by Brenda Polan
The outbreak of the Second World War also marked the declining years of Lanvin herself, by then in her seventies. The continuity sustained at the house of Lanvin is one of its greatest achievements. After her death in 1946, the company was run by family members for several decades, going through a number of different owners (including L’Oréal) before turning private in 2001 under investment group Harmonie, headed by a Taiwanese media businesswoman. The appointment of the sensitive, intuitive designer Alber Elbaz, who has acknowledged the inspiration he has garnered from the Lanvin archive and works at a Jeanne Lanvin black lacquer Art Deco desk, marked a new phase in the history of the house, continuing a remarkable history well into the twenty-first century.
Further reading: Jeanne Lanvin’s career is magnificently illustrated and documented in Dean L. Merceron’s Lanvin (2007). An introduction by Harold Koda analyses in detail why Lanvin has been overlooked by fashion historians. Elizabeth Barille’s Lanvin (1997) is a concise introduction to her work.
7 GABRIELLE CHANEL (1883–1971)
The most celebrated fashion designer in history, Gabrielle (‘Coco’) Chanel continues to be treated with reverence nearly forty years after her death. No designer can match her for influence on the modern women’s wardrobe. No designer, with the exception of Karl Lagerfeld, inheritor of her mantle at the house of Chanel, has thrived for so long. Her Parisian fashion house was launched as early as 1915, reached remarkable heights in the 1920s and 1930s and blossomed once again in the 1950s and 1960s.
Mademoiselle, as she was always called by her employees, took concepts from sportswear and men’s clothing and turned them into practical, effortlessly elegant clothes for women, launching her revolution at a time when women’s fashion was so overwrought that many wealthy women could not dress themselves without assistance. Her early contemporaries recognised her achievements through gritted teeth. For Paul Poiret, Chanel’s clothes were ‘miserabilisme de luxe’. While he explored bright colours and great swathes of fabric, Chanel pared down her design message time and time again. Call it functional chic; she was synonymous with the concept that ‘less is more’. She did not sketch, preferring to work directly on a model’s body, with sessions often lasting many hours with no break. Photographer Cecil Beaton, lunching with her in the twilight of her career in 1965, recalls the way she moulded the napkins in the restaurant. He was captivated by this small woman with hard black eyes who spoke in a torrent of words. Publisher and journalist John Fairchild watched Chanel at the age of eighty cut an armhole on a live model, drawing blood.
To her artist connections, she was often extravagantly generous. In the atelier and with her employees, she was tough, demanding and ruthless—qualities that won her few friends and made her increasingly isolated in later life. Money, and the making of money, certainly transfixed her, giving her the independence she cherished so much. ‘She possessed the wily foxiness of a country horse trader,’ her lawyer Robert Chaillet said.
But there was something more to Chanel. She had an exceptional ability to scent change in the air, an attribute common to the handful of designers who were influential throughout their careers. ‘Fashion is something in the air,’ she said. ‘You feel it coming, you smell it.’
Her life story is as remarkable as her talents as a designer. She was born Gabrielle Chasnel, the illegitimate daughter of market traders, in a poor-house hospice in Saumur in 1883. Her mother died when she was only twelve, so the young Gabrielle spent much of her childhood in an orphanage near Brive-la-Gaillarde. At the age of eighteen she was accepted as a charity student at a convent boarding school in Moulins and attracted attention for her striking looks, particularly her elegant long neck and deep black eyes. Local trader Henri Desboutin hired her as a shop assistant in his lingerie and hosiery shop. Chanel sang for a while at a local music hall, La Rotonde, where she gained the name Coco, after a lost dog in a popular song of the time. She was boosted in her early career by the support of a succession of wealthy and well-connected lovers; these connections also permitted her to rise far beyond the social status usually associated with dressmakers or couturiers. Her first lover, Etienne Balsan, owned an estate in Royallieu, where she lived for several years: he subsidised her first solo business selling hats from his apartment on boulevard Malesherbes. There then followed a passionate liaison with Captain Arthur Capel, known as Boy, an English playboy and polo player. He financed her first project in the rue Cambon, the Paris street that has become synonymous with her name. A small hat shop opened in 1910, followed by a boutique in the seaside resort of Deauville in 1913, selling knit separates and dresses. Biographers agree that Boy was the big love of her life; his death in a car crash in 1919 was a devastating blow.
