“He really understood me,” she recalled. “He said to me, ‘Coco, if only you’d stop lying! Can’t you talk like everyone else? Where do you dig up the things you imagine?’” Yet Boy appreciated her desire to work and respected her ambition. He agreed to finance Coco’s hat shop in Étienne’s ground-floor apartment. Both men wanted to help her.
Coco bought more flat-topped straw hats and boaters at the Galeries Lafayette department store and added a ribbon, a feather, or a flower or simply turned up a brim on one side. Étienne’s friends flocked to her shop out of curiosity and brought their friends. Once, a woman came in, and when Coco asked if she could help her, the woman said, “I just came to have a look at you.”
So Coco hired an assistant and stayed in the back room. When she was told a customer had asked to see her, she sent the assistant back out. “The more people came to call on me, the more I hid away,” she recalled years later. “This habit has always remained with me. I never appeared at shows. One had to make conversation, which terrified me. And I didn’t know how to sell.”
Soon she needed more room and asked Étienne, who was still her friend, to support a move. He refused. But Boy believed in her ability. And he wanted her to have something to do while he was busy taking care of his family’s shipping companies. “Coco is intelligent,” he told an acquaintance, a society lady. “She has the qualities of a businesswoman.” So in 1911 he advanced Coco the money for renting commercial space at 21, rue Cambon—the start of the House of Chanel.
Galeries Lafayette, the busy department store in Paris, during a sale in the early 1900s
Sales increased so fast, Coco needed more assistants. She lured experienced fitters and salespeople away from prestigious fashion houses.
At the time, the leading fashion designer in Paris was Charles Frederick Worth, considered the father of high French fashion, or haute couture. Worth had died in 1895, and his sons had taken over the business. Worth’s luxurious dresses with bustles and trains were worn over tight boned corsets. Corsets were meant to shape a woman’s body and were very uncomfortable. His rival, Jacques Doucet, created ornate evening gowns made of velvet and lace, also worn over armor-like corsets. Paul Poiret had trained with both Worth and Doucet and then opened his own fashion house. Poiret introduced loose, straight dresses and harem pants (pantaloons) inspired by the cultures of Turkey and Japan. He boasted that he had freed women from corsets. Coco sneered, “Paul Poiret, a most inventive couturier, dressed women in costumes.” And he later said of her, “We ought to have been on guard against that boyish head. It was going to give us every kind of shock.”
I WAS MY OWN MASTER
Inspired by her romance with Boy, Coco began decking herself out in his clothes. She borrowed things from his closet: polo shirts, loose sweaters, and English schoolboy–style blazers. Coco had already started wearing jodhpurs at Royallieu for horseback riding, but now Boy sent her to a tailor to have a riding jacket and trousers made out of the finest material.
Once, she and Boy attended a costume party at Royallieu where the guests dressed up for a mock country wedding. Coco was supposed to be the “best man.” She bought trousers, a white shirt, a dark jacket, and ankle boots from the boys’ department at a Paris department store. Although the outfit was meant for fun, Coco added a feminine touch with her alluring looks and charm. The tomboy clothes suited her and showed off her slim figure. While other women wore fussy feathers and lace, Coco purposely created an image of herself as a gamine, a playfully mischievous girl, and sparked a trend.
Her adoring patrons at rue Cambon urged her to expand her line and offer more than hats. So she began selling women turtleneck sweaters and open-neck polo shirts like the kind she took from Boy’s closet.
Coco (on the right) and her aunt Adrienne outside Coco’s Deauville boutique beneath the awning with her name, 1913
By 1913 Boy had encouraged Coco to open a branch of her shop in the seaside resort of Deauville, where they spent summers. They chose a spot on rue Gontaut-Biron, across the street from the Grand Casino. Coco hung out her first awning. Black letters against a striped background spelled out “Gabrielle Chanel.” An article about Coco’s “trendy new boutique” appeared in a women’s magazine. The article included a photograph showing Coco in a long skirt, a simple blouse, and an oversize knit tunic with big patch pockets. In those days, pockets on the outside of clothes were part of a man’s wardrobe and considered unladylike, but Coco liked sagging pockets and defied convention. She also pinned a camellia on her jacket the way men did, starting another signature style.
