The Last Collection

by Jeanne Mackin

  “There are ways to earn money. Good money,” this woman said, brushing bread crumbs from her fingers. “Can you draw?”

  “A little.” I grew more wary, sensing what her next words would be.

  Sketchers were fashion industry spies with three particular talents. They could observe, memorize, and draw. All the copy houses and the big department store buyers hired them before the new collections were to be shown. Their job was to go to the showings, concentrate on a few select numbers, dresses and gowns certain to sell well, to memorize the details, then, afterward, when no one was looking, sketch them. The copy houses and buyers paid as much as forty francs per sketch, and a good sketcher could earn as much as four hundred francs from a single two-hour showing of a collection. That was more than most seamstresses earned in many months.

  Because of the sketchers, each couture house trained one or two salesgirls to do nothing but watch the crowd during the showing, to catch anyone who might be jotting down notes or making drawings on their programs, or even paying a little too much attention to a particular gown.

  Sketchers, and their thievery, were why Coco didn’t give programs during her showings, only tiny slips of paper on which the viewers could jot down numbers of dresses and suits, and nothing else, Bettina said.

  Schiap laughed at them. “There is always something they can’t catch,” she had told me. “The correct size of the stripes in the lining, the design of the buttons. There is always a giveaway in the copies, and everyone knows it, so it just makes real customers hungrier for the real item, for a true Schiaparelli gown.”

  “Do you work for a department store or copy house?” I asked the woman, finishing the last drop in my glass and signaling to the waiter.

  The woman turned a furious red and wouldn’t answer.

  “This is for my drink,” I said, giving the waiter some coins.

  The woman, still beet red, wrote her phone number on a scrap of paper and pushed it toward me. “Our rates are the highest.”

  The next day, I saw her going into Coco’s salon. I was on my way to the Ritz to meet Ania at the bar, and the woman was turning into the rue Cambon. She probably had scissors in her bag and was going to snip fabric samples from the wide seams the couturiers used. This was an unfortunately common occurrence: some garments were so snipped at by thieves they had no seams left, just a few threads parallel to the stitching to hold it in place.

  Ania laughed when I told her about the encounter. “Poor Coco,” she said, stirring her mint julep. I wondered how she had learned about this quintessentially American drink, but didn’t ask. “How Coco hates the copiers. It comes from growing up poor. She resents every penny that should be hers but is taken by someone else.”

  “Is that why Schiap doesn’t mind as much?” Schiap, who had grown up in a great house full of valuable furniture and silver and servants.

  “With Schiap, it is not pennies that matter but ego. She thinks that when thieves no longer copy her designs, a couturier is no longer in style. She might as well be dead, or out of business, which might be the same thing to her.”

  “The only thing worse than having people talk about you, is not having them talk about you. Oscar Wilde,” I said.

  Ania tilted her brimmed hat a little more over her eye and winked at me. “Me, I’d rather be a penny counter, like Coco, than an egoist like Schiap. And if you ever tell her I said that, I will skin you alive.”

  “Coco has quite an ego as well. And I think someone is already spying on Schiap.”

  “Probably. Maybe even the police, since they like to sniff out communists. Schiap should be careful,” Ania said. “She has made enemies, and Coco Chanel is not the only one.”

  “Von Dincklage, too.”

  “Yes, him, too.” She fussed with her hat again. “How is Charlie?” she asked. “He hasn’t written to me in weeks. Does he . . .”

  “Yes. He still does,” I said. “He still loves you. This was more than a fling with him, Ania. You know that, don’t you?”

  “For me, too. It was so much more, but . . .” She turned away so I couldn’t see her face. “My daughter. I can’t leave her. I won’t.”