Her rise to fame was rapid and based on applying her own pared-down personal style to her business. That style was founded on knits and flannels, materials generally considered only appropriate for sports clothing. In later life, she liked to say her fortune was built on an old jersey jumper borrowed from Boy that she had customised by snipping through the front to create a cardigan. She borrowed ideas heavily from men’s clothing, ransacking her lovers’ wardrobes for inspiration, dressing her adolescent-boy physique in clothes that had been endlessly reworked to achieve the perfect fit. In her personal life, men brought her both great happiness and sadness. But in her professional life, there was no contest: magazine editor Alexander Liberman believed she learned all her sense of elegance from men.
By 1915, she had opened a fashion house in Biarritz, subsidised by Boy. A year later, she produced her first full collection, unveiled in Biarritz to immediate and widespread acclaim. It included her take on a men’s sweater, with the neckline cut lower and a ribbon through the buttonholes, paired with a pleated skirt. Also included was a khaki jersey skirt suit with a jacket shape like a male army jacket. It should be remembered that this was wartime, when practical dressing was de rigueur. A year after the First World War ended, Chanel officially registered as a couturière and set up at 31 rue Cambon, where the house of Chanel is still located today. Together with Jean Patou, whose contribution has been underestimated, she brought simplicity and practicality to fashion in the 1920s. She blew away the ostentation of belle époque fashion, producing accessible clothes that continued to borrow heavily from the working man’s wardrobe. The youthful energy and vigour of Chanel’s clothes chimed with the open-air sports-obsessed mood of the times.
In the early 1920s, she was the arch exponent of the garçonne or flapper look, the boyish style that dominated the decade. Her women wore sweaters, short pleated skirts with dropped waistlines and cloche hats. Boni de Castellane, a Parisian dandy, said: ‘Women no longer exist. All that’s left are the boys created by Chanel.’ The little black dress, a reaction to Paul Poiret’s orientalist colours and derived from the chemise dress, was a signature piece. Previously, black was for mourning clothes only; Chanel made it chic. Black and white, for her, created a ‘perfect harmony’. In 1926, American Vogue made a celebrated comparison with the Ford motor car: ‘Here is Ford signed Chanel—the frock that all the world will wear.’ After the shock of Boy’s death in 1919, Chanel dallied briefly with the Grand Duke Dmitri of Russia, picking up a penchant for all things Russian, including oversized pieces of jewellery, that fed into her collections. Perhaps more important was her friendship (and on-off romance) with Misia Sert, a well-connected society hostess with a fiery temperament to match Chanel’s own mercurial personality and friends scattered throughout the art world, such as Cocteau, Picasso, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. The quick-witted Chanel adapted quickly to this milieu and the two women enjoyed a long-lasting love-hate friendship.
Her love life continued to flourish, culminating in an intense relationship with the Duke of Westminster, known to his friends as Bendor, the richest man in Britain. She admired his British tweeds, which she turned into coats for her customers, trimmed with fur for a luxurious and softer look. She even created flared trousers inspired by the sailors’ bell-bottoms o
n Bendor’s yacht. Meanwhile, he widened her social circle to include dignitaries on both sides of the channel, most notably Winston Churchill. All the riches of the world were now hers to enjoy; nothing and no one was beyond her orbit. The orphan girl had come a long way. But the Duke chose to marry elsewhere in 1930, leaving Chanel alone again. Her solution was to plough herself into her work. During the 1930s, the house of Chanel achieved new heights, with a team of some 4,000 employees and production of up to 28,000 dresses a year. A brief flirtation with Hollywood aside, Chanel was based in Paris, where she slept at her suite in the Ritz hotel and received guests in her apartment in the rue Cambon. A fierce rivalry with Elsa Schiaparelli, both personal and professional, gave a competitive edge to her work. Yet another lover, the illustrator and designer Paul Iribe, held out hope of marriage once again. However, after four years together, he died of a heart attack in 1935, collapsing right before her at their holiday home in Roquebrune in the south of France.
