In Galante’s account of this episode, Chanel suddenly seemed to crumple into exhaustion for a moment, even as she declared her determination to Wertheimer: ‘I am continuing, I shall continue. They’ll end up by understanding.’ To which Wertheimer replied, ‘You are right. You must continue.’ Chanel said nothing – silenced, for once, by him, speechless after years of bitter exchanges. Then she turned to Wertheimer, her business partner, before walking through the revolving doors of the Ritz, where the Germans had come and then gone. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and the unspoken peace deal was done.
CELEBRITY CHANEL
It was America that celebrated the comeback of Coco Chanel; America that made her famous again, identifying her as a twentieth-century icon, making her face as recognisable as her legendary little black dress and pearls. And it was Life – the biggest magazine in America; not just a weekly chronicle of news, but a best-selling definer of fame – that took the lead in rejoicing in all that she represented. On 1st March 1954, the magazine ran a four-page spread on Coco Chanel, ‘the name behind the most famous perfume in the world’. There was no mention of the war, none of the disapproval or scepticism that had ambushed her in Paris, simply wholehearted appreciation; as if the United States was far enough removed from the recriminations of post-war France to enjoy unadulterated Chanel. Like Bettina Ballard in Vogue, Life was enthusiastic about Chanel’s revival of what it was that she had always done well. ‘Her styles hark back to her best of the Thirties – lace evening dresses that have plenty of elegant dash and easy-fitting suits that are refreshing after the “poured-on” look of some styles …’
In the following six months, the comfortable suits and dresses that Marie-Hélène Arnaud had modelled for American Vogue proved far more popular than anyone had predicted, and orders came flooding in from the United States. In New York, Bettina Ballard felt vindicated in her initial judgement when others in the fashion industry admired the navy jersey suit that she had ordered for herself from the comeback collection; in retrospect, she wrote, the clothes had taken on ‘an uncanny timeless Chanel personality that defied the scoffers’. By the time of the second collection, Life was quick to endorse Chanel’s achievement, and to perceive that what had been deemed a return to past glories was in itself shaping the future. ‘She is already influencing everything,’ proclaimed the magazine. ‘At 71, Gabrielle Chanel is creating more than a fashion: a revolution.’
It seemed contradictory – and continues to do so, even with the benefit of hindsight – that staying still would be seen as a transformation. But as Bettina Ballard observed in 1960, ‘The “Chanel look” remains exactly the same and precisely what women seem to want. Her extraordinary comeback in 1954 – a comeback that has endured – had far more to do with a real hunger that women had for the confidence-giving clothes that Gabrielle Chanel had always understood, always made, than any striking innovation that she brought to fashion. There was an unorganized revolt building up against the whimsy changes of fashion, many of which ridiculed the wearers, and Chanel came along like a messiah to be the leader of this revolt.’
But it wasn’t simply the clothes that drew new generations of admirers. Even in old age, Chanel herself seemed to be her own best model, with her characteristic assortment of jewels glittering against a white silk shirt; her way of standing, which came to be emulated by legions of those who followed in her wake. ‘She has invented that famous Chanel stance that looks as relaxed as a cat,’ wrote Ballard, ‘and has an impertinent chic; one foot forward, hips forward, shoulders down, one hand in a pocket and the other gesticulating.’
John Fairchild, who had arrived in Paris in 1955 to run his family business, Fairchild Publications, was equally impressed. As the the European Bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily (and from 1960, its publisher), he was in a position of considerable power in the fashion industry, yet it took him four years to gain access to Chanel. She was, he later remarked, ‘the Eighth Wonder of the World … the greatest designer in history … whose name was a household word throughout the world’. But when he was finally summoned to lunch at her apartment in Rue Cambon, she was self-deprecating, albeit with her characteristic sting. ‘I am only a little dress-maker, trying to make women young and pretty. These other designers that do the pretty little sketches, the boys, they don’t understand women, they don’t know how they live. Their idea is to make them weird, freaks.’
