Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Comœdia Illustré was the recently launched weekly supplement to the French daily Comœdia. Run by Maurice de Brunhoff, scion of one of the most influential publishing families in France, Comœdia Illustré was devoted to coverage of the arts, and catered to an eclectic band of sophisticates whose social mix would have been virtually impossible a few decades earlier. Brunhoff set his sights on the personalities and professionals who were representative of the social changes sweeping through large sections of French society. The financiers, industrialists, socialites, artists, writers, actors and demimondaines read such a magazine because it made them feel they were keeping abreast of the increasingly fragmenting artistic world and the radical changes emerging in all matters of style and taste.

Comœdia Illustré acted as cultural guide for its elite readership. Besides fashion, it presented photographs (very few magazines yet did this), illustrations, exhibition reviews and new elite music as well as popular entertainment. And the magazine’s largely youthful readership also identified with its undertone of rebellion. When Gabrielle had used her powers of persuasion on this, one of the city’s most stylish magazines, her liaison with one of the most high-profile young men in Paris would not have gone unnoticed. With Lucienne Roger wearing Gabrielle’s hat on Comœdia ’s cover, Gabrielle had carried off a brilliant piece of self-promotion.

Maurice de Brunhoff ’s gamble on the newcomer paid off; the response to Gabrielle’s hats was good. As a result, for the next month’s issue, October 1909, Gabrielle herself modeled two of her designs. Whether large, or small and close to the head, her hats were very simple, with no more than a single flourish. They were described as having “a style and harmony of lines that are unique to her,” and in November, Gabrielle once again got herself coverage, taking up a full page of the magazine. The December issue had another actress modeling another of Gabrielle Chanel’s hats, and throughout the following year, coverage of her work continued, with comments such as: “This design and those which surround it are of a rare distinction, and they honor Gabrielle Chanel, whose chosen and numerous clientele appreciates the assured and delicate taste more every day.”

The actresses and demimondaines of Gabrielle’s acquaintance were regularly prevailed upon to help in her promotion. Thus, in January 1911, her friend the actress Jeanne Dirys appeared on a Comœdia Illustré cover in an illustration done by the precocious young artist Paul Iribe. By May that year, the same magazine is telling us that Gabrielle Chanel’s distinguished work is now just as much sought after by beautiful women in town as in the theater.

As so often in the past, under the influence of actresses and the demimonde , society women were beginning to take note. In early 1912, Gabrielle’s work was described as “original,” and she herself was hailed as “this clear-sighted artist.” Meanwhile, Gabrielle Dorziat, Royallieu habitué and high-profile actress, modeled Gabrielle’s hats for Les Modes , another influential magazine. Dorziat wore Gabrielle’s daringly simple hats in an adaptation of Maupassant’s Bel Ami ; the press loved the actress, and her hats. Before the year was out, Comœdia Illustré declared that “this young artist… [Gabrielle] is taking a dominant place in fashion at the moment.” Not only were her hats lauded for their “unfailing stylishness and good taste,” they were used to complement outfits by fashionable couturiers.

In all the commentary on Gabrielle the designer, one is told that it was her astounding simplicity that was so radical. However, while bearing in mind that our own perception of past fashion must differ from that of its contemporaries, looking through a cross section of old magazines, Gabrielle’s hats do not stand out as entirely radical. In the elite magazines, one comes across a handful of other designers who were also throwing out the complexity and grandiosity of much contemporary fashion in favor of simplicity. Gabrielle was not alone in thinking “the women I saw at the races wore enormous loaves on their heads; constructions made of feathers and improved with fruits and plumes.” 6The difference was that her designs were more conspicuous because they reflected her own unconventional lifestyle. The other designers were not the live-in mistress of one of the most up-to-date young men in Paris. Gabrielle would say, “In the grandstands they were talking about my amazing, unusual hats, so neat and so austere, which were somehow a foretaste of things to come.” 7

Meanwhile, she had stiff competition in quality from the big names in Parisian millinery. The atelier system involved apprentices slowly working their way up under the severe and demanding premières . These years of training equipped the best milliners with great craftsmanship, subtlety of design and an inside knowledge of the trade, none of which Gabrielle possessed. The ambitious young woman Gabrielle had filched from the Maison Lewis, Lucienne Rabaté, grew impatient with Gabrielle’s refusal to take her advice (to make sure, for example, that a woman and her husband’s mistress never met at the Chanel atelier). Instead, Gabrielle squandered attention on a famous courtesan, the kind of undesirable whom Lucienne disdained. Society clients were the prize. Perhaps Gabrielle wasn’t so unaware of the nuances, and simply chose to ignore them. She was defiantly comfortable with the courtesans; she admired them, spoke the same language. At least they “worked” for their living and were not out to make her feel socially inadequate.

Lucienne eventually left the Chanel atelier, a story to be repeated many times with Gabrielle’s employees. No matter how much more knowledgeable than Gabrielle they might be, they accepted her way or they left. Gabrielle’s own unorthodox instincts were, however, to serve her very well. But her intense dislike of selling, or of ingratiating herself with her clients—“The more people came to call on me the more I hid away… And I didn’t know how to sell; I’ve never known how to sell. When a customer insisted on seeing me, I went and hid in a cupboard” 8—led to her sister Antoinette’s assuming most of this role.

Combining disingenuousness and the capacity for searing truth, Gabrielle was always a bag of contradictions, including the possession of extraordinary confidence and driving fear. Knowing, for example, that if a client found a hat too expensive, she might well reduce it, she kept herself in the background. Her most significant intuition here was the courtesanlike understanding that being enigmatic only made one more fascinating, and she coined the axiom: “A customer seen is a customer surely lost.” Despite the numerous mistakes and the slowness of it all, Gabrielle’s determination and growing sense of priorities were assuring her reputation.

There were also lighter moments. When the salon was empty of clients, for example, she and Antoinette could often be heard singing their hearts out in risqué numbers from the café-concerts . Business and its lighter moments weren’t, however, the only things then on Gabrielle’s mind. For the first time, she was truly in love. Not only did she love, she was loved in return, and experienced a rare sense of well-being.

Her lover, meanwhile, was, like her, possessed of tremendous energy; he was forever on the move. After the launch of Deauville’s polo club by his friend Armand de Gramont, other grounds had sprung up in a small number of country estates and elite summer resorts and, with his friends, Arthur played them all. Thus, in January 1911, The New York Times announced he would play at Cannes, while another newspaper reported his arrival with his polo ponies on the Côte d’Azur. In May, he was taking part in a tournament at Compiègne, and in August he was back competing at Deauville. At Dieppe, and then Châteauroux, in August, Arthur and Etienne Balsan coursed their greyhounds, and then played more polo. The personification of the modern man, Arthur was either in a state of distraction or doing something at breakneck speed.