‘It is perhaps of interest to add that two days after the Chanel Paris diamond show opened, De Beers stock was reported to have jumped some twenty points on the London exchange.’
Thus Chanel’s influence was proven to have real power; and the business of fashion, at least in her hands, to be less ephemeral than the financial institutions that had fallen victim to the catastrophic crash in the stock markets. But it was not the first time that Chanel had used jewellery to display her authority, as well as her social supremacy and success. These were made manifest in the manner in which she wore her precious gems – the Duke of Westminster’s pearls and emeralds slung over tweeds and plain woollen knits, in an insouciant disregard for tradition – and in her apparently effortless ability to persuade rich women to follow suit. As Cecil Beaton observed in The Glass of Fashion, Chanel’s genius was to invent ‘a mode of brilliant simplicity’: ‘Ruthlessly women were stripped of their finery, fitted with a tricot and skirt or 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 pearls.’
Proof of Chanel’s unrivalled power was also strikingly evident in her employment of aristocrats as artisans to make her jewellery, just as she had previously brought members of the Russian elite into her service. In doing so, the peasant girl from the provinces had leapt over the barriers of class that had encircled Parisian high society; an upturning of the social hierarchy that was made clear in her relationship with Count Etienne de Beaumont. His soirées and costume balls were fabulous affairs, as carefully choreographed as the ballets he patronised; but when Coco Chanel was first befriended by Misia, the dressmaker was not deemed worthy of an invitation to the Count’s salon. ‘I know perfectly well that in those days “society people” would never dream of inviting “tradespeople”,’ remarked Misia in her memoir. ‘Then again, the latter would never permit themselves to recognize or greet you, except in their own establishments. Consequently Count de Beaumont was probably behaving naturally in not sending Mademoiselle Chanel an invitation; but she was my friend, so I felt hurt that an exception had not been made for her.’ Misia’s comments were as revealing of her relationship with Chanel – loyalty spiked with malice and possessiveness – as they were of Chanel’s with Count de Beaumont. But if Misia felt hurt, and Chanel wounded, then an exception was very quickly made for the couturière in her transformation from tradeswoman to trendsetter to leader of the beau monde. As Chanel’s fame grew, de Beaumont not only welcomed her as an illustrious guest at his parties, but also agreed to work for her as a jewellery designer in the late Twenties. Chanel’s subsequent (and somewhat cryptic) account of this episode to Paul Morand indicates that she may not have entirely forgiven de Beaumont for his previous social slights; or perhaps he simply failed to prove his worth to her. ‘I know what work is,’ she said to Morand. ‘I have never hired layabouts. Count Etienne actually slaved away to such an extent that he secretly poached my buyers; he sent them off to his townhouse where he had set up a second workshop, while still retaining … the one he had at my house. I dismissed him, for all who are paid deserve hardship. I don’t like dilettantes who take other people’s place, be it in literature or couture. It is immoral to play at earning one’s living.’
Whatever the unhappy circumstances of the end of Chanel’s working relationship with the Count, she continued to see him socially, and still attended his elaborate Ancien Régime costume balls. After de Beaumont’s departure, she commissioned Jean Hugo as a jeweller, and another blue-blooded aristocrat, Fulco di Verdura, a Sicilian duke who designed several of Chanel’s most famous pieces, including a cuff bracelet crafted around a Maltese cross (in the same shape as the mosaic pattern on the stone floor at Aubazine). Verdura worked for Chanel in Paris for several years, from 1933 onwards, before setting up his own studio in New York as a bespoke jeweller of great renown.
But the man who was to be Chanel’s most important collaborator, and also her lover, was Paul Iribe, an exact contemporary of hers with a similarly provincial background. Born Paul Iribarnegaray to Basque parents in 1883 in Angoulême, south-western France, he had shortened his name to Iribe when he came to Paris in 1900. A fiercely ambitious young illustrator, Iribe founded his own satirical journal, Le Témoin, at the age of 23, which brought him to the attention of Paul Poiret. The couturier, then at the height of his fame, commissioned Iribe to draw an album of fashion illustrations in 1908. ‘He was a most unusual young fellow,’ wrote Poiret in his memoirs, ‘a Basque, chubby as a capon, with something of both the divinity student and the composing room foreman about him. In the seventeenth century he would have been a court priest; he wore gold rimmed spectacles, a wide-winged detachable collar with a loose sailor-knot tie … He spoke very softly, as though there was always some mystery, and placed a kind of crucial emphasis on certain words, articulating every syllable, as when he said: “That’s ad-mi-ra-ble!”’