One day, the weather turned cold. Coco needed something warm to wear and took one of Boy’s jersey sweaters. But she didn’t want to pull it over her head, so she cut it down the front, finished the edge with ribbon, and added a collar and a knot. When she went out, people asked her, “Where did you find that dress?” Coco said, “If you like it, I’ll sell it to you.” Quickly she made and sold ten jersey dresses. Later she said, “My fortune is built on that old jersey I’d put on because it was cold in Deauville.”
On the beach, she posed for photographs to promote her sporty clothes. “Everybody wanted to meet me,” she recalled. “I became something of a celebrity, and there, too, I started a fashion—couturiers as stars.”
The following summer, when Coco was again in Deauville, Germany declared war on France, and the next day Great Britain declared war on Germany. August 3, 1914, was the start of the Great War (World War I). Boy enlisted and joined a British intelligence unit.
By the third week of August, German troops had advanced toward Paris, and wealthy people fled to Deauville. Coco’s was the only store open in town. Women needed practical outfits to do volunteer work in hospitals, and they snapped up Coco’s skirts, sailor blouses, and knit jackets.
I created a brand-new silhouette.
Boy visited Coco whenever possible. In the summer of 1915, they went to a fashionable resort south of Biarritz, near the Spanish border. Spain was neutral, and the rich flocked there to escape from thoughts of war. Coco and Boy hit on the idea of opening a branch of her boutique in Biarritz. Once again they chose a key location: an ornate villa on rue Gardères, facing the casino near the beach. On July 15, 1915, Coco opened her shop, the first fashion house in Biarritz. She hired Marie-Louise Deray, an expert seamstress, and sent for her sister Antoinette. Before long she had sixty women sewing for her in Paris while also maintaining salons in Biarritz and Deauville.
Since there was a wartime shortage of fabric, Coco thought of making dresses out of inexpensive machine-knit wool jersey, the kind used for men’s underwear and nightshirts. “The jersey in those days was only worn underneath,” she said. “I gave it the honor of being worn on top.”
She bought a manufacturer’s entire stock, which came only in beige and gray, and transformed the fabric into chemise dresses. Coco shortened hems to above the ankle so that women could move freely. “I created a brand-new silhouette,” she said. The dresses sold out! So she bought more jersey and had it dyed in a range of colors. Coco shaped the soft jersey right on the models, who had to stand still for hours. An assistant held pins while Coco barked commands.
“Mademoiselle was demanding,” recalled Marie-Louise, the head of the workroom. “If a fitting went wrong [Coco] exploded. She loved to pester people . . . She was tough, unrelenting with the staff. But what she came up with was sensational, both chic and exceedingly simple.”
In America, Harper’s Bazaar published a picture of Coco’s creation with the caption, “Chanel’s charming chemise dress.” The stretchy material clung to the figure, so the dresses had to be worn without corsets. Poiret had killed corsets, but his clothes featured dizzying pleats and feathers. Coco’s dresses were simple and sporty. She later said, “By inventing the jersey I liberated the body; I discarded the waist.” Of course, women had to be “slim like Coco” to look good in the dresses.
Coco’s comfortable and stylish outfits made of silk jersey shown in the
magazine Les Elégances Parisiennes, March 1917
Our workrooms were like a fairyland, a veritable rainbow.
Orders flooded the Biarritz boutique. Customers included members of the Spanish royal family. By early 1916, while the war raged on, Coco employed three hundred people in her boutiques and traveled in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce.
She sent Marie-Louise back to Paris to take charge of the atelier (workroom) there. Soon Coco had five workrooms, including the headquarters in Paris, producing dresses in silk, cotton, and wool as well as jersey. She selected the fabrics and colors herself. “Our workrooms were like a fairyland, a veritable rainbow,” recalled Marie-Louise.