Not everyone agreed. Although Christian Dior had died of a heart attack in October 1957, his house continued to flourish under the aegis of the young Yves Saint-Laurent; while Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges (who worked for Balenciaga until opening his own house in 1961) were fêted for their innovative Modernism. Nevertheless, women were responding to what it was that Chanel offered; which was, amongst other things, a way of dressing that was masculine in its unruffled dignity, while remaining true to its creator’s idea of femininity. Just as she had appropriated the Duke of Westminster’s clothes in the Twenties, and those of Boy Capel before him, so Chanel remained adept at combining a streak of androgyny with a decorative touch. It was not feminist fashion – it was not fashion at all, in its adherence to continuity – but there was something liberating about it. ‘Elegance in a garment is the freedom of movement,’ said Mademoiselle, in one of her oft-repeated maxims, a philosophy that she put into practice with her signature jacket. Lined in silk, and weighted with a fine chain sewed into the bottom seam to ensure that it hung with immaculate symmetry, Chanel designed each jacket to fit perfectly, and yet to be supple enough for a woman to swing her arms or put her hands in the carefully placed pockets. Some were in jersey, reminiscent of those she had introduced during the First World War, comfortable as a cardigan. Others were in tweed, soft as the ones she had borrowed from Bendor, and a reaffirmation of ‘le style anglais’ that she had made famous, blending the style of an aristocratic Englishman with quintessentially Parisian chic. Thus the Chanel jacket was reborn in the Fifties, trimmed with grosgrain ribbon and gilt buttons embossed with the symbols for which she was renowned (a lion’s head, to denote her astrological sign; a camellia, for her favourite flower; stars, as had appeared in her diamond collection and at La Pausa; and the famous double C logo).
Romy Schneider being dressed by Chanel. Giancarlo Botti, 1960.
To the jacket, she added a bag, equally redolent of her history and iconography. The 2.55 – named after its launch in February 1955 – used numbers as an ingredient in its mystique, coded clues to the past, which added to the perception of the bag as a classic, so desirable that it seemed its days would never be numbered. This was not the first handbag that Chanel had designed – that dated back to 1929 – but when she talked about the 2.55, the message was one of practicality, as well as heritage. ‘I got fed up with holding my purses in my hands and losing them,’ she explained, in reference to her original bag, ‘so I added a strap and carried them over my shoulder.’ And while the stories of Chanel’s history were ever more embroidered, the 2.55 became emblematic of her past at its most romantic, with the joys and sorrows of every archetypal fairytale. The quilted leather, or matelassé, was said to be an indication of her love of riding as a young woman, dating back to a time when quilted material was worn only by stable-lads. The chain that served as a shoulder strap was just as evocative: golden metal plaited with a leather cord, suggestive of horse bridles and harnesses, and also perhaps of the belts worn by the Catholic nuns who had educated her as a child. ‘I know women,’ she said, towards the end of her life, when the chain strap had become an instantly recognisable component of the classic Chanel bag. ‘Give them chains. Women adore chains.’ Perhaps she was being characteristically provocative; or possibly this was as close as she could get to honesty, to an admission that she had not yet rid herself of the bonds of her past, nor stopped yearning for the links that bind a woman to a man.
After the bag, she introduced another component to the essential Chanel look: two-tone slingback pumps that went into production in 1957, and in wh
ich she was frequently photographed. As with the jacket, they suggested a gentlemanly British tradition: the Duke of Westminster and his friends had worn two-tone shoes in white canvas and beige leather for playing golf, while the Prince of Wales was seen in similarly sporty versions in the Twenties and Thirties, giving royal approval to footwear that had previously been deemed a trifle too raffish for respectability. But Chanel’s versions, beige leather tipped with black toes, were as flattering as they were practical. ‘The black, slightly square toe shortened the foot,’ explained Monsieur Massaro, then, as now, the shoemaker for the House of Chanel. ‘The beige melted into the whole and lengthened the leg.’ The heel was never too high to walk in, but with enough height to add a swing to the step. ‘A woman with good shoes is never ugly,’ commented Mademoiselle, adding another maxim to her collection. ‘They are the last touch of elegance.’
