Mademoiselle

by Rhonda K. Garelick

  104 kept their own houses afloat: As early as 1933, the Reich founded an institute devoted to nationalizing women’s style, the German Fashion Institute. But the institute foundered and succumbed to internal divisiveness, never succeeding in standardizing women’s fashion in any way. In 1936, when Magda Goebbels, wife of the Reich’s propaganda minister, initiated a patriotic boycott of French dress models, Hitler personally intervened to overturn it. Irene Guenther analyzes the discord and disorganization of the German Fashion Institute in Nazi Chic, 167–200. Janet Flanner in the first of her three-part profile of Hitler writes, “Hitler prefers the Walküre type of lady.… He also likes women who are well dressed. Though it would be officially denied, Hitler opposed Frau Goebbels’s recent patriotic boycott of French dress models, a blacklisting which, since Germany has no dress designers, nearly ruined the foundation of Germany’s ready-made garment trade.… Owing to Hitler’s pressure, the ban was lifted and today one-third of the leading Paris couturiers model business is with Berlin.” Flanner, “Führer I,” The New Yorker, February 29, 1936: 20–24.

  Hitler even expressed indulgent understanding of those German soldiers occupying Paris who ignored orders and bought silk stockings and other non-regulation French luxuries to send home to wives and girlfriends. Guenther, 141.

  For the definitive study of French couture during the war and the relationship between designers and the Reich, see Dominique Veillon, Fashion Under the Occupation, trans. Miriam Kochan (1990; repr., New York: Berg, 2001).

  105 Women’s love of Parisian clothes: Famous Italian sportswear designer Countess Gabriella di Robilant, who opened her famous atelier “Gabriella Sport” in 1932, cited Chanel as one of her “spiritual masters.” “From Chanel … I learned the science of dressing, I refined my taste and later … got to know many secrets of an art which up to then had been a prerogative of the French.” Quoted in Lupano and Vaccari, 226. Originally in Gabriella di Robilant, Una gran bella vita (Milan: Mondadori, 1988). In December 1935 the Italian government established the National Board of Fashion dedicated to promoting and standardizing Italian design, but it did not accomplish its stated goals. The Italians even tried to police the language of fashion: French fashion terms used habitually in Italian were expunged and replaced with new Italian coinages. The Commentario dizionario italiano della moda (Commentary and Italian Dictionary of Fashion) by Cesare Meano, was published in 1936, with what Eugenia Paulicelli points out was the “paradoxical aim of both establishing and ‘retrieving’ a national tradition in the culture of fashion.” Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion Under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (London: Berg, 2004), 57.

  As in Germany, the Italian effort to eliminate foreign influence failed. “Fascist nationalism and its empty rhetoric could never construct an ‘Italian national identity’ closed in itself nor be a permanent and universal inspiration for an Italian fashion and style,” writes Paulicelli, 15.

  106 contradictory view of women: “Fascism had an ambivalent rapport with all models [of femininity],” Victoria de Grazia wrote. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 73.

  107 through motherhood and housewifery: In matters of sexual politics, the fascists looked to the early sexologist Otto Weininger, whose 1903 book, Sex and Character, laid out an extremely Manichaean view of human sexuality according to which men were logical, intellectual creatures, made for action and thought, and women, illogical, unconscious beings, best suited for mindless tasks and passive reproduction.

  108 Social progress for women: This included ousting women from all civil service jobs and other forms of public employment, as well as drastically reducing many state-sponsored services for women and children. See Sandi E. Cooper, “Pacifism, Feminism, and Fascism in Inter-War France,” The International History Review 19, no. 1 (February 1997): 103–14. Mussolini denied women the right to vote (after raising it as a possibility) and was responsible for establishing fascism’s purely reproductive view of human sexuality, designed to limit women to the roles of wives, mothers, and widows. See Maria-Antoinette Macciocchi, “Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology,” Feminist Review no. 1 (1979): 67–82, 77.

  109 undermining the traditional feminine roles: “Italy was uncomprehending of modern female roles,” writes historian Victoria de Grazia. See de Grazia, 24. See also Etharis Mascha, “Contradictions of the Floating Signifier: Identity and the New Woman in Italian Cartoons During Fascism,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 11, no. 4 (May 2010): 128–42.

