by Cecil Beaton
She hated the way hairdressers set their clients’ hair in tight waves like cart ruts, and she would take nail scissors and crop the hair of her favourites herself. She then set about concealing their breasts and buttocks. Women began more and more to look like young men, reflecting either their new emancipation or their old perversity.
Perhaps Chanel’s genius lay in her intuition that ladies were tired of the finicky trimmings that had been decked upon them for decades. She guessed that women of fashion would be riding in subways and taxis and would require a new concept. Possibly she turned to nature and rediscovered, or reaffirmed, the fact that the female of the species is generally unadorned, that female birds are drab compared to the males. The trick, or the genius, was to convert this drab look into a mode of brilliant simplicity, which was exactly what Chanel did. Ruthlessly women were stripped of their finery, fitted with a tricot and skirt or a plain dress; and when they looked like Western Union messenger boys, when they had been reduced to chic poverty, then and only then did she drape them with costume jewellery, with great lumps of emeralds, rubies, and cascades of huge pearls.
Her way was not madness, but method. As a dress designer, she was virtually nihilistic, for behind her clothes was an implied but unexpressed philosophy: the clothes do not really matter at all, it is the way you look that counts. Thus in the twenties, fashionable women began to take on an appearance which has since become standard with the American working girl of today and which, for that matter, chic women have never quite lost.
The most important reason of all for Chanel’s success was her insistence that women should look young. Previous to Chanel, clothes were designed for mature women, the social and cultural leaders of fashion. With Chanel’s advent they were all designed for youth; or, if not for young women, were designed to make mature women look young. It was her belief that a good figure was more important than a pretty face; yet she claimed also that it was just as easy to dress a fat woman as a slim one.
Chanel not only invented ingenious ways of making women look twenty years younger, but she also contrived brilliant inventions for making them look expensively poor. Women would be dressed in workmen’s velveteen coats with an apache hat or would wear ordinary felt overcoats. Not until the coats were taken off did one realize they were lined with sables. Chanel made dresses of sand-coloured materials that had previously been used only for the somewhat sordid underclothes of men.
CHANEL, 1953
It was Ina Claire who, in her own feminine way, exploited the Chanel look on Broadway. She was among the first to bring real clothes into the theatrical scene. Previously actresses had worn only “costumes.” For drawing-room comedy scenes Ina Claire would appear in pale beige kasha dresses or two-piece velveteen suits, and thereby paved the way for actresses to wear Edward Molyneux’s suits on the stage.
To some extent Chanel’s creativity was conditioned by theory, though never bound by it. She believed that a fashion is not for one person, nor even for a group; if a fashion is not popular with great numbers of people, it is not a fashion. Chanel herself was responsible for many “fashions.” Few people, indeed, realize the complete extent of her personal innovations. She popularized enormous shell-rimmed spectacles. She invented backless shoes, lace dresses modelled along sports lines, evening dresses of ankle length (she maintained it was slovenly to have them longer), women’s trousers cut to the calf, and many other fashions which, after twenty years and more, are still popular and may well continue for a long time. A part of the reason for the durability of her creations is their practicability: she detested lack of reason, and everything had a mathematical function. Buttons had to work properly; pockets were put where the hands could easily go into them.
During her active period as a dressmaker Chanel often took up needle and thread herself, or would cut, fit, and invent hats in paper. She trained her mannequins with all the loving discipline of a Petipa or a Balanchine, teaching them to walk on their toes, with their pelves thrust well forward. Cocteau has written of Monsieur Cheruit’s mannequins, who were similarly trained at that time: “Cheruit could be heard crying the whole length of the red and gold salons: ‘Mesdames, throw out your stomachs! Don’t draw in! Bulge! Bulge! Throw out your stomachs!’ ”
Chanel’s personality, like her designs, was something of a paradox, a mingling of the masculine and the intensely feminine. Actually the concept she had of women was entirely feminine: she wanted them to be charming and simple and natural, bemoaning the fact that the young were not sufficently romantic. She detested affectation and believed that women should let their hair grow white if it was inclined to do so. This last opinion had such effect that many younger women went so far as to simulate, by using powder in their hair, a premature streak of white. The professions of men bored her. When Cocteau told her she had a masculine mind, she became furious and, as a gesture of defiance, put a small girl’s hair ribbon round her head, knotting it in a bow on the top: a fad was created.