Coco boasted that she had started another trend in 1917 by cutting her hair short. At that time, it was fashionable for women to have long hair. Coco’s thick hair fell below her waist, and when she went out in the evening she did it up in three braids wrapped around her head. One night she was dressing to go to the opera, and the gas burner in her bathroom blew up. Soot covered her white dress and her face, and her hair was singed. She washed her face, determined to go out.
Coco with short hair, circa 1923
“I took a pair of scissors and cut one braid off,” she said. Then she cut the second braid and finally told her maid to cut the third. Coco slipped into a black dress and left for the opera. Everyone admired her coiffure, saying that she looked like “a young boy, a little shepherd.” From then on, when planning a new collection, as a ritual she cut her models’ hair and her own with a pair of nail scissors. But it was Poiret who had introduced short “bobbed” hair for women when he presented his 1908 collection. The clothes, inspired by ancient Greek gowns and Japanese kimonos, featured straight, geometric lines. Poiret wanted his models to have very spare hairdos to complement the outfits. So they wore Dutch-boy cuts with full bangs.
Coco must have known about her rival’s innovation. Nevertheless, she gave another account of how she popularized the fad. “In 1917 I slashed my thick hair,” she recalled. “To begin with I trimmed it bit by bit. Finally I wore it short. . . . And everyone went into raptures.”
Coco’s earnings enabled her to pay back the money Boy had loaned her to open the boutique in Biarritz. “I was my own master,” she said, “and I depended on myself alone.”
Heart-shaped earrings made of gold metal, red and black plastic, and rhinestones, 1995, that feature the double Cs linking the names Chanel and Capel
Yet she had always hoped that one day they would marry, despite her lower-class background. But in the spring of 1918, Boy became engaged to an English aristocrat, Diana Lister Wyndham. They married in October, just before the war ended. Coco was heartbroken.
She and Boy still cared about each other. Coco rented a villa in the town of Garches, west of Paris, and he visited her there. After seeing her in December 1919, he left in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce to meet his sister in Cannes. On the way there, a tire exploded. The Rolls flipped over and burst into flames. The driver escaped. Boy was killed on the spot. An old friend of Coco’s drove to her villa that night to tell her about the accident, but she guessed what had happened and asked him to take her to Cannes. They drove for eighteen hours without stopping. No one saw her cry. “His death was a terrible blow to me,” she later said. “1919, the year I woke up famous and the year I lost everything.”
Coco’s black wool jersey and silk satin day dress with pleated skirt, 1926
BLACK WIPES OUT EVERYTHING
Coco still had her three boutiques and plunged into work as a memorial to Boy. In his will, much of his estate went to his wife and baby daughter, but he had left Coco a huge sum of money, which she used to move to a five-story building at 31, rue Cambon. Later, in about 1928, she installed mirrors that covered every wall in the salon. Mirrors lined the walls of the staircase too. The faceted mirrors reflected multiple images of the models as they presented new collections. Coco, perched out of sight at the top of the stairs, could see the reactions of the spectators below.
Boy had introduced Coco to a circle of artistic friends that included a legendary model named Misia Sert. As a young woman Misia had posed for artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Édouard Vuillard. Portraits of her appeared in posters, photographs, and paintings all over Paris. The first time she and Coco met, Misia admired Coco’s fur-trimmed red velvet coat, and at the end of the evening Coco offered to give it to her.
Jean Cocteau and the cast of the ballet Le Train Bleu wearing Coco’s costumes, 1922: (left to right) Lydia Sokolova, Anton Dolin, Jean Cocteau, Leon Woizikovsky, and Bronislava Nijinska
“Obviously I could not accept it,” recalled Misia. “But her gesture had been so pretty that I found her completely bewitching.” The next day Misia hurried over to rue Cambon, and the women became best friends. Sometimes they dressed in twin Chanel outfits.
After Boy’s death, Misia sympathized with Coco. “I tried desperately to think of ways to distract her,” she said. At Misia’s dinner parties Coco met artists Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, composer Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Diaghilev, the director of Ballets Russes. The artists and writers didn’t ask or care about her background; they simply admired her talent and wit. Coco did not need to fabricate stories for them—a vice she still indulged in among certain people.
