Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Lagerfeld says, “All that together makes it that I can play with the elements like a musician plays with notes. You don’t have to make the same music if you’re a decent musician.” 4

Using formidable designing skills, honed with rigorous couture training, his enviable unself-consciousness has enabled Lagerfeld, for a staggering fifty years and more, to design an immense body of work with fluency and ease. (With Chanel Inc. as financer, he has also helped preserve the highly skilled — largely Parisian — couture artisans with the recent purchase of several distinguished companies, such as Lesage (embroidery), Goossens (jewelry), and Massaro (footwear), whose time-consuming and, therefore, very costly work would otherwise have led to their closure.) While Lagerfeld knows his work “has reestablished Chanel’s image,” he is quite aware that

Not all this was very Chanel… but my job is to give the idea that this is what Chanel is. What it is in reality, what it once was or what it might have been once doesn’t matter. And it can have a certain magic which includes everything… the name, the myth, the woman, myself… but the whole thing must be something of today… which is rooted in the past. 5

Enjoying his boast “I’m the first [fashion designer] who has made a name for himself with a name that wasn’t his,” Lagerfeld made it seem smart to do this and highly profitable for Chanel. As a result, several long-established houses have been revamped by new designers. Meanwhile, Lagerfeld claims he is simply “a visitor passing through,” saying, “I haven’t made an empire with my name on it,” but like a mercenary, “I go wherever they pay me. I don’t have to think about marketing, or sales, that’s none of my business.” (The pragmatist in him, nonetheless, adds, “I like to be used by people who invest… if you don’t invest, if you don’t spend — the box is closed.”)

Gabrielle is mistakenly portrayed as a hardheaded businesswoman, but like Lagerfeld after her, she was pragmatic and businesslike about her creativity, without its being business that motivated her. She would say, “It was thought that I had a mind for business, I don’t… Business matters and balance sheets bore me to death. If I want to add up I count on my fingers.” 6And while her fights with the Wertheimers were about money, their primary source wasn’t a financial one. Rather it was from Gabrielle’s great pride, her insecurity and the fear of losing her independence. Her success arose from her recognition and anticipation of her times, combined with an intelligent employment of the right people to run the business for her. Her business, like her successor’s, was, above all, designing.

Unlike Lagerfeld, Gabrielle never dreamed of working for anyone else. Neither did any relationship, or age, make her feel able to retire from the House of Chanel:

They didn’t understand that, neither men nor the others, that still there was one thing I had done myself — the Maison Chanel is my only possession, the rest was thrown at me. It’s the only thing I’ve made — all I’ve had, I didn’t want anything… but everybody was giving me everything. I didn’t want anything from anybody; I had made something on my own. 7

As we have seen, Gabrielle’s house became her raison d’être, and she identified with it more than anything: it was her. It also led her to great loneliness.

Lagerfeld, meanwhile, doesn’t profess to have a vocation or a message, and in an interview with the formidable fashion journalist Suzy Menkes, he says, “I have no direction, line, etc. I am not that serious. In fact, I’m not serious at all. That’s why it works.” When asked what he believes his legacy will be, he replies, “I never think what’s going on after me. I don’t care!” 8

Multilingual, intelligent, ironic and pragmatic, Lagerfeld prides himself on his culture and appears driven to constant motion. In addition to his multifarious activities for several design houses, his designing portfolio includes costumes and stage sets for theater and film, house interiors, and a steady stream of books, many of which are presentations of his own photographs.

While Lagerfeld’s success at Chanel means he is almost synonymous with Gabrielle’s house, the image he has cultivated has made him almost as iconic a figure as Gabrielle herself. Using her “elements” with great ingenuity, Lagerfeld has gained for himself and Chanel even greater cachet with his interweaving of aspects of Gabrielle’s personal story into his designs. He has created collections based on Russia (Dmitri Pavlovich, Igor Stravinsky) and Britain (Arthur Capel), and made short films referring to episodes in Gabrielle’s life, such as her love affair with Stravinsky. In combination with Lagerfeld’s own image, his fashion has helped create a new version of Gabrielle. Albeit simplifying her, over the years his endless recreation of her designs has done much to perpetuate Gabrielle’s personal legend for a modern audience. The atmosphere that now surrounds her reminds us that Gabrielle once referred to her life as “the maze of my legendary fame.”

Evoking herself, Gabrielle said, “Those on whom legends are built are their legends.” 9In the latter part of her life, however, she need not have exaggerated her role as the person who had single-handedly revolutionized women’s appearance, for she was, and remains, the most influential designer of her century.

The source of Gabrielle’s phenomenal success lay in her instinctive understanding of the new epoch and her anticipation, if not dictation, of what it needed. The source of Gabrielle’s greatness lay beyond simple success. She believed she had been put on this earth for a purpose: “I was working toward a new society.” And dress was only the most visible aspect of more profound changes she helped to bring about. During the course of her extraordinary and unconventional journey — from abject poverty to a new kind of glamour — Gabrielle Chanel had helped forge the very idea of modern woman, and would say: “That is why I was born. That is why I have endured.” 10

Of the many people who have helped me with this book, I owe the first debt of gratitude to my agent, Clare Alexander, whose idea it was. My initial doubts were soon transformed into an obsession. And, while Clare failed to curb this, she has my heartfelt thanks for her unfailing encouragement and professionalism. These were given with habitual good grace during the writing of this most difficult of lives.

Marie Louise de Clermont-Tonnerre, director of external relations at Chanel, kindly gave her support to the writing of the book, making my research at the Chanel Conservatoire possible.

The prime source for Gabrielle Chanel is Paul Morand’s L’Allure de Chanel (copyright © Editions Hermann), and I am most grateful to Arthur Cohen, at Editions Hermann, who so readily gave me permission to quote freely from Gabrielle’s extraordinary memoir. Edmonde Charles Roux was Gabrielle’s first and supposedly exhaustive biographer, but no one can now think of writing anything on her without Morand’s book, published two years after Charles Roux’s.

An apparently endless stream of writing on Gabrielle has appeared since these publications. Pierre Galante’s Mademoiselle Chanel, Marcel Haedrich’s Coco Chanel and Claude Delay’s Chanel Solitaire (particularly insightful with regard to Gabrielle’s inner life) are all notable for their perception and sensitivity. These authors were all Gabrielle’s friends, and I have drawn heavily on their work. Lilou Marquand’s insightful Chanel m’a dit has been helpful.

Mary Davis’s Classic Chic: Music Fashion and Modernism; Valerie Steele’s Paris Fashion: A Cultural History; the contributors to Modern Woman Revisited; Judith Thurman’s magnificent biography of Colette, Secrets of the Flesh; Francis Steegmuller’s indispensable Cocteau; and Eugen Weber’s magisterial Peasants into Frenchmen were of great help in the development of my ideas.