Though the dresses she designed seemed at times on the ascetic side, Chanel herself lived in great luxury, both materially and intellectually. Snobs and poets were her friends. Her surroundings were of Regency gilt and cocoa-coloured suède; she had Louis Quinze gold tables, brown Coromandel screens, rock crystal, and too many dark red roses.
She loved jewellery but stressed that it was to be worn as junk; i.e., regardless of its value, as something decorative or amusing, but never because it was expensive. By day, with her informal clothes, she would wear a great deal of jewellery; but at night, with her evening dresses, she wore perhaps only one bracelet. Much of Chanel’s costume jewellery was copied from her own fabulous collection of flawless emeralds, rubies, pearls, and diamonds.
What was Chanel really like? Her clients couldn’t know, for she made it a practice never to see or meet any of them, just as she seldom saw one of her creations after it was made. Her work was always completely impersonal, carried out in the Rue Cambon, in that large office full of embryo dresses and experimental berets.
It was always impossible to guess Chanel’s age. She was dark and sunburned, with high cheekbones, an upturned nose with nostrils, as she said, “like tunnels,” brilliant black eyes like buttons, and a gash for a mouth. Her hands were delicate, of a skin with a white sheen upon it, and so strong that they could shoe a horse. She wore no red on her fingernails but reddened the tips of her toes, on the theory that feet were a dreary business and required every aid. Over her angular frame Chanel wore clothes that were congruent with what she preached and often created a fashion by an impromptu gesture. Feeling chilly one day on the late Duke of Westminster’s yacht, she threw a man’s blue overcoat over her shoulders. For the next generation other women did likewise. A snapshot of her at Antibes in the thirties wearing sailor trousers and a jersey, with pearls and a beret, is as alluring as any fashion invented twenty years afterwards. When Chanel rode to hounds in France, she was perfectly groomed but ruined the conventionality of her appearance by wearing all her pearls on the outside of her habit.
Many of Chanel’s private dicta have entered into the unspoken rules that still govern fashion. She had an unerring sense of colour, emphasizing the use of black, which she considered extremely chic, and of white, but eschewing bright colours except the combination with a solid shade that would have a restraining effect. Pastel shades, she said, were only for redheaded women.
In the history of haute couture since the turn of the century, Chanel has perhaps been the most important single influence on fashion in clothes. At any earlier moment the innovations which she brought about would have been totally contrary to the spirit of the age. Yet for a great fashion designer to come into being, talent alone is not enough: the designer must have the absolute and authoritative genius to impose his or her vision of the needs of the times on the times themselves, so that fashions which a year previously would have been considered outrageous are suddenly a necessity. It is the genius who creates the need, though that need must reflect
the unconscious wishes of the moment if the genius is to be accepted, at least by his contemporaries. Today Chanel has retired from the active world of fashion. The large offices in the Rue Cambon, with their beige carpets and plate-glass mirrors, are given over to the sale of her famous scents; above them in her private apartment, Chanel, in a neat blue suit and immaculate shirt and harnessed with jewels, and surrounded by her Coramandel screens, gesso tables, and chunks of rock crystal, and with her vitality undiminished, enjoys her luxury and the fruits of her success at leisure. Though Chanel herself has echoed the theory that fashions are never revived, becoming costumes, it is a tribute to her rare and remarkable practicality, and an anomaly in the annals of recorded fashion, that few of her innovations have become dated. Like Nature’s seeds, her past creativity flowers anew with each season, barely hidden behind the vague alterations of less talented designers.
