Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Before Arthur left for the front, he had instructed Gabrielle to remain in Deauville; his instinct was that she should keep her boutique open. Meanwhile, luxury, extravagance, conspicuous consumption of any kind suddenly didn’t seem appropriate, and practicality became the order of the day. A number of the socialites remaining in Deauville volunteered at the hospital, and a pared-down, unostentatious wardrobe became a practical necessity. Yet while many of the socialites claimed they had “lost everything,” they also spent that strange summer living a life as luxurious as the great resort was able to provide. Unaware that this season was the last of an époque , intimations of change nonetheless led many a wealthy woman to Gabrielle’s door to equip herself with those unfussy clothes she had originally designed with sport and leisure in mind.

And in spite of shortages of material, Gabrielle continued using her initiative and quickly reaped the rewards: her salon was always busy. Mustering her growing number of assistants, she had them sew and sew, and later said, “I was in the right place, an opportunity beckoned. I took it… What was needed was simplicity, comfort, neatness: unwittingly I offered all of that.” 7Elisabeth de Gramont, whose stylish unconventionality made her one of Gabrielle’s early devotees, remembered the tremendous activity in the boutique and the new somberness of women’s wardrobes. Gabrielle recalled the races, just before the war, and said she hadn’t realized that

I was witnessing the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century; the end of an era. An age of magnificence but of decadence, the last reflection of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body’s architecture… woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for lace, for sable for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious. 8

She decried the Belle Epoque tendency to transform women into “monuments of belated and flamboyant art,” and deplored the trains of insipid pastel dresses dragging in the dust. Referring to the decadence of those years, she remembered how there was so much wealth that it had become “as ordinary as poverty.” And that little had changed since the 1870s, “with its frenzy of easy money, of habits of straying from one style to another, of romantically taking its inspiration from every country and all periods, for it lacked a way of expressing itself honestly.” 9

One of those Gabrielle had in mind here was Paul Poiret. His hugely simplified designs had signaled a fundamental redirection of women’s clothing, so that now it was cut along straight lines and constructed from rectangles of fabric. Nonetheless, there were significant aspects of Poiret’s work that Gabrielle would resolutely eschew. First, Poiret looked with nostalgia to the past. Second, he was seduced by the romance of the exotic, at that moment involving the fantasy of Russia, central to the vogue for all things oriental. Gabrielle recognized that what both these strands of thought — the exotic and indulgence in the past — were doing was hiding from aspects of the present. While Poiret had embraced his radical times and believed he was intent upon liberating women, in his costume “fantasies,” they still played out a version of the old stereotype: woman subjugated and presented as more ideal than real. His harem pants were a perfect case in point.

In the realm of clothing at least, Gabrielle was no longer interested in fantasy. Embracing what she saw as the reality of her times, she not only gave women practical, stylish clothes but also made them fashionable. And at the end of that hectically busy summer at Deauville, the first of the war, Gabrielle had earned the huge sum of two hundred thousand gold francs. (In today’s currency, this is worth approximately ₤560,000.)

When he could, Arthur rushed back from the front to maintain his business interests and visit Gabrielle and his friends. But life was entirely altered. The majority of his contemporaries were paring down their lives and feeling diminished by the war. To begin with, aside from old men and boys, much of the male population had been packed off to fight. Paris felt unrecognizable:

Rid of its bad ferments, [it] had become popular, fraternal again: we were humble little things at the mercy of events: the stock exchange was closed, theaters were shut, the Parliament was away, luxury cars were in Bordeaux… the streets of Paris have become great village streets again, where one communicates from door to door. 10

But Gabrielle’s and Arthur’s entrepreneurial spirit — some would call it opportunism — made what they had to offer very salable, and their response to their times united them still further. While Gabrielle sold her simple, stylish and appropriately sober clothes, Arthur used his fleet of ships to become one of France’s major providers of coal, then one of the most crucial resources in the running of a country and a war.

By the end of November 1914, Arthur was based in Flanders with his fellow officers at the Château de la Motte au Bois. Its châtelaine, the Baroness Clémentine de la Grange, noted how appropriate Arthur’s first billet, with two lady milliners, had been, saying that it was “not for the first time… that millinery has played a part in his life.” As a close friend of the baroness’s nephew, another intelligence officer, Odon de Lubersac, Arthur was invited to stay at the château.

Shortly before Christmas, Arthur’s commander, General Allenby, offered to have her driven to visit her other son at Reims. She later recorded:

I started in Captain Capel’s car, driven by a Parisian ex-jeweller, his chauffeur. Captain Capel and Lieutenant Pinto asked permission to accompany me to Paris. When passing through the village of Croisettes… I stopped a few minutes to see my nephew, Renauld. As I went back to the car I saw a crowd round it. Boy Capel was already seated by the chauffeur, smoking his pipe, with an expression on his face that aroused my suspicions. Lieutenant Pinto and I, before getting into the car, tried to fathom the reason for the villagers’ curiosity. At last we discovered on the back of the car, which was thick with dust, that the wretched Boy had written with his finger, “Honeymoon!” I was the joke of the village!

Capel, though of a most solemn and serious appearance, cannot resist a joke, good or bad. 11

Meanwhile, along with many of the Deauville beau monde, Gabrielle returned to the capital with Antoinette, leaving a saleswoman in charge of the salon. While the war hadn’t reached the rapid conclusion that had been predicted, people realized that, for the moment, Paris wasn’t going to be overrun.

In the meantime, Adrienne had returned to Vichy, apprehensive for the safety of her lover, Maurice de Nexon, now fighting at the front; many had already lost loved ones. Two more deaths, while probably leaving Gabrielle relatively unmoved, nonetheless bore a significant connection to her past. Her grandparents had come to their final rest: Adrienne’s mother, Angélina, had died a year earlier, and now Adrienne had her father, Henri-Adrien, buried beside her at Vichy.

In those months following the initiation of hostilities, with Gabrielle’s greater financial autonomy she took on the responsibility for her little nephew, André Palasse, whose mother, Julia-Berthe, had committed suicide so gruesomely. Gabrielle would always feel a particular tenderness for André, and while spending Christmas with Arthur, she decided to send the boy away to school in England. At Arthur’s suggestion, Gabrielle chose his old prep school, Beaumont, so as to teach André English and to begin equipping him with the manners and the bearing of a gentleman.

Following another six months of war, with vast numbers of casualties, there was still no progress along the western front. It has often been suggested that it was the appalling experience of trench warfare that forced the various armies to move almost overnight into the age of technological warfare. By 1915, planes were flying reconnaissance, and flamethrowers, hand grenades and the terrifying poison gas were regularly being used. What Gabrielle called the “age of iron” had well and truly begun.