Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

While by living at Royallieu she may have sacrificed any respectability, she had also been given a unique opportunity to leave behind her miserable beginnings. However, it didn’t take Gabrielle long to recognize that country-house life could be an indolent one for the masters. Living as Etienne’s mistress failed to consume enough of her prodigious energy, so she launched herself into an activity that both did this and also contributed toward the refashioning of Gabrielle Chanel. The most successful courtesans were those who mimicked best the attributes of better-off women. Only higher-class women rode, and with Etienne’s tutelage, Gabrielle now set about becoming a horsewoman.

Etienne taught her about the handling of the horse at all stages of its training. Gabrielle proved a most willing and able pupil, luxuriating in an experience that took her outside her normal self. A personality of extremes, once she had decided to apply herself to something, it was done with a fierce intensity. And in her determination to ride, on the days when she and Etienne weren’t training together, Gabrielle was up at dawn and off with his apprentice jockeys and the trainers. With these men she felt at ease, understanding their working-man’s language. She rapidly became not only a fearless and skillful rider, but also a fine polo player, at that time unusual for a woman.

Gabrielle would say that her fine horsemanship didn’t spring from an obsession with horses, that she wasn’t like Etienne or those English women who “loved hanging around the stables.” Nonetheless, it was for her horsemanship that she was remembered by Valéry Ollivier, one of Etienne’s friends, himself a distinguished horseman. He and the other visitors to Royallieu hadn’t regarded Etienne’s young mistress as particularly significant: “She was a tiny little thing, with a pretty, very expressive, roguish face and a strong personality. She amazed us because of her nerve on horseback, but aside from that there was nothing remarkable about her.” 11

Valéry Ollivier was correct: Gabrielle did have a strong personality. And as a character of outstanding force and intelligence, she could also have excelled at a number of things. In the future, she would say of her couture business, “I could easily have done something else. It was an accident.” 12

After the mid-nineteenth century, it had become increasingly fashionable for women of means to go horse riding. Both female riders and lesbians were called Amazons (referring to those sexually suspect women in Greek mythology). This was because their riding habits had for many years been quasi-masculine ensembles and were regarded as an especially forward-thinking, modern aspect of female dress. 13The riding habits were made of woolen cloth and dark, sober colors (then uncommon for women of means in their daily attire). The women wore severely tailored jackets and skirts over chamois trousers, attached to a corset, frequently made by men’s tailors. It was accepted that these outfits were intentionally masculine, made even more so with the addition of a man’s bowler or top hat. But while the adoption of semimale attire for riding had remained much the same for years, some of the women who hunted were more radical in their appropriation of men’s clothing. For several years, they had worn shorter skirts or even breeches — and rode astride their horses.

Not long after Gabrielle began learning to ride with Etienne, she was to make another gesture revealing her capacity for nonconformity: she went to the tailor at La Croix Saint-Ouen, in the forest of Compiègne, whose usual clients were stable boys and huntsmen, and had him make her a riding outfit. She didn’t request a female ensemble of fitted tailored jacket and a long skirt; she wanted a pair of trousers — in other words, jodhpurs. Years later, she remembered the tailor’s confusion at her request.

A photograph shows her sitting astride her horse in her new riding gear: a short-sleeved, mannish shirt, a knitted tie and those rather shocking men’s jodhpurs. Nudging again at tradition, Gabrielle has also substituted the woman’s riding hat — either a top hat or a bowler — for one both less formal and more feminine-looking, wide brimmed and made of soft felt. With her slight figure and broad young face, in this outfit she could almost have been mistaken for a boy.

If Gabrielle’s part in the evolution of women’s dress was not always as outrageous as others have suggested, while riding astride her horse was in the vanguard, and most shocking was her wearing men’s riding trousers, and not only when she was hunting. And Gabrielle was famously to take this idea further. Rather than confining her blurring of male-female sartorial boundaries to horse riding, it was to become one of her great trademarks; with a hint of that frisson given by cross-dressing, femininity and seductiveness were heightened by borrowings from a man’s wardrobe.

Etienne Balsan was neither a man of politics nor a man of letters. He was a most gifted and dedicated sportsman whose favorite reading was the racing and the gossip columns in the daily papers. Most important of all the equine pursuits at Royallieu was the racing timetable. From Royallieu, it was possible to visit a racetrack most days of the week, and Gabrielle did so with Etienne and his friends. Mondays at Saint-Cloud, Tuesdays at Enghien, Wednesdays at Tremblay, on through the end of the week to Sunday at Longchamp, the most elegant of racecourses, in the Parisian park of the Bois de Boulogne.

Spectating at the races had become an immensely popular pastime across the social spectrum. One writer went so far as to say that in France, sport was the turf. As an activity with great social prestige, racing had quickly become a stage on which to vaunt one’s social position. This, of course, included the competitive spectacle of fashion. Indeed, many of those who regularly attended the races were far more interested in the promenade of fashion and society than the racing itself. A microcosm of Parisian society, racetrack meetings attracted enormous crowds, and by the early 1900s, the Longchamp racecourse was one of the most fashionable public venues in France. A huge draw for other forms of entertainment, race days were rich pickings for prostitutes of all kinds.

While a respectable woman was obliged to be escorted in public, the demimondaine usually arrived unaccompanied and was consequently forbidden access to the enclosure. Yet as the most seductive celebrities of the day, these women were also major attractions. The Second Empire had flourished, and with it the demimonde had flowered, and the grandest of its denizens met with society women, with whom they now frequently shared the same couturier. “At first glance they were the same women dressed by the same dressmakers, the only distinction being that the demimonde seemed a little more chic. ” 14

By contrast with the worldly image of these exotic fin de siècle creatures, Gabrielle always appeared unadorned, modest and neat; without exception, her dress was very simple. At the racecourse, intent on watching one of Etienne’s horses in training, she might wear a loose, mannish coat over a tailored jacket, collar and tie, with an undecorated straw boater. She made a practical, sporty look appear most desirable.

A good many American women appear to have adopted tailored outfits for practical activities as far back as the 1880s. This fashion was well ahead of France. As late as 1901, the influential French magazine Les Modes was still describing the female suit as “a revolutionary development,” adding the caution that “gentlemen have not fully appreciated the tailored costume. They have found it too closely resembling their own.” 15

Gabrielle would say in the future that she had been unaware of being watched and gossiped about as Etienne Balsan’s mistress at the races. She also said, “I looked like nothing. Nothing was right on me… Dresses didn’t fit me and I didn’t give a damn.” 16Gabrielle didn’t wear the traditionally exaggerated female getups for the races, and instead stuck to her simple tailored outfits. Again, it wasn’t that wearing a tailored outfit was unheard of, but it was seen as unconventional for a woman to wear it to the races.