Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

She drew a clear distinction between craft and art. And while, paradoxically, Gabrielle had a good deal of the artist in her, she singled out the couturier’s instinct for their times:

Creation is an artistic gift, a collaboration of the couturier with his or her own times… It is not by learning to make dresses that they become successful (making dresses and creating fashion are different things); fashion does not exist only in dresses; fashion is in the air, it is borne on the wind, you can sense it, you can breathe it, it’s in the sky and on the highway, it’s everywhere, it has to do with ideas, with social mores, with events…

Fashion should express the place, the moment. This is where the commercial adage “the client is always right” gets its precise and clear meaning; that meaning demonstrates that fashion, like opportunity, is something that has to be grabbed by the hair. 3

She would add that “fashion roams around the streets, unaware that it exists, up to the moment that I, in my own way, may have expressed it. Fashion, like landscape, is a state of mind, by which I mean my own.” 4

If one is searching for what made Gabrielle stand out from her contemporaries, the source of her originality won’t be found by looking for any one particular thing. It lay in a combination of elements, at the heart of which was Gabrielle’s profound instinct for her own period. Her powers of observation, her intuitiveness, her inherited shrewdness as the trader’s daughter — these gave her an unusually alert sense of “what was in the air.” In combination with her intelligence, these qualities made her a remarkable adept at interpreting and presenting their own epoch to her contemporaries.

Gabrielle’s great gift lay in paying ruthless attention to the texture of the moment. If fashion can be said to illuminate or articulate that, then that was Gabrielle. Acting as a barometer, she gave her world what it wanted, just before it recognized the need. Her work was always just that one step ahead because she intuited her times better than most of those around her.

For Gabrielle, the genius of the couturier lay in that quality that kept her so vibrantly alive. This was the ability to anticipate: “More than a great statesman the great couturier is a man who has the future in his mind… Fashion is not an art, it is a job. If art makes use of fashion, then that is sufficient praise.” And then she justifies the necessity to follow fashion, the necessity to follow one’s own times: “It’s best to follow fashion, even if it is ugly. To detach oneself from it is immediately to become a comical character, which is terrifying. No one is powerful enough to be more powerful than fashion.” 5

These intelligent pronouncements, some of the best ever made about fashion, also reveal much about Gabrielle’s motivation. They arose from a certain modesty about her own work, and a deep respect for what she believed was the work of the real artist. At the same time, she was never in awe of the great artists of her day. Associating happily with them, she was correct in her belief that in some important sense, she was their peer.

Gabrielle’s sense of invention now led her to develop a rich new seam of creativity. In 1924, she set up her own jewelry workshops, and Comte Etienne de Beaumont — who for some time had had jewelry made to his design by the best artisans, as presents for friends — became her manager. Gabrielle also asked François Hugo, already the director of her jersey factory at Asnières, to make her some jewelry designs. As there was already an extensive demand for replica jewelry, Gabrielle could turn to a wide range of highly skilled artisans, such as Madame Gripoix and her husband, famous costume jewelers, originally for Poiret. Gabrielle’s inspiration was diverse. For all her austerity of design, she loved the exotic, and was also fascinated by Renaissance and Byzantine designs. During the twenties, she added many strings of fake pearls — and great colored stones in the form of necklaces, brooches and pendants — to her understated clothes. And in the late twenties, she even sparked a fashion for asymmetrical earrings: one black and one white pearl. (One of the ways she signaled that her jewelry was imitation was by the unnatural size of some of her stones.)

Carmel Snow, who would become the highly influential editor of Harper’s Bazaar, wrote of her sister Christine’s return from Paris in that decade. When she showed the female members of the family her Parisian wardrobe, her mother was appalled at the Chanel dress made of jersey and decorated with some dubious fur:

Worse than that, Christine festooned her dress with ropes and ropes of artificial pearls. In the first place, no lady wore anything but a single strand of pearls before eight o’clock in the evening. In the second place, they were real. Christine admitted that Coco Chanel herself wore fabulous jewels with her own jersey dresses and sweaters, but that everyone in Paris who couldn’t afford such a display was now wearing Chanel’s imitation jewelry. 6

But Gabrielle also wore this imitation jewelry. Indeed, she famously made a habit of mixing it with her own fabulous jewels, many of them received as gifts from her lovers. Imitation jewelry had been made for the less well off for thousands of years. But where these jewels had traditionally copied the “real thing,” Gabrielle’s oversized jewelry was different in that it was ostentatiously fake. And her prestige was such that her clients followed her; women who usually owned valuable collections of precious real jewels wanted Gabrielle’s imitations. She believed that

Expensive jewelry does not improve the woman who wears it… if she looks plain she will remain so… the mania to want to dazzle disgusts me; jewelry is not meant to arouse envy; still less astonishment. It should remain an ornament and an amusement… Jewelry from jewelry shops bores me; I had the idea of getting François Hugo to design clip-on earrings, brooches.. 7

In order to look right, it had to be imitation. Typical of Gabrielle’s capacity for paradox, she believed that too much money killed luxury. She also had many of her priceless gems dismantled and reordered to her own designs. Later, the renowned jeweler Robert Goossens would say, “I took apart a lot of Mademoiselle’s jewels. I don’t know if they were Grand Duke Dmitri’s or the Duke of Westminster’s, but I remember a ruby necklace… from Cartier, out of which I made earrings. Mademoiselle would give them away as presents… They were unique pieces.” 8

During the daytime, Gabrielle often wore a mass of jewelry, while in the evening she might wear none at all. She had a more sophisticated understanding of luxury than many of the wealthy, and said, “Jewelry should be looked on innocently, naively, rather as one enjoys the sight of an apple tree in blossom by the side of the road as one speeds by in a motor car. This is how ordinary people perceive it; for them jewelry denotes social standing.” 9So it does for many of the rich. While Gabrielle was at pains to turn the snobbery of jewelry on its head, she was also ahead of her time in challenging the idea of what is “real.”

Gabrielle worked extremely hard, turning out her two large collections every year, and the orders only grew. In 1924, when she had something like three thousand workers, her perfume, Chanel № 5, had been selling steadily from her salons in Paris, Deauville and Biarritz. Exactly how much demand there was for more perfume is unclear, but Gabrielle wanted to sell more. She was now advised by an acquaintance of some years, Théophile Bader, the owner of the largest Paris department store, Galeries Lafayette. He said he wouldn’t sell Gabrielle’s perfume until she had a much larger quantity than Ernest Beaux was presently making down in Grasse. Bader said he knew just the people Gabrielle should meet. These were two young brothers, Pierre and Paul Wertheimer. Intelligent, hardheaded businessmen, the Wertheimers owned Bourjois perfumeries, the largest cosmetics and fragrance company in France, and were intent upon building on their father’s considerable success. Apparently, the Wertheimers and Gabrielle met at the Longchamp racetrack, and there they struck a deal.