Iribe’s work for Poiret was much praised, and as his fame spread as an illustrator, stylist and designer of fabrics and furniture, so too did his social success. His first wife was an actress, Jeanne Dirys, a celebrated beauty who had contributed to Chanel’s early triumph as a milliner when in 1911 she was depicted in a broad-rimmed Chanel hat on the front cover of Comoedia illustré in a bold illustration by Iribe himself. A friend and colleague of Cocteau – they launched a new magazine together, Le Mot, in 1914, after the demise of Le Témoin – Iribe was rapidly absorbed into Misia’s inner circle, with all its fashionable absurdities and splendid inconsistencies. During the First World War, for example, when Misia had been given permission to transport wounded soldiers from the front line to Paris, she persuaded several couturiers to donate their delivery vans to be converted to ambulances, and called upon Paul Iribe to be her driver. There are differing reports of Misia’s outfit – some say she was dressed in a nurse’s outfit especially designed for her by Poiret, others that she wore a business-like tweed suit – but Paul Iribe was dressed like a deep sea diver (for reasons that were never made clear), while Cocteau was in a male nurse’s uniform by Poiret, and Sert wore pale grey knickerbockers.
The little black dress goes yellow in New York. Illustration by Georges Lepape, American Vogue, 1928.
Chanel in pearls. Jean Moral, 1938. Boris Lipnitzki, 1936.
By 1919, Iribe had made his way to America, where he married an heiress, Maybelle Hogan, and was subsequently employed in 1923 by the Hollywood producer Cecil B. DeMille to design costumes and sets for The Ten Commandments. DeMille was sufficiently impressed to allow Iribe to direct a film, Changing Husbands, and even after its disastrous reception, the producer entrusted him with the role of art director of another biblical extravaganza, The King of Kings. Rumour had it that Iribe was fired when he failed to make practical arrangements for the staging of the Crucifixion. Certainly, he left Hollywood and returned to Paris before the film’s release in 1927, whereupon he opened an interior design shop (financed by his rich American wife) on Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
The precise date of the start of his affair with Chanel is unrecorded, but Iribe was definitely involved with her by the time of her diamond exhibition in November 1932; indeed, he was in London on her behalf soon after the opening of the exhibition, attempting to negotiate with the relevant authorities over a demand for customs duty to be paid if the exhibition came to England after Paris. Iribe’s efforts were unsuccessful and the planned exhibition at Londonderry House in December was cancelled, despite protestations that the entrance fees were to be donated to a charity of which Queen Mary was patron.
For all his undeniable energy and charm, Iribe was a controversial figure, both for his womanising and for his increasingly nationalistic politics. He had persuaded Chanel to finance a revival of Le Témoin in 1933, in which she appeared the following year as the unnamed yet recognisable model for his illustration of Marianne, the incarnation of Fra
nce, being judged by a sneering panel of foreign leaders (Roosevelt, Ramsay MacDonald, Hitler and Mussolini). Le Témoin was right-wing, but party politics were far less important to Iribe than a ferocious, chauvinistic patriotism; he was anti-Semitic, anti-German, antifascist, anti-democracy and passionately pro-France. As his rallying cry for the magazine declared: ‘Le Témoin speaks French. Subscribe to it.’