The advent of war with Germany in 1939 created hardship for all the Paris couturiers. Chanel’s business solution was to close the couture house but to keep open the boutique, selling only her celebrated Chanel No. 5 scent and accessories. Her personal solution—finding a German lover, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who was both a diplomat and a spy—proved an unmitigated disaster. When the war ended, Chanel was arrested, accused of treachery and forced into exile in Switzerland. For years, with her personal reputation in tatters, she mooched around Lausanne with occasional visits to Paris. Not until 1954, at the age of 70, did she astonish the Paris fashion world by announcing her comeback.
Dwindling sales of Chanel No.5 prompted the Wertheimers, the family that owned the rights to the scent, to make an extraordinary offer to Chanel. She would sell the house of Chanel to them, while they in return would pay all her bills for the rest of her life. With the deal sewn up, Chanel set about recapturing the magic of her pre-war house. The first show, staged on 5 February 1954 and attended by an adolescent Karl Lagerfeld, was not an instant success. The collection was like a ‘time warp’, recalled one junior American Vogue editor. But Bettina Ballard, then editor of French Vogue, felt differently. Her eye was caught by a navy blue wool-jersey suit that, she felt, summed up Chanel’s style. The jacket had square shoulders and was lightly padded with patch pockets and sleeves that unbuttoned to reveal white cuffs. The Chanel suit remains one of the great creations of modern fashion. The armhole was crucial, always small and high, constantly reshaped by Chanel herself to create a close fit. This emphasised the slenderness and fragility of the wearer’s shoulders and neck. Another internal detail, a gold chain sewn into the hems of the jacket, ensured that the jacket hung straight and did not ride up. The essential accessories included a hat, flesh-coloured stockings and two-toned sling-back shoes. As for jewellery, Chanel did not stint, from her trademark strings of pearls to her enjoyment in mixing both fake and real, which appears particularly modern from a twenty-first century perspective.
Within three collections, Chanel had made a spectacular comeback. The girl who came from nowhere now made the suit that every young high-society woman chose to wear. The suit was copied relentlessly in America and Europe, bringing Chanel style to a generation of women who could not afford couture prices. In her later years, Chanel became a French icon. She surrounded herself with her cabinet of young models and a close-knit circle of trusted friends and servants. Many of the celebrated Chanel maxims emerged from the 1960s, such as: ‘A woman’s education consists of two lessons: never to leave the house without stockings, never to go out without a hat.’
It is doubtful that the young Chanel, who broke through so many traditions back in the 1920s, would have had much time for such stipulations. But the old Chanel had come full circle, now locked in her own legend. Since her death in 1971, at the age of 88, that legend has remained intact, while the house of Chanel, driven forward by Karl Lagerfeld since 1983, has continued to flourish. Her status as an outsider may hold the key to her success. As Katell Le Bourhis, director of the Musée des Arts de la Mode et du Textile in Paris, put it: ‘She had no references, no education, no upbringing, so she was free to invent her own rules of dress.’
Further reading: There is a wealth of writing on Chanel, from Edmonde Charles-Roux’s early biography, Chanel (1976), to Alice Mackrell’s Coco Chanel (1992) and Janet Wallach’s Chanel: Her Style and Her Life (1998). Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton’s Chanel (2005), the catalogue to the Chanel exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has some illuminating essays. The Allure of Chanel, by Paul Morand (translated by Euan Cameron in 2008), is also of interest.
8 JEAN PATOU (1880–1936)
Often overshadowed in his lifetime and beyond by his archrival Coco Chanel, French designer Jean Patou was equally influential during his heyday, which can be precisely traced from the end of the First World War in 1918 through to the Great Crash of 1929. Perhaps, like Chanel, he might have made a glorious comeback, but he died relatively young and impoverished by his great vice—gambling.