CHAPTER X
THE LADY FROM CHILE
SOMEDAY, perhaps, a volume will be written about the quiet, authoritative people who, without attracting attention to themselves like noisy comets, yet, by the sheer gravitational pull of their individual choice, influence and often change the orbit of taste of a whole epoch. In literature, for instance, such persons rediscover great writers for their contemporaries; in painting, they bring forgotten artists to light; while in the world of fashion, be it clothes, interior decoration, or flowers, they continually assert fresh values.
Madame Eugenia Errazuriz was such an influence. Her effect on the taste of the last fifty years has been so enormous that the whole æsthetic of modern interior decoration, and many of the concepts of simplicity which are so generally acknowledged today, can be laid at her remarkable doorstep.
Born Eugenia Huici in the small Chilean village of Huici, Madame Errazuriz’s formative years and education were entrusted to the English nuns in Valparaiso. But she was destined to leave her native country at a very early age, arriving in the Europe of the 1880S to take up life, first in Paris and later in London, as the wife of a rich amateur painter. An extremely elegant woman, she always wore very high-heeled shoes and dressed in the height of the mode. Thus garbed as a woman of fashion, Madame Errazuriz was painted almost continually throughout her life, inspiring such diverse artists as Picasso, Sargent, Helleu, Chartran, Madrazo, and Conder.
MADAME ERRAZURIZ AS A YOUNG MARRIED WOMAN
Eschewing the desire to become a social figure, she early made friends among the most advanced musicians and painters. It is said that Madame Errazuriz was the first to discover Picasso, whom she loved throughout her life; Stravinsky was also an early friend. Yet, for all her charm, she was extremely vague in defining herself and was apt to be diffident when talking about personal tastes. She had little sense of money, never knowing whether there were a hundred thousand pesetas in the bank or none. Hence it is something of a paradox that, in spite of the soft focus of her personality, and without being particularly articulate in any language, she became, by degrees, a grey eminence in the world of artists and cultivated people, who were to acknowledge themselves as her disciples. Like sunflowers turning to the sun, they looked to Madame Errazuriz for a redefinition of elegance, taste, and love of the beautiful.
PABLO PICASSO
In common with the few rare and quiet authorities who had preceded her in the art of living, Madame Errazuriz’ personality was such that her philosophy gained a wide and purifying influence. Though rich, she had grown tired of sumptuousness; having possessed everything, she decided to reduce her life to common denominators, echoing Oscar Wilde’s tenet that simple things are the last refuge of complex people.
So she emptied her rooms, placing only a few pieces of furniture in them with an uncanny instinct for the dynamic symmetry of arrangement. Madame Errazuriz detested suites of furniture with sofa and identical chairs. “Never follow suit,” she would stress. From the outset her taste was diametrically opposed to the knickknacks, bric-a-brac, and junk of Edwardian and Victorian decoration. Bibelots were swept out as useless; frills were banished. She became the Beau Brummell of twentieth-century interior decoration, allowing only things of intrinsic merit or quality to be found in her rooms. But this did not necessarily mean they had to be of great value: more than any other woman of her generation, Madame Errazuriz appreciated the quality of individual objects, despite their category or price, and a simple wicker basket could often be found on a valuable table.
She preferred one beautiful object to a number of pretty ones. Her Paris salon had an inkwell, a blotter, a vase of fresh leaves, a flowering plant in an eighteenth-century jardiniere, a magnificent commode, and little more. There was no excess, no object was left there by chance. Each detail, on the contrary, had been selected with the greatest care, down to the ash trays that Madame Errazuriz especially felt should be the simplest, most unostentatious objects. To have an expensive ash tray on a table was, for her, as vulgar as putting out a saucer with a large cheque upon it: a plain piece of glass was all that was needed.
The abiding rules of proportion and measure were of prime importance in her estimation, and she herself always lived in beautifully constructed houses and well-proportioned rooms. Even a small apartment was obliged to have its own architectural interest.
Within such dimensions Madame Errazuriz could create her satisfying yet unadorned world. The walls of her salons were inevitably painted white; the floors had a cleanliness that comes only from soap and water.
