Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

For most, “emancipation” meant little more than what they did with their appearance. It was only a small number of women, like Gabrielle, whose lives really were entirely altered. In Paris, these included Colette; the fashionable bisexual painter Tamara de Lempicka, who sniffed her cocaine with the likes of André Gide; the shipping-line heiress Nancy Cunard, who knew Gabrielle, wore Chanel and outraged her class, not by the drugs she used but by her cropped hair, her men’s suits and her cohabitation with a black lover. Then there was the bisexual Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein and the black American dancer Josephine Baker, whose erotic and challenging female persona took Paris by storm in 1925.

If in reality, however, the scope for most French women had expanded little, in essence, what they wore was announcing to their menfolk, “I am your equal.” A popular song from the twenties articulates well the anxieties these loosened boundaries were provoking:

Hey, hey, women are going mad today;

Hey, hey, fellers are just as bad, I’ll say.

Masculine women, feminine men,

Which is the rooster, which is the hen?

It’s hard to tell ’em apart today, hey, hey.

Victor Margueritte described the heroine of his La garçonne, Monique Lerbier, as the incarnation of “woman’s right to sexual equality in love,” and her premarital erotic encounters, including those with women, provoked a public outcry. Margueritte saw bobbed hair as “a symbol of independence, if not power.” 10Meanwhile, Antoine, the Parisian hairdresser who was a pioneer of the short haircut, joked that in creating the bob, he had avenged Samson by depriving Delilah of her hair and hence her power to charm men. Discussion and argument raged back and forth, fathers disowned short-haired daughters, and there was more than one case of murder. The socialite Boni de Castellane complained that “women no longer exist; all that’s left are the boys created by Chanel.”

Yet in this age of confusion, Gabrielle herself believed she was in less doubt about what it was she was doing. Confident in her femininity, she didn’t feel she was in competition with men. What she wanted was scope to act equally. This of course involved competition but, for her, it didn’t mean trying to become the same. In years to come, she would make one of her breathtakingly dismissive statements reinforcing this attitude: “Women who want to look like men, men who want to look like women are both failures.”

The stereotype of the flapper was that of an apolitical consumer, hell-bent on having a good time. A number of recent historians have seen Gabrielle and her kind as part of an emergent modern consumerism exploiting women in the pursuit of profit. 11Although this is far too simplistic, “emancipation” was indeed at times rather illusory. In 1923, Vogue described the hours “one poor woman” spent at the gym and the masseuse, and the pills and “rubber girdles” used to attain “an ideal shape.” Another article would say “how seductive is the straight line of our winter dresses, how revealing of the sveltnesse of the female silhouette,” but then admitted that this was pretty much impossible to acquire without some kind of corset: “There was no other way of achieving the desired silhouette.”

One honest contemporary writer declared that there was a “tyranny of liberty in current fashion” because of the desperate measures to which women were driven, and that “the effect of extreme elegance… hardly leads someone to suspect it took two hours to achieve, so much is dependent on the triumphant appearance of simplicity.” 12This could well be a description of the amount of time we know Gabrielle took over her own preparations to dress. Our commentator did, however, also say that if contemporary dress was an “illusion of freedom,” freedom was in fact the objective of the new look. But if a woman’s bobbed hair and short dresses were not as “liberating” as they were made out to be, and many women’s lives were most unliberated, why did young women take to these fashions with such enthusiasm?

Perhaps the answer lies in the idea that in appearing liberated through what one wore, it gradually became a genuine aspect of personal emancipation. Wearing short hair and short dresses, women were able to project a fantasy of their ideal, liberated selves moving freely in society. Appearing thus liberated, they gave the idea a certain political power and did provoke a public outcry. The appearance of the flapper represented a visual image of personal freedom. Wearing the clothes promoted by Gabrielle, women embraced what had become part of the meaning of fashion, throwing off their previous constraints.

Wearing the new fashions — copies of Gabrielle’s fashions — kept the idea of female identity in the forefront of people’s minds. While the debate in France was intensely political, women’s short hair and short dresses became central to the cultural mythology of the whole era. Provoking outrage, frustration, envy and admiration, the way Gabrielle and her followers looked provided a powerful visual language for the upheaval and change that everyone saw around them. 13And while, for most women, their clothes were as yet a fantasy of liberation, fashion itself was a powerful language of signs, heralding the arrival of a new world.

While Gabrielle’s dresses may have been decorated, they were also not much more than sheaths, where any sign of the waist was long gone. Hips and busts were effectively banished, and those corsets must indeed have been in demand. Waists were firmly tethered to the hip; at the most, women’s designs were only semifitted, and Gabrielle’s particularly versatile sporty looks were ever more popular and much copied. Vogue would write that her “dresses, which met the needs of the time so well and which made those who were wearing them look so young, earned their creator worldwide fame.” 14

Perhaps the most legendary of Gabrielle’s designs was the one known as the little black dress. It was described as “little” because it was discreet. Quite how it came about is unclear, but Gabrielle’s own version of events was told later. One evening in 1920 she was at the theater. Looking at the women all around her in their flashy, gaudy colors, she said she was driven to say to her companion, “These colors are impossible. These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black! So I imposed black… Black wipes out everything else around it. I used to tolerate colors, but I treated them as monochrome masses. The French don’t have a sense of blocks of color.” 15

Forestalling the criticism of these ideas, Gabrielle said that it was wrong to think that dressing women in black removed all originality from them. Rather, she believed that dressing alike apparently helped reveal women’s individuality. While wearing black earlier herself, in her 1926 collections Gabrielle introduced a number of utterly simple day dresses, all in black. A color traditionally used for uniforms of various kinds, or during periods of mourning, black was on the whole considered unseemly if worn by women on other occasions. But Gabrielle had already made long and beautiful black evening dresses at least as early as 1917.

Now she reinterpreted and restyled the color in the most elegantly spare shapes. She was the first to show black dresses to be worn at any time of day or night, and later said, “Before me no one would have dared to dress in black.” For daytime, the dresses were in wool or Moroccan crepe; for evening, they were in luxurious materials, such as silk crepe, satin and velvet. While their basic structure remained deceptively simple, they were counterbalanced by decoration, such as jeweled and rhinestone-decorated belts or white collars, cuffs and much jewelry. Sometimes Gabrielle used the striking flourish of a white camellia — made from various materials — pinned against a black dress. (Eventually, she loved to have them pinned in the hair.)