Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

As a young man of distinction and a polo player of note, Arthur was one of the resort’s darlings. And so its habitués looked on with interest as he arrived for the season with the woman rumored to be his live-in mistress, and whose hats were becoming familiar to the beau monde . Vogue had recently given Deauville its stamp of approval as “the summer capital of France,” with the “shortest, gayest, and most exciting season of any of the fashionable resorts on the continent.” Arthur now took a suite of rooms at one of the grandest hotels, the newly opened Normandy, which was connected by an underground passage to the opulent new casino.

While society dismissed the rumored talk of war and flocked to the “summer capital,” Gabrielle was preparing to launch her new venture: with Arthur’s financial backing, she was about to open a new shop. Having chosen with Arthur premises on the rue Gontaut-Biron, the smartest street in Deauville’s select shopping quarter, Gabrielle had hired two country girls as seamstresses, organized the redesign of her shop and begun putting out the word.

Like all resorts, Deauville’s prestige was sustained by the theatricality of its daily life. All events and venues, from the restaurant to the parties and the polo ground to the boardwalk by the beach, relied for their entertainment on the dress and behavior of the visitors. Catering to a community of ever-changing, socially fluid personalities, the resort’s entertainments were promenading, sports and parties. The changes of dress required for the morning promenade; the afternoon’s races, polo, golf; the evenings spent dancing, at the casino or a party called for large and varied wardrobes.

And it was aspects of resort lifestyle that had inspired Gabrielle’s designs. Few women took part in any sports; they were observers dressed in immensely impractical clothes. But for the small group of younger women like Gabrielle, who played tennis or golf or actually went to the beach to swim, what they now wanted was fashion with greater ease of movement.

In Gabrielle’s boutique, with its striped awning proudly bearing the name “Gabrielle Chanel,” she offered clothes and hats based on simplified elements. There were open-collar blouses; simple sweaters; loose, belted jackets and long skirts for relaxed and outdoor living. Most famously, Gabrielle had taken familiar items of men’s practical clothing and turned them to her advantage. The fisherman’s shirts, turtlenecks and oversized sweaters, the polo sweater — Arthur’s having apparently been donned one day because Gabrielle was cold — all these she modified for women. The polo shirt, for example, became an open-necked, belted tunic with sleeves rolled up. Borrowing from those workaday wardrobes, she amazed and delighted her audience by demonstrating that the practical and the everyday could be the source of high style, until then invariably rooted in luxury and the exotic. In a place like Deauville, attuned to the slightest diversion in dress, Gabrielle’s salon immediately set tongues wagging.

Adrienne was once again pressed into service, leaving the boutique several times a day to spend time around the town with friends, sporting one or another of Gabrielle’s outfits. This proved so successful that Antoinette joined the ranks as mannequin, while Gabrielle and Arthur’s circle was also drumming up interest. This first range of clothes was almost certainly ready-to-wear, Gabrielle’s first couture collection coming later. At the beginning of September, the magazine Femina published a full-page illustration evoking the jolly atmosphere around Gabrielle, accompanied by the following puff:

Every morning at the chic hour, groups form outside the fashionable shop. Sportsmen, noble foreigners and artists shout at one another and chat; some, friends of the house, harangue female passers-by, inviting them to come in… “Come on, dear countess, a little hat, just one, only five Louis…!” And one goes in: people chat, they flirt, they show off amazing outfits… Outside it’s a hubbub, the double rank of people sitting down who watch, contemplate and criticize: a non-stop double-stream, moving toward the sea. 11

Femina showed Gabrielle with a client and some illustrious friends, including one of the most celebrated contemporary painters, Paul Helleu, and the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont. Santos-Dumont was a Brazilian whose aeronautical feats had included the first European public airplane flight, making him one of the most famous men in the world.

We see Gabrielle in a casual white outfit on the boardwalk by the beach, with that length of dark hair caught up and setting off a loose, easy blouse and a long simple skirt. To this she has added an oversized, open-necked cream tunic with large patch pockets, and into her buttoned belt she has tucked a white flower. Pockets were as yet uncommon on the outside of stylish women’s clothing, unless it was for sporting occasions. (British companies such as Burberry made fishing or walking coats with pockets.) Anyone other than the most forward-thinking observer would have regarded Gabrielle’s hands, dug comfortably into her pockets, as audaciously unladylike. In another photograph, Adrienne poses in a wrap coat, and she and Gabrielle stand together smiling broadly in front of the boutique, its “Gabrielle Chanel” awning wafting in the sea breeze.

Recently discovered photographs give a lively impression of the resort’s street theater. Arthur and his stylish friends lounge nonchalantly around the entrance to Gabrielle’s salon. In another photograph, a group of celebrities passes the time of day on comfortable chairs in front of the salon. Paul Helleu and his friend Giovanni Boldini (also friend to Edgar Degas), probably then the most successful portrait painter in Paris, sit talking with another friend, Sem, pseudonym of Georges Goursat, the most notable French caricaturist of the day. His studio was near Gabrielle’s boutique on rue Cambon in Paris, and he had been a friend and admirer for some time. Sem was a small man who dressed carefully and whose sardonic pen made those in the public eye fear him. In Jean Cocteau’s characterization of Sem, one senses Cocteau’s defensiveness. Sem was “a ferocious insect… progressively taking on the tics of his victims he pursued. His fingers, his stump of a pencil, his round glasses… his forelock, his umbrella, his dwarfish, stable-boy silhouette — all seemed to shrink into and concentrate upon his eagerness to sting.” 12

That summer, Gabrielle captured Deauville’s imagination. Her lover’s social standing, Gabrielle’s own striking appearance and personality and her cohort of admirers combined to help promote and accommodate this young woman of undistinguished background in this most elite of locations. Later, Gabrielle also recalled her own sense of conviction when she said: “The age of extravagant dress, those dresses worn by heroines that I had dreamed about, was past.” 13

Among her visitors on the rue Gontaut-Biron was the Baroness Diane “Kitty” de Rothschild, who brought with her Cécile Sorel, one of the capital’s leading actresses. A delicious piece of gossip going the rounds had it that Kitty Rothschild, a devoted client of Poiret’s, had turned up one day at his salon with her retinue of male admirers. They had not only followed the baroness into the dressing room but also entertained themselves by making suggestive remarks to Poiret’s young mannequins. Poiret was at the pinnacle of his career and gave vent to his anger by banishing the Rothschild retinue from his salon. Whether or not this ban was extended to Kitty Rothschild herself is uncertain. Nevertheless, the young socialite let it be known she was intent upon revenge.

Knowing full well that as one of the most fashionable women in Paris, her patronage was invaluable publicity, she shunned Poiret’s salon, putting out the word that she now followed the exciting new designer, Gabrielle Chanel. Soon other stylish young women, such as Princess Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge, née Erlanger; Pauline de Saint-Sauveur and Antoinette, pretty wife to the fashionable playwright Henri-Adrien Bernstein, were to be seen in Gabrielle’s salon. Gabrielle and her assistants were kept frantically busy into the new year of 1914.