  • ELEVEN •

  The showing of a new couture collection is a rainbow of emotion: red excitement, blue nervousness, yellow optimism, violet regret. For months, Coco and Schiap and the designers had been working on new designs, new concepts and styles, dozens of them, competing not only with their rivals but with their own history. The designers cannot repeat themselves, yet they must stay close to their own brand, they must be identifiable, so that when a customer wears her new dress people can say, “Oh, that’s a Chanel,” or, “That’s a Schiaparelli. Isn’t it interesting what she has done this season?” It is a tightrope walk for the imagination.

  The great houses of Paris all showed their new collections during the same week, and the scheduling is like designing a battle strategy; the showings are the battles, and there are winners, and there are losers.

  That week, collection week in late August, Paris doubled in population. In addition to all the Parisians returning from their summer holiday, buyers and shoppers came from all over the world. You could walk down the rue de la Paix and hear Spanish, Greek, English, Italian, all the different American accents from Texas to the Bronx.

  There were duchesses from Bavaria and buying assistants from Macy’s, English debutantes getting ready for their first season, Argentinian mistresses hoping to get one last wardrobe from a man growing bored. Wives. Daughters. Any woman who cared how she looked, who could get to Paris, did. The hotels and restaurants filled; the cafés at night overflowed. Paris throbbed with excitement.

  Coco and Schiap showed their new collections on the same day, just hours apart, but Coco’s was first. I went to the late-afternoon showing and tried to ignore the glance of unpleasant surprise the doorman gave me and my Schiaparelli day dress when I handed him my ticket.

  Those tickets were small miracles to come by, reserved for the big buyers, the style editors of the major magazines and newspapers, the other bigwigs in the world of couture as well as the most famous customers: the Duchess of Windsor, Elsie de Wolfe, and others of large fortune and good taste. Janet Flanner, the correspondent for the New Yorker, never missed a showing. But Coco had saved one of those precious tickets, one of those chairs in the audience, for me. A kindness? Perhaps.

  Her second-floor showroom was filled with rows of silk upholstered chairs and tubs of white orchids. The air was thick with the scent of her most popular perfume, No. 5. The lighting was dim enough to be flattering to faces no longer young but strong enough to show off the clothes. A string quartet played Vivaldi. The buzz of conversation all but drowned out the quartet, and people, mostly women, shifted expectantly in their chairs.

  On the showroom floor, shop assistants lurked behind pillars and in corners, ready to confiscate any pencil or pen that lingered too long over the program for the collection. Coco would not let people take notes during the showing, for fear of copyists and sketchers. Journalists and known customers would be invited back later so that they could more closely inspect the collection, but the general audience was not to write during the showing.

  I checked the audience to see if the woman who had approached me and asked to sketch for her was there. She was. Hat perched too far back on her head, jacket not well constructed—I was learning some of the tricks of the trade—sitting in the third row. I caught the eye of one of Coco’s assistants and carefully, hoping no one else would see, pointed at the woman. The assistant approached her, whispered a few words. The woman shook her head. The assistant insisted. With a shrug of her shoulders, the woman handed over her small pocketed notebook.

  She looked over her shoulder, saw me, and gave me a scathing glance, but I was glad I had thwarted her. I hated cheats. Coco had seen this skirmish, and when I looked in her direction again, she smiled a thank-y
ou.

  The collections were always shown in a prescribed sequence: first, the day and sport outfits, the casual clothes worn by models who looked ready for the tennis court, a ride in the Bois de Boulogne; then the afternoon and town clothes, sophisticated ensembles for tea and cocktails and matinees; then, the magnificent evening gowns and wedding dresses.

  The models paraded out holding the number of their outfit in one hand, the other placed on a hip or stroking a lapel of a jacket. They turned to show the backs, turned to face us once again, and then disappeared, to be replaced by the next model, the next ensemble. The audience sat forward in the chairs, eyes flaming with covetousness as they wrote down the numbers of the outfits they wanted for their own wardrobes.

  All through the showing Coco sat at the top of the stairs, half hidden behind a pillar, her face showing exhaustion and worry.