Colette, for one, was hugely suspicious of him, as she made clear in a letter to Maurice Goudeket (her lover and husband-to-be) after encountering Iribe and Chanel together in St Tropez in July 1933. The writer had been a close friend of his first wife, Jeanne Dirys, who had died over a decade previously, having fallen ill soon after he abandoned her; but Colette’s antipathy towards Iribe was not simply fuelled by loyalty to a dead woman. Her letter described how she had just run into Misia while shopping in St Tropez; Misia had told her with great excitement that Chanel and Iribe were planning to be married. A few minutes later, Colette felt a pair of hands – ‘very fine, cold ones’ – covering her eyes. ‘It was Coco Chanel … and a little further along I catch sight of Iribe, throwing me kisses. Then, before I can complete the rite of exorcism, he embraces me, tenderly squeezing my hand between his cheek and shoulder.’ Colette did not explain why she felt such dread of Iribe that an exorcism might be necessary, but did quote his response. ‘How naughty you are, treating me like a demon!’ he declared, to which she replied, ‘And even then you don’t give up?’ Her letter continued, ‘But he went on overflowing with joy and affection … He is slender, lined, and white-haired, and laughs through a set of brand-new teeth. He coos like a dove, which makes it all the more interesting, because you will find in old texts that demons assume the voice and the form of the bird of Venus.’
Chanel herself described Iribe with a certain ambivalence. ‘The most complicated man I ever knew was Paul Iribe,’ she told Paul Morand. ‘He criticised me for not being simple.’ Despite his own penchant for high living and his designs for lavish interiors, furniture and jewellery, Iribe started to find fault with Chanel’s life at 29 Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Her account to Morand of Iribe’s complaints offers far more insight than was usual in her memories of past love affairs. ‘“I don’t understand,” he said, “why you need so many rooms … What’s the point of all these objects? Your way of life is ruining you. What a waste! Why do you need all these servants? One eats too well in your house. I’d come here more often, I might live close to you, if you knew how I’d be happy with nothing. I loathe pointless gestures, vast expenditure and complicated human beings.” … I replied: “So be it. I shall become simple. I shall reduce my standard of living.”’
She gave up her lease at Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and rented two rooms in a modest house not far from Rue Cambon, taking with her a Coromandel screen, two heaters, her favourite books and a few rugs. ‘When he saw me leaving my house, Iribe was annoyed, jealous, unhappy. “I’m boarding out,” I told him. “It’s very convenient … and I’m going to start living the famous simple life.”’ Much to Iribe’s irritation, Chanel also suggested to him that he do the same. After some argument, they both moved into the Ritz.
From there, they would have observed the riot that took place on 6th February 1934, when thousands of demonstrators marched from the Place de la Concorde towards Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Palais de l’Elysée. The demonstration has sometimes been referred to as a sinister right-wing assault on democracy, but in fact appears to have been far more confused (and confusing) than that. ‘Nobody knows how many people were on the Place de la Concorde the night of February 6;’ reported Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, ‘maybe forty thousand, maybe sixty, with hundreds of thousands more on the Left Bank, behind the Madeleine, down the Rue de Rivoli … struggling to join them.’ No matter what conclusions were subsequently drawn from the sectarianism that fuelled the riot, Flanner believed that ‘its initial importance lay in its unheralded unity, its passionate, complete popularity. For several years, every class in France has been banditized by state taxes, state politicians, state-protected swindlers; on that one night every class in Paris turned out to protest – from men in Republican derby hats to chaps in Communist caps, from middle-aged, medaled war veterans down to Royalist adolescents who had never battled for anything except, in dreams, for an exiled king. Against horses’ hooves, gunshot, and police clubs, this unpartisan mass fought in surprise, struggled with mutual courage, and was struck down without party distinction.’
Other newspapers gave different reports. The Communist L’Humanité informed its readers that the fight had been that of the working men of Paris against Fascism, while the right-wing monarchist gazette, L’Action française, declared that it had been against Communists, Socialists, Radicals, Republicans, Jews and Freemasons. The Socialist Le Populaire accused war veterans and the Right of attempting to overthrow democracy and impose a dictatorship; the Conservative-Nationalist Le Jour believed the complete opposite, and announced that the brave war veterans had defeated a dictatorship bid by the Left. Amidst all the frenzy, Le Main came closest to the truth: that the riot on 6th February was ‘A Day of Civil War’.