As the elements of Chanel’s style became globally recognised, her fame kept pace with that of her clients. Just as her first customers, in her earliest days as a milliner, had included actresses as well as socialites, so they did again, coming to pay homage to the oracle of Rue Cambon. She dressed the young French beauties – Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau, Anouk Aimé and Brigitte Bardot – and designed costumes for Ingrid Bergman in Thé et sympathie (a French version of a Broadway play, staged at the Théâtre de Paris in December 1956; the same month that Chanel also came up with the costumes for Jeanne Moreau in the Paris opening of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Moreau continued to appear in Chanel – in Louis Malle’s film Les Amants in 1958, and two years later in Roger Vadim’s Les Liaisons dangereuses – as did Romy Schneider, most notably in Luchino Visconti’s Boccaccio ‘70. Indeed, both Vadim and Visconti took their young protégées to Chanel for inspection and reinvention; to be polished and dressed for the part. And Visconti already had much to be grateful for to Chanel: their friendship dated back to before the war, when the handsome young Italian was a visitor to Rue Cambon and La Pausa. She had introduced Visconti to the revered French director who was to become his mentor, Jean Renoir, (and Renoir himself had commissioned Chanel to design costumes in his pre-war films La Bête humane and La Règle du jeu). The couturière’s cachet in European cinema grew with her designs for Delphine Seyrig in Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad. Hailed by some as a haunting masterpiece of Surrealism, and damned by others as rambling and incomprehensible, the film (released in 1961) served as an undeniably elegant frame for the exactitude of Chanel’s little black dresses, its meditation on symmetries finding expression in her designs, even if it were also questioning the premise of conventional form. But her appeal was to extend beyond Europe and its art-house directors: Hollywood royalty increasingly favoured Chanel, including Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlene Dietrich (who had first worn Chanel in 1933). The publicity in turn boosted the sales of the perfumes; though perhaps the biggest coup of all came courtesy of Marilyn Monroe. When the film star was asked in an interview what she wore at night, she replied – in an apparently unpremeditated line that did more than a multimillion dollar advertising campaign – ‘Chanel N°5.’
While America embraced Chanel, it was no wonder that she spoke so warmly of its citizens when she met John Fairchild, at the same time as dismissing the French, as if punishing them for the savaging she had received for her comeback collection: ‘Chanel launched into a tirade against the French – how mean, how hard, how awful Paris was today. American women were the most beautiful. The Americans were the only ones who understood her.’ They also honoured her; hence her trip to Dallas in September 1957, to receive a fashion award as the most influential designer of the twentieth century, from Stanley Marcus, the owner of the department store Neiman-Marcus.
On her way back from Texas, she was interviewed by Lillian Ross in The New Yorker, who seemed unusually smitten. ‘We’ve met some formidable charmers in our time,’ wrote Ross, ‘but none to surpass the great couturière and perfumer Mlle Gabrielle Chanel, who came out of retirement three years ago to present a collection of dress and suit designs that have begun to affect women’s styles every bit as powerfully as her designs of thirty-odd years ago did. At seventy-four, Mlle Chanel is sensationally good-looking, with dark-brown eyes, a brilliant smile, and the unquenchable vitality of a twenty-year-old, and when, giving us a firm hand-shake, she said, “I am très, très fatiguée,” it was with the assurance of a woman who knows she can afford to say it. Since the Chanel look is causing such a stir these days, we took particular note of what its begetter was wearing: a natural-coloured straw sailor hat; a natural-coloured silk suit, with box jacket and straight skirt; a white silk blouse, with gold cuff links; low-heeled brown-and-white shoes; and plenty of jewelry – a pearl hatpin, pearls and diamonds in her ears, ropes of pearls about her neck, and, on her jacket, an enormous brooch of antique gold studded with rubies, emeralds and diamonds.
‘“The brooch is of my design and the dress is nothing, très simple,” she said. “The cuff links were given to me by Stravinsky, thirty years ago. The occasion? Admiration, of course – the admiration / bore him!”’
Chanel did not put a foot wrong in the interview with Ross – her answers, in English, were as well judged as her perfectly cut sleeves. Indeed, her performance was as graceful as the most skilled celebrity who knows how to shine in the limelight, without looking vain; her composure maintained even when Ross asked her why she had happened to be in retirement for so long. ‘Her brown eyes flashed. “Never was I really in retirement in my heart,” she said. “Always, I observed the new clothes. At last, quietly, calmly, with great determination, I began working on une belle collection. When I showed it in Paris, I had many critics. They said that I was old-fashioned, that I was no longer of the age. Always I was smiling inside my head, and I thought, I will show them.’