A few years later, she created costumes for Cocteau’s ballet Le Train Bleu, about rich vacationers traveling to Deauville, and Picasso designed the stage curtain and program. The costumes for men and women were based on Coco’s own lines of sports clothes: swimsuits, tennis outfits with headbands, and striped sweaters. When Cocteau was asked why he had chosen Coco, he said, “Because she is the greatest couturiere of our age.”
One evening at the Paris Opera House, Coco sat in her box seat and surveyed the gowns of the women in the audience. “All those gaudy . . . colors shocked me,” she said. “Those reds, those greens, those electric blues . . . brought back into fashion by Paul Poiret, made me feel ill. . . . I remember only too well saying to someone sitting beside me: ‘These colors are impossible. These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black.’”
Up till then, women had worn black only if they were in mourning. But in 1920 Coco made the color fashionable by introducing “the little black dress.”
“I imposed black,” she said, “for black wipes out everything else around.” Using materials such as crepe and wool, she designed simple sheaths with rounded necklines, close-fitting sleeves, and skirts that fell just below the knee.
These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black.
Coco made many versions of the “little black dress” for daytime and evening. One dress in sheer silk chiffon had floating panels and a pointed handkerchief hem with streamers at the shoulders that could be tied into bows. Another evening dress was sleeveless, with tiers of chiffon in the skirt. A severe, long-sleeved black dress featured a cowl neckline and resembled a nun’s habit, a reflection of her days at the orphanage. Sometimes Coco added a white fabric camellia for contrast, and the flower became her symbol.
By 1926 the fame of Coco’s creation had spread to America, and Vogue dubbed it the “Ford dress,” comparing it to the mass-produced car that came only in black. Wealthy women on both sides of the Atlantic wore her designs or copies of them. Coco once said, “You have a style when everyone on the street is dressed like you. I achieved this.”
The original No 5 perfume bottle designed in 1921, with a stopper marked with the double C logo
LEAD THEM BY THE NOSE
Each day, Coco came to work smelling of lye soap, the kind she had used at the orphanage. She loved perfume, however, and dabbed a drop behind her ears and at her wrists. In 1920 she began developing her own brand. “Women wear the perfumes they’re given as presents,” she once said. “You ought to wear your own, the one you like.”
Other couturiers, such as Poiret, had established perfume and cosmetics businesses, but Coco was the first not to use floral scents. “I don’t
want hints of roses, of lilies of the valley,” she told chemist Ernest Beaux, who had a laboratory in Grasse. “I want a perfume that is composed.” Beaux experimented with aldehydes, new chemical compounds. Coco visited his lab every day and sniffed the specimens. Beaux presented two series: one through five, and twenty through twenty-four. Finally Coco chose number five. Five was her lucky number.
Since childhood Coco had been superstitious and thought that numbers were magical. The story goes that a gypsy once told her that five would bring her luck. Coco believed it “with a passion.” She insisted that she had been born on August 5, although the true date was the nineteenth. However, her birth sign, Leo, was the fifth in the zodiac. And she always presented her fall dress collections on May 5, the fifth month of the year, and her spring collection on February 5.
The success was beyond anything we could imagine.
It was like a winning lottery ticket.
“That’s what I expected,” she said to Beaux of the fragrance she had selected. “A perfume unlike any other ever made.” She picked up the plain bottle, wrote “5” in her own hand, and said, “Now I will sell this.”
Paul Poiret and Rosine Perfumes eau de cologne, hand-painted bottle, 1920s
That night she took a vial of the perfume to a swanky restaurant and sprayed women who passed her table. “You’ve got to be able to lead them by the nose,” she said. Back in her Paris salon, she gave sample bottles to her favorite clients and had her salesgirls spray the fitting rooms with the scent. When her clients asked for more of the perfume, Chanel pretended that the idea of selling it had never occurred to her. “You mean you really like my perfume?” she asked coyly.
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