  By the end of that showing, though, her pensiveness had given way to satisfaction. The cheering, when she descended the steps, was loud enough to satisfy even the demanding Coco Chanel.

  “The lamé dress with the bolero,” the woman next to me shouted to her companion, her shrill voice barely audible over the applause.

  “The printed lounge pajamas with that huge necklace!” her friend agreed.

  Coco’s collection was a success.

  But the Schiaparelli collection was a grand success.

  A crowd of fashion-hungry women raced across the gray cobbles of the Place Vendôme in a loud clattering of heels on pavement, as soon as the Chanel viewing was over, even before the applause had died down. I watched Coco’s face grow stormy at how eager they were to see what Schiap had planned. Schiap could have scheduled her showing so that it didn’t follow so closely on the heels of Coco’s, but when I saw the women, the journalists, the buyers for the stores, racing across the Place Vendôme to Schiap’s boutique, I knew this was her revenge for the Durst ball.

  I could have stayed behind, talked with Coco, congratulated her. But I, too, didn’t want to miss a minute of Schiap’s collection. I had already seen the garments, but Schiap didn’t just show clothes; she presented theater to her audience, spectacle.

  The boutique was all in darkness when we arrived. A doorman solemnly opened the door, and ushers guided us up the stairs to our seats, where we fidgeted like schoolchildren. When we had grown quiet, baroque music began to play, Lully’s court music written for Louis XIV. Slowly, imitating a sunrise, the lights came up, just enough so that we could see, but not enough to dim the constellations that glowed from lights carefully arranged on the ceiling of the boutique. The show began.

  Schiap’s models danced La Ballet de la Nuit, slowly twirling, arms extended to invisible partners, and we were all transported to a court ball in seventeenth-century France. We watched with breath held in, not wanting to break the spell of glamour. No one took notes; we were too enthralled with the fantasy.

  The collection finished with slender evening gowns in moiré silk that changed color as the models walked, and at the very end they put on the capes meant to be worn over the gowns, all covered in glittering rhinestone embroidery. The models and gowns seemed part of the sky itself, glittering and mutable, full of shooting stars. It was breathtaking.

  Gogo, returned from her stay in Nice and brown as a walnut, applauded from beginning to end, never once letting her hands rest in her lap.

  “Marvelous,” she whispered in my ear. That day Gogo adored her mother, admired her, loved her. We all did.

  Schiap was mobbed by journalists and buyers at the end of the showing. The society ladies stayed behind as well, shouting for the attention of Schiap’s assistants, who now allowed customers to see the garments up close, to feel the fabrics, see the details of the embroidery, as they made up their minds which outfits they would order. I stayed on the fringe of the crowd, taking it in, but Schiap looked up at me once and winked. Set me on fire, her expression said. Well, I showed her.

  I remembered an old proverb my grandfather had told me once, back in New York when I was fuming over some childish wrong committed against me. When you plan revenge, you must dig two graves.

  * * *

  • • •

  After the showings, Paris, that city of changing, dappled light, changed yet again, from sultry summer and frantic collections week to autumn. The tourists and buyers left, and the city seemed like a woman who has grown a little wiser, a bit calmer.

  I was anything but calm. I was painting furiously, two, sometimes three new canvases a week, barely letting the paint dry on one before beginning another, trying to capture the light in all its variability, the colors on the trees, the mutable river, the clothing of the women, the cold-pinked cheeks of schoolchildren. There was color everywhere, and I was consumed with the need not to repeat it or try to capture it, but to talk with it, to add my own colors to the silent conversation of hue and tint.

  The colors almost mixed themselves on the palette; my skies were bluer than blue, the reds shimmered with passion. The lighting in my landlady’s attic was magnificent, and more and more, instead of thinking of scenes, of people walking by the river or a dawn cityscape, the usual paintings made of Paris, I thought only of the colors. I hadn’t been able to finish Allen’s portrait, and lines, specific subjects, seemed not worth painting. The landscapes I tried, the Seine at late afternoon, the grays of Notre Dame’s façade, seemed easy, pretty, no more than souvenirs for tourists. The colors, though, appeared on my canvases in large blocks and ovals.

