Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

When Misia had got wind of Gabrielle’s philanthropy toward Diaghilev, she felt her role as the sole source of invention, especially if it had to do with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, had been subverted. Extraordinarily, she complained to Gabrielle about giving Diaghilev the finances to mount The Rite of Spring. Then, on hearing of Gabrielle’s further generosity, she said, “I am overcome with sorrow when I think that Stravinsky has accepted money from you.” 11

Misia was fascinated by Gabrielle, and would remain so for the rest of her life. She understood, with that uncanny intuition, that Gabrielle was different — in her own way, completely original. But she felt that the great Diaghilev was her “property.” Now that Gabrielle’s own philanthropic acts had intruded on Misia’s territory, she was incensed.

Gabrielle’s creative success and distinctive persona were enlarging her position in Parisian society. While only the most up-to-date of the haut monde were prepared to socialize with this “dressmaker,” she was now meeting some of the most significant musicians, artists and writers then in Paris. With both the haut monde and bohemia curious about her, Gabrielle had allowed herself to be seduced not by another wealthy socialite but by an artist. This particular artist, Stravinsky, was no ordinary struggling composer, and Gabrielle’s affair with this towering figure was an intriguing and thought-provoking interlude. While sometimes denying the affair, she also said what was clearly closer to the truth for her: that “he was marvelous.” This relationship confirmed Gabrielle’s unusual ability to inhabit those two worlds that are, in many ways, mutually exclusive: the world of society, the haut monde, and the world of the artist.

This ability involved a tension at the heart of Gabrielle’s creativity, and was something she would have to negotiate for the rest of her life. Like all true artists, Gabrielle was obsessed with reality and functionality and, in turn, the peculiar relation of these to beauty. This was the unique position she was forging for herself in fashion: an unobtrusive functionality.

The artist in Gabrielle intuited that if an artist associates too much with power, the creative spirit can be sterilized. And yet luxury, which was an essential part of what she was promoting, is about exclusivity, itself inextricably associated with power. As a couturier, Gabrielle was dressing the rich and powerful, who used their luxury to exhibit their wealth and power. As an artist of simplicity and minimalism, Gabrielle was running into implicit conflict and confrontation all the time. She worked in the midst of a paradox. Yet unlike many of her artist friends, Gabrielle was not a rebel whose actions were based on destruction. Her fascination, even obsession, with youth and youthfulness emerged from a different motivation. For Gabrielle, youth was a vital, creative force, not a destructive one. In dressing the rich as if they were poor — in frustration, Poiret described this as her pauvre de luxe —she was forever walking a tightrope. A tightrope from which, nonetheless, she didn’t fall because, unlike the rebel, Gabrielle was not attacking culture.

An image of her has grown up over the years, originating in this period. It evokes a picture of an ignorant, socially meek woman whose powerful personality helped her rise to prominence as a designer because she had an instinct for the right clothes. Apparently, through Misia Sert’s tutelage and introductions, Gabrielle was able to meet and understand how to communicate with the artistic community. This picture is the one painted by Misia Sert for her own aggrandizement. It is an image perpetuated by all subsequent writers on Gabrielle. And it is nonsense. It implies that Gabrielle’s association with artists was simply a diverting pastime. In fact, her friendship with these people was crucial both to who she was and to the cultural influence she was already wielding.

Gabrielle did not become a person of artistic significance because Misia made her one. Misia wanted to know Gabrielle because Misia’s unerring sense of the creative possibilities in other people picked up on something in Gabrielle that was already there, something whose great force Misia described in her memoirs. The image of a slightly pathetic Gabrielle is one based on a veiled snobbery that subtly discounts both her tremendous intelligence and her remarkable character. With that unsettling capacity for self-knowledge, Gabrielle herself signaled how it was that her qualities had made her quite equal to the challenge of formidable success: “I was self-taught; I learned badly, haphazardly. And yet, when life put me in touch with those who were the most delightful and brilliant people of my age, a Stravinsky, or a Picasso, I neither felt stupid, nor embarrassed.” 12She went on to say that this was because “I had worked out on my own that which cannot be taught… It is with this that one succeeds.” 13

When Stravinsky met Gabrielle, she already had achievements behind her that, for the times, must have appeared astounding. Although her modernity was expressed with great finesse, it would, nonetheless, have been seen by many as quite shocking. With a very few exceptions, the only women who were financially independent were those with inherited wealth. Among the most prominent of these exceptions were the courtesans and the actresses who had made their own money — but at what long-term cost? As we have seen, the ability of these women to act with real independence was severely curtailed by a series of powerful social constraints. One of the outstanding contemporary exceptions — regarded as an exciting stimulant, and a very dangerous one at that — was the writer-actress Colette. Colette had flaunted her outrageous difference for several years (as a bisexual who had lived with her female lover and performed seminude and in provocative female embrace on stage) and had transformed herself, through tremendous hard work, from being an entirely dependent woman to one who was financially independent.

One of the ways Gabrielle expressed her independence was in establishing friendships with the coterie of artists, writers and musicians that was making Paris the seat of modernist art. She felt most at ease with these people, whose work inevitably made them outsiders. For Gabrielle, the artists’ lives, and the way they were perceived, were not so very different from the courtesans’, living, as they did, both at the center and at the edges of society.

As far as we can make out, the day before New Year’s Eve 1920, Gabrielle and Stravinsky, and a number of these artists, were present at a party later recorded by Paul Morand. He tells how it “started again at Chanel’s” at rue Cambon. A buffet was laid out in the fitting rooms. A good proportion of upper Bohemia was present; several were to become Gabrielle’s lifelong friends. These included Diaghilev’s chief dancer Serge Lifar, Satie, the painter André de Segonzac, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who in 1922 would sculpt a bust of Gabrielle, Picasso’s fellow founder of cubism Georges Braque, Picasso himself, the painter Luc-Albert Moreau, Jean Cocteau, his sulky teenage boyfriend Raymond Radiguet, the literary prodigy of the moment, Misia and José Maria Sert, Elise Toulemon (Caryathis), the outrageously modernist writer Blaise Cendrars, and several young composers, who came to be known as Les Six:

The presence of the Russians gave rise to a rather beautiful party… Auric [one of the members of Les Six] cracked his fingers on the piano and there was blood running down the keyboard. Jean [Cocteau] contorted, was initiating the Duchesse de Gramont in a broken Cancan… Drieu and Larianoff were shoring up the walls of an attic, Chanel, her legs in the air, was snoring on a sofa. Stravinsky was drinking his ammonia. J.M.S. [José Maria Sert] was taking a swimming lesson in the knocked over overcoats. Massine was doing things in the middle of the parquet floor, very quickly, on his own, then fell like a mass, and Rehbinder… was taking vodka for the Volga. Ansermet [Diaghilev’s conductor], whose beard Misia wanted to cut, had wrapped a towel around his head, and yours truly went home in the morning with no hat and no tie. 14