And so she did; pointing the way forward, even as she was mocked for looking backwards, with such success that now she was being copied in France. ‘So much the better!’ she declared to Ross, seeing imitation as the best form of flattery, a sentiment she echoed in another interview in which she damned her young rival Yves Saint-Laurent with faint praise: ‘Saint Laurent has excellent taste. The more he copies me, the better taste he displays.’ But the ethos that Chanel expressed in The New Yorker- both in the clothes that she wore and designed, and in her way of life, as an independent, self-reliant woman – seemed undeniably, uniquely, appealing. ‘I must tell you something of significance. Fashion is always of the time in which you live. It is not something standing alone. The problem of fashion in 1925 was different. Women were just beginning to work in offices. I inspired the cutting of the hair short because it goes with the modern woman. To the woman going to work, I said to take off the bone corset, because women cannot work while they are imprisoned in a corset. I invented the tweed for sports and the loose-fitting sweater and blouse. I encouraged women to be well-groomed and to like perfume – a woman who is badly perfumed is not a woman!’
But there was more to being a woman than silk suits and scent. ‘Women have always been the strong ones of the world,’ she said to Ross. ‘The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants. It is just my opinion. I am not a professor. I am not a preacher. I speak my opinions gently. It is the truth for me. I am not young, but I feel young. The day I feel old, I will go to bed and stay there. J’aime la vie! I feel that to live is a wonderful thing.’
What Mademoiselle Chanel did not choose to reveal to The New Yorker- nor to anyone else, aside from her great-niece Gabrielle, her own flesh and blood – was that in the end she had conceded some of her strength, giving up a piece of herself to a man more stalwart than others. And although she had not taken his name, he had taken hers, in a final sealing of a long and tumultuous relationship. In the winter of 1954, Chanel had gone to New York, accompanied by Gabrielle, for one last set of negotiations with Pierre Wertheimer. He was, by now, a man
at the height of his power – described by Time as the ‘King of Perfume’, ‘a lean and elegant Frenchman’, wearing the emblem of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole – and Mademoiselle Chanel had need of him. Gabrielle Labrunie still remembers the snows that winter – so deep that the city seemed silent – and the lengthy meetings that went on for several months. She stayed with her aunt for the entirety of the discussions, at the conclusion of which the Wertheimers agreed to buy out Chanel’s business. In effect, they were to underwrite the couture house, gaining all rights to Coco’s name, in return for paying every penny of her expenses, including her personal bills at the Ritz and elsewhere. Chanel kept creative control, and her royalties from Les Parfums Chanel, but gave up any involvement in the financial running of her company. Gabrielle believes that when her aunt finally signed the contract with the Wertheimers, she felt liberated, rather than constrained: ‘She was free to do whatever she wanted.’
‘J’aime la vie!’ Mademoiselle had said to The New Yorker, the very model of an independent woman in her natural coloured suit; cut to her exact specifications, the epitome of the art of couture, yet suggestive of comfortable ease. Some years later, she still adhered to the merits of wearing beige, set against her trademark red lipstick. ‘I take refuge in beige,’ she told Claude Delay, ‘because it’s natural. Not dyed. Red, because it’s the colour of blood and we’ve so much inside us it’s only right to show a little outside.’
She also spoke to Delay about America: ‘America attracted her, America, which had taken her father away and whose daughter she was by adoption.’ Chanel’s reminiscences included an anecdote about a visit to Stanley Marcus’s ranch during her trip to Texas to accept the Neiman Marcus fashion award: ‘There was a little short-horned bull just like me, with a wreath of flowers.’ The bull was joined by another one, in a bizarre tableau of a wedding in Mr Marcus’s garden; a peculiar story that Chanel repeated to Marcel Haedrich: ‘A pair of unlikely newly weds suddenly appeared in the converging beams of a number of spotlights: a very young bull stuffed into evening clothes and wearing a top hat between his horns, and an equally young heifer in white Chanel with a long veil.’
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