with the Wertheimers were about money, their primary source wasn’t a financial one. Rather it was from Gabrielle’s great pride, her insecurity and the fear of losing her independence. Her success arose from her recognition and anticipation of her times, combined with an intelligent employment of the right people to run the business for her. Her business, like her successor’s, was, above all, designing.
Unlike Lagerfeld, Gabrielle never dreamed of working for anyone else. Neither did any relationship, or age, make her feel able to retire from the House of Chanel:They didn’t understand that, neither men nor the others, that still there was one thing I had done myself—the Maison Chanel is my only possession, the rest was thrown at me. It’s the only thing I’ve made—all I’ve had, I didn’t want anything . . . but everybody was giving me everything. I didn’t want anything from anybody; I had made something on my own.7
As we have seen, Gabrielle’s house became her raison d’être, and she identified with it more than anything: it was her. It also led her to great loneliness.
Lagerfeld, meanwhile, doesn’t profess to have a vocation or a message, and in an interview with the formidable fashion journalist Suzy Menkes, he says, “I have no direction, line, etc. I am not that serious. In fact, I’m not serious at all. That’s why it works.” When
asked what he believes his legacy will be, he replies, “I never think what’s going on after me. I don’t care!”8
Multilingual, intelligent, ironic and pragmatic, Lagerfeld prides himself on his culture and appears driven to constant motion. In addition to his multifarious activities for several design houses, his designing portfolio includes costumes and stage sets for theater and film, house interiors, and a steady stream of books, many of which are presentations of his own photographs.
While Lagerfeld’s success at Chanel means he is almost synonymous with Gabrielle’s house, the image he has cultivated has made him almost as iconic a figure as Gabrielle herself. Using her “elements” with great ingenuity, Lagerfeld has gained for himself and Chanel even greater cachet with his interweaving of aspects of Gabrielle’s personal story into his designs. He has created collections based on Russia (Dmitri Pavlovich, Igor Stravinsky) and Britain (Arthur Capel), and made short films referring to episodes in Gabrielle’s life, such as her love affair with Stravinsky. In combination with Lagerfeld’s own image, his fashion has helped create a new version of Gabrielle. Albeit simplifying her, over the years his endless re-creation of her designs has done much to perpetuate Gabrielle’s personal legend for a modern audience. The atmosphere that now surrounds her reminds us that Gabrielle once referred to her life as “the maze of my legendary fame.”
Evoking herself, Gabrielle said, “Those on whom legends are built are their legends.”9 In the latter part of her life, however, she need not have exaggerated her role as the person who had single-handedly revolutionized women’s appearance, for she was, and remains, the most influential designer of her century.