  110 duty to repopulate the fatherland: “Woman’s proper sphere is the family,” proclaimed Joseph Goebbels in 1934. Quoted in Leila Rupp, “Mother of the ‘Volk’: The Image of Women in Nazi Ideology,” Signs 3 no. 2 (Winter 1977): 362–79, 363. Originally quoted in Hilda Browning, Women Under Fascism and Communism (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934), 8.

  Rupp discusses an interesting subgroup of feminist Nazis who agitated for women’s equality. The party returned to this theme constantly: “We have given honor back to the housewife.… The work of the housewife … is one of the most economically important factors in a nation,” declared Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, head of the Nazi Women’s League. Her speech, entitled “Duties and Tasks of the Woman in the National Socialist State,” was delivered in October 1936 to a Nazi rally. Reprinted in Landmark Speeches of National Socialism, ed. Randall L. Bytwerk (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008): 52–65, 59.

  Hitler, who devoted a section of Mein Kampf to Germany’s “fertility problem,” even established a kind of paramilitary reward system for reproduction, bestowing medals to mothers of large families. Bronze stars went to women who had four children, silver to those with five, and gold to those with six or more. France had tried a similar system in the 1920s to combat the country’s low birthrate. “The Führer decorates women with many children, just as he decorates the bravest soldiers,” read a sample speech distributed to Nazi Party leaders for use on Mother’s Day—a holiday celebrated with Christmas-like fanfare under the Reich. Such templates for speeches were distributed monthly to local and regional politicians to guide and standardize their rhetorical efforts. “Model Speech for Mother’s Day,” 1944, in Bytwerk, 144.

  111 “a perfect German wife”: From PBS, Master Race.

  112 the Nuova Italiana: Victoria de Grazia sums up the paradox neatly: “The constraints on women [were] … mystifying, insidious, and demeaning. [But] at the same time, the fascist dictatorship celebrated the Nuova Italiana, or ‘New Italian Woman.’ ” De Grazia, 1. Germany fell prey to the same contradictions, having constructed an ideology based simultaneously on “a mythic past and a technological future,” as Mark Antliff points out. Mark Antliff, “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (March 2002): 148–69.

  113 The political backlash: At the same time, French feminists also responded to fascism’s rise with increased activism, condemning Hitler’s and Mussolini’s militarism.

  114 back to the nursery: See Christine Bard, Les filles de Marianne (Paris: Fayard, 1995). “Wherever economic crisis occurs,” writes Bard, “women’s right to work [outside the home] will be called into question.” Bard, 313.

  115 unpatriotic neglect of child rearing: The alliance had been established in 1896 by Jacques Bertillon. See Andrés Horacio Reggiani, “Procreating France: The Politics of Demography, 1919–1945,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 725–54. The Italians had a similar scapegoat: la donna-crisi—or “crisis woman”—the cosmopolitan and educated woman who refused traditional roles. See also de Grazia, 73. Alliance president Paul Haury denounced women who he felt denatured themselves, emasculated French men, and weakened the fabric of the nation. See Paul Haury, “Votre Bonheur, jeunes filles,” Revue 266, September 1934, 281. Quoted in Cheryl Koos, “Gender, Anti-Individualism, and Nationalism: The Alliance Nationale and the Pro-natalist Backlash Against the Femme Moderne, 1933–1940,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 699–723.

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bsp; 116 Paul Morand figured among: Morand wrote an essay in 1944 blaming lack of procreation for France’s political troubles.

  In July 1935, Prime Minister Pierre Laval proposed a law designed to reduce state expenses—in households where both spouses worked for the government, the wife’s salary was to be reduced by 25 percent. The same year, he also proposed that when both spouses worked as civil servants, the wife simply be fired, in order to save the state money and promote stay-at-home motherhood. Public outcry blocked passage of this law, but it resurfaced as a model for legislation successfully passed under Vichy. Bard, 317. See also Paul Smith, Feminism and the Third Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 215. Laval would return to power as head of the Vichy government and be executed for treason in 1945.

  Working women did not necessarily fare better under leftist governments. In 1939 under Prime Minister Edouard Daladier of the Radical Party, feminists lost a major battle upon passage of the Code de la famille, civil legislation that—among other things—replaced welfare subsidies for children with subsidies paid only to “the woman at home,” effectively forcing mothers to forgo paid employment in order to receive benefits. See Smith, 249. The code outlawed abortion and placed new and extreme restraints on the sale of contraceptives. Those flouting the new law risked exorbitant fines and prison sentences of up to ten years. Although the Daladier government dissolved soon after the code was passed, its restrictions paved the way—and served as a model for—similar policies enacted by the Vichy regime, which severely restricted women’s access to work, education, and reproductive freedom.