In the aftermath, Janet Flanner counted the cost: ‘Official number of dead, twenty, obviously too small; unofficial number, around seventy, also too small except for miracle, considering that over two thousand machine-gun shots were fired into twenty thousand people. French cost of living, compared to French wages, higher by 30 per cent than any other on earth. Taxi strike plus riots coming during spring fashion shows estimated to have cost big houses one million francs each.’
The effect on Chanel was incalculable. Her spring show took place, as usual, on 5th February, narrowly missing the riots, but the atmosphere in Paris was anxiously febrile, and orders may well have been affected. Certainly, she was already well aware of the ongoing effects of the Depression, although her response tended to be one of confidence. She also saw it as her duty to defend the fashion industry against accusations of its irrelevance and frivolity; hence the spirited magazine article that had appeared under her byline in (of all places) The St. Paul Pioneer Press the previous year, in February 1933. ‘To talk about fashion at a time so full of sadness and hardship seems to be almost a fault of tact,’ began the piece, ‘but, if you want to think about it, isn’t fashion one of the great industries, not only of France but of the whole world?’ Chanel then launched into further rhetoric, with a hectoring passion reminiscent of Paul Iribe’s political tracts, although her arguments were internationalist, unlike his fervid brand of nationalism. Fashion, she declared, ‘allows millions of men and women to earn their living’, for it gave work to ‘the wool, the cotton and the silk industries, also the industries of feathers and artificial flowers. Also the industry of material weaving and the dye industry. And do you realize what the transportation of those goods means? … Do you realize what it means for the railroads, the navigation corporations, the customs people, the merchants, the owners of shops, large and small, the salesmen and the saleswomen?’
She then addressed herself directly to her American audience: ‘In fighting for fashion, as I do, in keeping it alive, as I do, I have the great pride of knowing that in my way I am helping the wool industry and the great stores of your cities, great or small. I know that I am fighting for work against unemployment, and in that way I may be helping farmers, too, for when there is too much misery in the world your wheat doesn’t sell.’ But for all her rhetorical self-assurance, Chanel’s article ended on a note of uncertainty. ‘I want men to be confident of tomorrow, looking at the women dressed in the fashion that I am going to create tomorrow. But although I am a woman, I am not vain enough to pretend to know today what tomorrow is going to be.’
In retrospect, when Chanel considered her past with Iribe, she suggested that it had been doomed from the start. ‘My relationship with Iribe was a passionate one,’ she told Paul Morand. ‘How I loathe passion! What an abomination, what a ghastly disease! The passionate man takes no notice of the outside
world or of other people; he sees them merely as instruments; the weather, happiness, the neighbour’s rights, these things don’t exist for him.’ Perhaps Chanel was protesting too much – after all, she had known great passion – but her description of Iribe suggests that she came to feel exhausted by him. Unlike the tender memories she expressed of Boy Capel or the Duke of Westminster, her annoyance with Iribe surfaced in her narrative to Morand, as did her sense that he was jealous of her success. ‘I can’t help feeling irritated when I think of the atmosphere of passion he built around me,’ she said. ‘He wore me out, he ruined my health. When Iribe had left for America, I was beginning to be very well known. My emerging celebrity had eclipsed his declining glory.’
Chanel also identified something in Iribe’s attitude to her that might have been linked to his own passionate feelings about France, and what it meant to be French. ‘For him I represented that Paris he had been unable to possess and control, from which he had departed in a sulk to join Cecil DeMille, down in his boring, gloomy studios in California.’ Her attempt to analyse Iribe’s psyche was not necessarily an accurate representation of his emotions, but it was deeply evocative of what she described as ‘those phantoms that we call complexes’. And if her description of him was melodramatic, it nevertheless gave some credence to Colette’s view of him as demonic. ‘Iribe loved me, but he did so because of all those things that he never admitted to himself, nor admitted to me; he loved me with the secret hope of destroying me. He longed for me to be crushed and humiliated, he wanted me to die. It would have made him deeply happy to see me belong totally to him, impoverished, reduced to helplessness, paralysed and driving a small car.’
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