  “But what is it? I see only red and blue,” said Solange, the housemaid who swept my floor once a week in exchange for an English lesson.

  “That’s what it is,” I said. “Color.”

  “But it must be something else,” she insisted. “A tree. A swimming pond. Two lovers, there in the corner where the blue and the red swirl around together.”

  “So you do see more than color.”

  She thought about that, biting her lip and leaning on her broom handle.

  The day that I finished my first canvas without any representational lines at all took me by surprise. I had meant to sketch in two children playing with a beach ball, but they refused to appear. Instead, there was a blur, a spiral brushed into a splotch of yellow. There were brushstrokes of joy, not children feeling joy. It was the memory of joy.

  I no longer dreamed of Allen at night. I no longer woke up with my arms formed into an empty searching circle. It wasn’t forgetting. What I felt for Allen is never forgotten, never finished. But it was an acceptance, both of loss and of a need to take a step forward each day, into the unknown future. The future, like some art, is abstract. We must see what we can in it and accept the unknowing of what is not seen.

  And as I was accepting the facts of my life, Paris was unwillingly accepting her own changes. By the end of September, Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini, and Hitler had redrawn the map of Europe, surrendering Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s army. He hadn’t stopped after annexing Austria, as many had hoped. I wondered what color Czechoslovakia, now a puppet state of Germany, would be in this new map.

  “A mistake,” Schiap said. “A big mistake. To make deals with a man like that. He is a monster.”

  Overnight, it seemed, sandbags multiplied all over Paris, protecting monuments, buildings, bridges. There were sandbags in front of Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe, in front of Saint-Michel and Les Halles. The leaves began to fade from green to yellow, the weather turned cooler, and Paris, lovely, gay Paris, began to feel sad.

  There was a sense of urgency in the air. People walked a little faster. My landlady began stocking up on flour and sugar and wine, hoarding bags and boxes in the alcove under the stairs.

  Ania came and went like a bird, a butterfly. During the summer, her husband had taken her child with him to the South of France, but now they were back and Ania spent weekends with them, in a house somewhere just outside Paris. When she wasn’t with her
daughter, she was visiting friends in London, going to a spa in Vichy.

  One day at the end of November I found her again at the Ritz.

  She was tanned and wore huge sunglasses, larger even than Coco’s tortoiseshell spectacles, but they still weren’t big enough to hide the dark smudge circling Ania’s right eye. It was dark in the bar; with those glasses on she must have been all but blinded.

  The Ritz bar was getting set up for cocktail hour—candles on the tables, white cloths, aproned men and women straightening chairs and tables. In the darkened room they seemed like attendants from an unpleasant dream, unsmiling, silent, looking sideways at Ania and me at the bar. I had never liked the Ritz bar. Too many came just hoping to find the writer Hemingway drinking there. Too many men still regretted the good old days of just two years before, when women, not allowed in the bar, were required to sit in a small room, separately, on the other side of the hall.

  “What happened to you?” I asked, pulling off the glasses and studying the bruise around Ania’s eye.

  “I walked into a door.”

  “Looks more like a fist smashed into your face.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “I walked into a door, and if you say otherwise to anyone else I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” She couldn’t think of a suitable revenge. “Another. And one for my friend.” Ania slid her martini glass over the zinc counter to the bartender.

  “Is Guido still out there?” she asked, not looking up from her martini glass. Guido was the chauffeur.

  “Yes. And not looking happy.”

  Ania flung coins onto the glistening zinc, and the bartender sullenly fetched them.

  “Well, he’s not happy. He’s lost all his free time because he’s been told to keep an eye on me. I’m not allowed to drive myself anymore. Anywhere. My husband doesn’t approve of where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”