  In 1939, Catholic playwright Paul Claudel wrote an ode urging Frenchwomen to heed Marshal Pétain’s call to renounce worldly aspirations and return to motherhood and the home: “France, listen to this old man who cares for you and speaks to you like a father! Daughters of Saint Louis, listen to him and say: Haven’t you had enough of politics?” Quoted in Muel-Dreyfus, 116.

  France under Vichy embraced what Muel-Dreyfus has called “the eternal feminine,” worshipping an extreme, nearly caricature-ish version of womanhood, embodied by the fecund housewife who strengthens the nation through procreation. In 1942, Pétain made abortion a capital crime. As Muel-Dreyfus points out, this philosophy co-opted women into the same rigid categories created by racism, producing “an amalgamation between sexual submission and social submission and, by celebrating national maternities, imposed its obsessions concerning the ‘inassimilable.’ French women, or rather, ‘the’ French woman, were inscribed by the power in its racist rhetoric.” Muel-Dreyfus explains that for the Fascists, the subjugation of women amounts to a kind of “sexual racism, [which] feeds into [conventional] racism. Woman was never posited alone but with children, slaves, workers, Jews, the colonized, etc.” Muel-Dreyfus, 6. Richard Sonn has studied the issue of women’s reproductive rights during this era. See Sonn, “Your Body Is Yours: Anarchism, Birth Control, and Eugenics in Interwar France,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 4 (October 2005): 415–32.

  117 “a caricature, a sad doll”: Votre Beauté, quoted in Muel-Dreyfus, 107.

  118 Gustave Thibon lamented: Quoted in Muel-Dreyfus, 25; originally in Gustave Thibon, Retour au réel (Lyon: Lardanchet, 1943), 66.

  119 fascism mingled comfortably: As scholars such as Roger Griffin have demonstrated, fascism was not a monolithic structure, but rather more of a “syncretic” system that coexisted at times with progressive views on art, literature, music, and dance, and was neither exclusively reactionary nor anti-intellectual. See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Not all supporters of fascism in France even shared its misogynist principles. Fascist sympathizer and Chanel friend François Coty, for example, expressed some approval for feminism in his newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple. Even Mussolini himself did nothing to prevent his daughter Edda from becoming one of the first women in Italy to wear trousers in public and to drive a car. George Mosse, “Fascist Aesthetics and Society: Some Considerations,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1996): 245–52, 250.

  120 “fascist longings in our midst”: Sontag, 97.

  121 “My epoch was waiting”: Quoted in Delay, 189.

  122 foundation stone of national identity: William Wiser writes, “Fashion … had come to represent France as the ultimate in commercial creativity, a lucrative export—not even the advance of a world depression seriously diminished the demand for expensive dress wear, for the rich … are always with us.” William Wiser, The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930s (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2000), 141.

  France was not the only nation aware of fashion’s political importance. In Italy as well, fashion figured prominently in national conception, as Eugenia Paulicelli has pointed out. “Fashion is one of the key factors for understanding the manifold process of both personal and national identity formation as well as the complexity of identity’s public performance and invention.” In 1936, the National Fashion Body of Italy (the Ente nazionale della moda) published a dictionary of Italian fashion terms, whose goal was “eliminating French terminology from the language of fashion; and … creating an Italian lexicon of fashion to plug the gap … left by the purge of French terms.” Eugenia Paulicelli, “Fashion Writing Under the Fascist Regime,” Fashion Theory 8, no. 1 (2004): 3–34.

  123 “France’s Great Couturiers”: André de Fouquières, “Grande couture et la fourrure parisienne,” L’Art de la Mode (June 1939).

  124 “a national icon of France”: Patrick Buisson, 1940–1945: Années erotiques, vol. 2: De la grande prostituée à la revanche des mâles (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009), 21–22.

  125 “She was powerfully aware”: Haedrich, 137.

  126 The price cuts increased access: B. J. Perkins, “Chanel Makes Drastic Price Cuts in Model Prices,” Women’s Wear Daily, February 4, 1931.

