Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

They hadn’t moved… and stayed in there the rest of the evening talking about God knows what… They never sat down. They stood — like men — and talked for hours. I’d never been in the presence of such strength of personality… Neither of them was a real beauty. They both came from nothing. They both were much richer than most of the men we talk about today being rich. 13

While saying that Gabrielle had “an utterly malicious tongue,” Vreeland also had great admiration for her, and added, “But that was Coco — she said a lot of things. So many things are said… and in the end it makes no difference. Coco was never a kind woman… but she was the most interesting person I’ve ever met.” 14Vreeland mixed with some of the most interesting people of her day.

Gabrielle had told the New Yorker reporter, “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.” And over the coming seasons, this youthful septuagenarian made strapless evening dresses of embroidered organdy and quantities of others in satins, chiffons, brocades, velvets, lamés and some of the most avant-garde, man-made fabrics, plain and printed Then there was the lace Gabrielle used to such effect for effortlessly chic and alluring below-the-knee cocktail dresses, or a longer, black-lace, boned, strapless sheath, with a trumpet-shaped skirt over stiffened, black-net petticoats.

As the fifties wore on, and her success continued, in each collection there were always the variations on the suit: these were soon selling more than seven thousand a year. More than twenty years later, Diana Vreeland would say, “These postwar suits of Chanel were designed God knows when , but the tailoring, the line, the shoulders, the underarms, the jupe— never too short… is even today the right thing to wear.” 15

And a new generation of the best-dressed women in the world was wearing Chanel Nº 5, once more the most popular perfume in the world. Not only Gabrielle’s old friend Marlene Dietrich and other luminaries, such as Diana Vreeland, but also younger celebrities wanted to become her clients. These included the actresses Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman. In the sixties, Gabrielle would attract to 31 rue Cambon yet more young women from the stage and screen: Anouk Aimée, Gina Lollobrigida, Delphine Seyrig, Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve. And while Gabrielle was particularly attached to Schneider and Moreau, she saw Elizabeth Taylor and her then husband Richard Burton on their visits to France. When Gabrielle was asked whether she didn’t think Elizabeth Taylor wore her Chanel suits rather too tightly buttoned — over that famously ample bosom — she replied, “There is one… who can do anything, that is Elizabeth Taylor… She is a real star.”

Bettina Ballard wrote:

There was an unorganized revolt building up in women against the whimsy changes of fashion, many of which ridiculed the wearers, and Chanel came along… to be the leader of this revolt. The young joined as her followers… and now there is a whole new generation aware of the good-taste connotations of the “Chanel Look.” She will certainly go down in history as the only couturier who spanned the taste space of almost half a century without ever changing her basic conception of clothes. 16

In 1959, Vogue wrote:

If fashion has taken a turn to the woman, no one can deny that much of the impetus for that turn stems from Coco Chanel — the fierce, wise, wonderful, and completely self-believing Chanel… it is not that other Paris collections are like Chanel’s… But the heady idea that a woman should be more important than her clothes, and that it takes superb design to keep her looking that way — this idea, which has been for almost forty years the fuel for the Chanel engine, has now permeated the fashion world. 17

This acclaim, from one of the most influential fashion magazines in the world, was also a precise rendering of Gabrielle’s mantra: that clothes, rather than dominating a woman, should be the background to her personality. Gabrielle’s comment that “the eccentricity should be in the woman not the dress” had been central to the most austere version of this philosophy, the now-legendary “little black dress.” And while Gabrielle herself was sufficiently characterful that she had always outshone her clothes, they also acted as her “shield.” Her assistant, Lilou Marquand, would say, “Maybe that was Mademoiselle’s genius: her clothes were a protection. In my suit, I was certain to look my best. No more worrying about one’s appearance, image, and line: I could think of something else. Living in Chanel gave a safety which, for Mademoiselle, was worth all the holidays in the world.” 18

Although Gabrielle vehemently denied the criticism sometimes now leveled, that her collections didn’t change, her suit, in particular, was endlessly refined and had become unfailingly recognizable as “a Chanel.” While this description irritated Gabrielle, she did indeed repeat a formula with different materials, and surrounded the changes with the details — the buttons, the braids, the linings. But this was the point: wearing a Chanel suit, one had no need to worry about one’s appearance. It has been said many times before that these suits were a kind of uniform. But as with a uniform, where everyone apparently looks the same, as Gabrielle said of her “black Ford” dresses, in such clothing, the individuality of the wearer is brought out rather than submerged.

By the late fifties, Gabrielle had created all her signature elements: the little black dresses; the smart trousers; the costume jewelry; the slingback shoes with contrasting toe caps; the pert hats; the delicate lace evening dresses; the comfortable yet elegant jersey dresses; the suits of bouclé or the Prince of Wales check with their distinctive Chanel buttons, all with chains to ensure the jackets sat well, the linings often matching the accompanying blouse; the 1955 quilted leather or jersey bags with those gilt chain shoulder straps and now the big bows gathering up Gabrielle’s models’ short bouffant hair. And no matter what may have been said about how often these elements appeared, they were also thought worth emulating by other designers, and by women across the world.

After Gabrielle’s long hiatus, despite her seventy-one years, in 1954, her thirst for work seemed as unquenchable as ever. And as had been her custom, she drove her models and her staff as much as she drove herself almost to distraction. If those who worked for her were not strong enough, or didn’t have enough respect for her, they left. It would be said that Gabrielle ruled by intimidation: “As to really contradicting her… only her friend Maggie [van Zuylen]… dared to throw a glass of beer in her face; for the rest, her employees were too afraid of her.” 19Gabrielle’s small court — that kind that typically grows up around a couturier — of course had its sycophants, but all those who worked for her did not fear her. Like her friends, several had made the decision to accept her for what she was.

When the French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes wrote his essays on the language of fashion, 20he nailed Gabrielle as a classic rather than an innovator. While also declaring her a rebel, he described her recent declaration of war on the other designers: “It is said Chanel keeps fashion from falling into barbarism and endows it with all the classical virtues: reason, naturalness, permanency, and a taste for pleasing rather than a taste for shocking.” Barthes described Gabrielle’s unwillingness to take part in the annual fashion “vendetta,” where what has gone before is now dead. However, while his critique of Gabrielle is a good one, in the past she had been an innovator, and “reason, permanency, [and] a taste for pleasing rather than shocking” are not the attributes of a rebel.