Of all his many achievements, his development of sportswear for women is perhaps the most significant. In 1921, he dressed the tennis player Suzanne Lenglen at Wimbledon in a straight white sleeveless cardigan and a short white silk pleated skirt, creating an instant sensation. This boyish, sporty look—known as the garçonne—dominated women’s fashion for much of the decade, reflecting an era when women were enjoying freedom as never before, including the freedom to exercise, sunbathe and show off their legs. As with so much sportswear, many of the clothes were in reality bought by women who did not participate in sport and were more interested in showing off their Patou monogrammed cardigan sweaters to their envious friends. Patou knew this well enough, ensuring that his swimsuits, launched in the mid-1920s, included practical styles in shrink-resistant fabrics for real bathers and styles more suited for social display on the beach.
He never married but had, it appears, countless affairs and liaisons, living the life of a playboy. His perceptive biographer, Meredith Etherington-Smith, points out that Patou’s boyish women contrasted curiously with his own voracious heterosexual appetites. ‘Perhaps it was simply because Patou was not deeply involved with one woman that he was able to view women objectively, yet with a sympathy that enabled him, with an obvious sensitivity, to create clothes that combined the new spirit of freedom and yet appealed to men.’ If there was a muse, it was his sister, Madeleine Patou, in the early post-war years, although Lenglen and other sportswomen and actresses also came to fulfill that role. Madeleine’s husband, Raymond Barbas, played an equally important role on the business side, as did the socialite and publicist Elsa Maxwell in marketing the Patou name.
Patou had an unswerving eye, but he did not create his own models. As he told the photographer Baron Gayne de Meyer, ‘I wouldn’t know how to design. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, for I can’t draw, and a pair of scissors in my hands becomes a dangerous weapon.’ Instead, he provided the raw materials for inspiration for his studio, edited the results ruthlessly and followed the process through every stage. Even at the final moment, when a model was ready to walk before an audience, Patou would frequently discard an outfit. This was notably the case for a repetition genérale, technically a full dress rehearsal but in reality the name given to one of his seasonal gala fashion presentations that brought together an audience of fashion editors and the most prestigious buyers and clients. It was a foretaste of the modern fashion show, although Patou’s version also included a champagne supper.
Jean Patou was born in 1880 in Normandy, the son of comfortably off parents, Charles and Jeanne Patou. Charles was a tanner, renowned for his bookbinding leathers in exquisite colours, passing on a sensibility for colour to his son. Quickly shunning the option of joining the family tanning business, Patou worked for an uncle in the fur trade before a series of stop-and-start ventures of his own culminated in the opening of Maison Parry in Paris in 1912. For two years, before the outbreak of war, he began to de
velop the neat sense of style that characterised his work, including the use of concealed pleating, inset godets and panels. Fashion historian Caroline Rennolds Milbank has pointed out that at this early stage he also created some of the first ‘smokings’—tailor-mades with jackets fashioned after a man’s dinner jacket. By the year 1914, Patou was ready to launch under his own name, encouraged by a big order from a New York retailer, but the outbreak of hostilities with Germany put an abrupt halt to his plans. The First World War saw Patou in action for five long years, fighting as far afield as Anatolia. The psychological impact of this period was immense, and Patou’s brother-in-law, Raymond Barras, was convinced that it shortened Patou’s life considerably. However, Patou also learned much from his wartime experience, most notably about leadership and the importance of delegation. Back in post-war Paris, ensconced at 7 rue St Florentin, he set about making up for lost time, finally founding the house that bore his name in 1919. The long-waisted shepherdess dresses of that year and equally long-waisted folkloric Russian peasant collections of 1920 and 1921 put him on the map. However, it was his step-by-step evolution of sportswear for women, borrowing extensively from men’s sportswear, that was the most groundbreaking of his achievements.