  127 “women prostrate themselves”: Jean Cocteau, “From Worth to Alix,” Harper’s Bazaar, March 1937, 128–130.

  128 Grecian-style bas-relief: Martin Rénier, Femina, June 1939. See also “Paris Fashion Exhibits at the Fair,” Vogue, May 15, 1939, 60–63.

  129 “It’s a religion”: This executive was then quickly corrected by a superior who asked that I remove the remark from my notes.

  130 “Gabrielle Chanel imposes”: “Votre heure de veine,” Le Miroir du Monde, November 4, 1933, 10.

  131 “miniature female Stalin”: Elsa Maxwell, “The Private Life of Chanel,” Liberty Magazine, December 9, 1933.

  132 “great and strong being”: Quoted in Ridley, 135.

  133 “Chanel dictates”: The New York Times advertisement, December 30, 1935.

  134 “A new treaty alliance”: Using similar military and political language, the same issue of Marie Claire announced the return to wide-skirted, crinoline-style dresses as proof of a “return to the Second Empire” and the style of “Empress Eugénie,” warning furthermore that such aristocratic nostalgia in fashion risked inciting a “serious threat of a coup d’état.” “L’Empire revient,” Marie Claire, March 4, 1938.

  135 “It would be to misunderstand”: Pierre de Trévières, “Paris et ailleurs,” Femme de France, March 10, 1935, 12. Emphasis added.

  136 “She reigns with authority”: “La femme de la semaine: Chanel,” L’Express, August 17, 1956.

  137 “The mood in the salon changes”: Joseph Barry, “Chanel No. 1: Fashion World Legend,” The New York Times, August 23, 1964.

  138 “[like a] spider in her web”: Marie-Hélène Marouzé oral interview; Jeanne Moreau oral interview transcript, April 22, 2006, Conservatoire Chanel.

  139 “hands on the seams”: Delphine Bonneval, interview, May 14, 2008, 5, Conservatoire Chanel.

  140 “Mademoiselle put herself on a par”: Marquand, 114.

  141 “life as a dictator”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 87.

  142 “[reconciliation] of fascist”: “The ‘monumental gathering of the female forces’ of fascism, rallyin
g 70,000 women in Rome on May 28 1939, was, in the words of the official Stefani News Agency release, ‘the most total and thrilling demonstration ever of the party’s efforts toward forming a full-blown fascist and imperial consciousness … among its female forces.’ ” De Grazia, 225.

  143 the swastika as his emblem: Chanel was introduced to German customers by 1926 at the latest, when a Berlin fashion show featured her work. Her designs continued to appear in all the top German fashion magazines until the official declaration of war with France.

  144 personal elegance could be found: Designer Geoffrey Beene summed up the phenomenon neatly: “It’s the first time I’ve seen women not objecting to another woman’s wearing exactly the same thing they are.… The spirit of competition does not seem to exist in [Chanel’s] case.… Chanel style … is beginning to take on the aura of a uniform.” Quoted in Holly Brubach, “In Fashion: School of Chanel,” The New Yorker, February 27, 1989, 71–76.

  145 “[No one] understands the concept”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 57. Her words echo those of the official magazine of the Nazis’ League of German Girls, describing the new official uniforms: “The radiant white of the blouses, worn on the bodies of hundreds and even thousands of girls … brings great joy to the viewer.” Quoted in Guenther, 121.

  146 “brings out each woman’s individuality”: Personal conversations with Marika Genty and Cécile Goddet-Dirles of the Conservatoire Chanel.

  147 “As a child I had only”: Vilmorin, Mémoires, 52–53.

  148 “She is the image”: Denise Veber, “Mademoiselle Chanel nous parle,” Marianne, November 11, 1937.

  149 the 1961 Moscow Expo: Le Patriote illustré, August 6, 1961.

  150 during her later years: Carmel Snow and Mary Louise Aswell, The World of Carmel Snow (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 55. In La Chair de la robe (The flesh of the dress), the distinguished French writer Madeleine Chapsal, who knew couture well (having worked for the great couturière Madame Vionnet) and who knew Chanel personally, echoes these sentiments: “I am conscious of this image, always identical, that Chanel has imposed for as long as she has worked in fashion, and well, it is the image of herself!” Madeleine Chapsal, La Chair de la robe (Paris: Librairie Fayard, 1989), 223.