Before the 1914 war Madame Errazuriz took a house at Biarritz which, to the amazement of her friends, she decorated like a peasant’s house, whitewashing the walls and leaving the red tiled floors carpetless but spotlessly clean. In the salon-dining room, a long wooden shelf, scrupulously scrubbed, ran the length of the wall; and on it, for decoration as well as practicality, she placed a still life of hams, huge cheeses, and loaves of bread under large glass bell jars. Her table was always set very informally, though napkins were of the heaviest linen, and knives and forks of the best quality of French eighteenth-century silver. Picasso lived nearby and would pay spontaneous visits with a painter’s smock over his bathing clothes to amuse himself by making impromptu frescoes.
In the aging Madame Errazurizs’ Paris pavillon (a wing of Count Etienne de Beaumont’s house, which she occupied in the late twenties) the floor of the white entrance hall was always freshly scrubbed and shining. The stair railing was black, the carpet bright red, the garden table and armchair emerald green. There was a plain oak cupboard copied from an old Chinese piece. For decoration she created the strangeness of magic by the most ordinary, using household implements that, though usually stowed away in back-hall closets, struck her as beautiful. A ladder and a coat hanger were painted grey; a wicker trunk and laundry basket stood in full view; an umbrella hung from a hook, ready for use. Often she would buy objects such as the cupboard of raw wood found at a farmer’s market, because she responded to their admirable proportions. Or she might set a watering can in the hall, since it was needed to water the green plant next to it and was a thing of beauty in its own right. Garden shears or a garden basket, because of theirs, were placed in positions where they might delight the eye.
This manner of living was more purist than peasant and required both time and effort. No amount of labour was too great for Madame Errazuriz to obtain exactly what she needed, whether it was the best marmalade or the finest-quality linen. If she preferred linen rather than fine lawn for sheets, it was because linen could always be freshly scrubbed and washed. Indeed, all the objects surrounding her smelled of the pristine purity of spring water. Artificial perfumes were contrary to her tastes—she preferred eau de cologne and eau de toilette, or the fresh scent of rosemary, lavender, and sweet geranium.
Her simplicity extended to food as well. Madame Errazuriz regarded as an offensive vulgarity the afternoon tea table laden with many varieties of elaborate little sugar cakes. She produced the best blends of tea and went to great lengths to have the crispest breads served with the purest fa
rmhouse butter. Her toast was a work of art.
Once in Paris I was invited to have tea with this unusual woman. On the table before us was a simple cream-coloured Devonshire pot with a dozen white tulips rammed into it, sticking stiffly out to one side and not splayed in the manner usual to flower arrangements. I remarked on the individual boldness of the gesture. Madame Errazuriz held the pot up, and I was struck then by its beauty. She seemed amused. “Yes,” she murmured, pausing between her words with little thoughtful noises, “it’s a beautiful pot; it is a beautiful pot.” The venerable hand that held the pot, her deep voice the hesitancies—all indicated her profound and instinctive appreciation of this æsthetically satisfying object, whose crackle, colour, and shape were a delight to her. She seemed, at that moment, a very earthy, direct, almost peasant woman. I felt I had gained an insight into the basis of her æsthetic philosophy.
As we sat, I made a mental inventory of the room. There were a divan and chairs upholstered in heavy indigo crash, a colour whose popular use since the turn of the century can be traced to her. In her lifetime she employed it for unlined curtains as well. Her furniture was very solid, beautiful mahogany or fruitwood, not in the least ornate or gilded, but simple and solid English or austere Louis Seize. There were a very wide Louis Seize guéridon, some highly polished bronzes, and curtains of clean blue and white striped linen, fresh from the wash. Abstract Picassos hung in the rooms.
In that salon I could see the reflection of our latter-day taste for polished woods inlaid with brass, for rough cotton and unlined linen curtains. Madame Errazuriz emphasized the beauty of poverty (not unlike Chanel’s influence on the fashions of the twenties) and showed how lovely cotton linen could be. It is indeed more than probable that she was anti-silk. She disliked florists’ hothouse blooms, favouring fresh garden flowers. It was also typical of her taste to prefer faïence to porcelain and glass to crystal.