Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

While Gabrielle’s black designs were to become universally adopted, the initial response to their elegant economy of line was not unanimously positive. American Vogue, however, correctly predicted that the little black dress would become “a sort of uniform for all modern women of taste.” Its very “simplicity” would overcome the fear women had hitherto labored under, of being seen in the same dress as another woman, reflecting an essential element of Gabrielle’s whole outlook: a woman in a black dress draws attention as much to herself as to her dress. American Vogue had immediately grasped Gabrielle’s message and, in the editorial, made the famous comment that these dresses were like the black, mass-produced Ford motor cars. By implication, they would become standard wear for the masses. A detail of that season was Gabrielle’s addition of cloche hats. They may at first have been criticized by the likes of her friend Sem—“They are nothing but plain tea strainers in soft felt, into which women plunge their heads… everything disappears, swallowed up by that elastic pocket”—but these “tea strainers’ quickly became the rage.

Gabrielle would say that women had previously thought “of every color, except the absence of color.” And though declaring that “nothing is more difficult to make than a little black dress,” and that the tricks of the exotic are much easier, she was the first in her day to fully recognize that black and white have what she described as an “absolute beauty… dress women in white or black at a ball: they are the only ones you see.” 16

While Gabrielle has a reputation for having resented the upper classes, from the twenties onward she began to employ them. In the future she would say, “I have employed society people, not to indulge my vanity, or to humiliate them (I would take other forms of revenge should I be seeking that), but… because they were useful to me.” 17She maintained that through the rich seam of contacts available to families with any lineage, she was kept abreast of things without having to be present at every social event. From observation and hard personal experience, Gabrielle had become tougher and did indeed have little respect for a good many of those with great privilege. And, to be sure, her aristocratic employees were useful to her, as emissaries and ambassadors for Chanel. Tapping into the prevalence for snobbery, especially among her clients, Gabrielle was well aware that the presence of the old European aristocracy as her employees added to the air of exclusiveness in her salons. This would have been virtually impossible before the war, when a couturier was not “received” in society. But times had changed and many were obliged to work who had previously hardly known the meaning of the word.

In tough mode, Gabrielle said, “When I took smart friends on a trip, I always paid, because society people become amusing and delightful when they are certain they won’t have to pay for their pleasure. I purchased, in short, their good humor.” At the same time, she said she found them “irresistibly dishonest” and in her idiosyncratic way, had a genuine sympathy for their impoverished gentility. Gabrielle’s bravado act often omitted the fact that she not only helped a number of those with distinguished lineages, but also found them sympathetic.

Although Gabrielle was born a peasant, her own nature was in many ways a patrician one, and she identified with certain traits associated with the upper classes: “Yes, society people amuse me more than the others. They have wit, tact, a charming disloyalty, a well-bred nonchalance, and an arrogance that is very specific, very caustic, always on the alert; they know how to arrive at the right time and to leave when necessary.” 18(Whatever ambivalence Gabrielle might have felt about this section of society was far outweighed by her deep antipathy to the bourgeoisie. She regarded their traditional small-mindedness as loathsome.)

The many aristocratic Russian émigrés as well as eastern Europeans and the odd upper-class French and Anglo-Saxon employed by Gabrielle were people virtually unemployable elsewhere, and the Chanel salons became a refuge for a good number of them. Here, if the well born were prepared to turn their hand to commerce, they could also maintain their dignity. In Gabrielle’s own way, she esteemed them, in particular, the Russians. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein recalled the sad story of a grand Russian woman fallen on hard times; part of her family had been shot by the Bolsheviks. She desperately needed work, and Gabrielle employed her. 19An old retainer at Gabrielle’s nephew’s château remembered Gabrielle taking in a bankrupt elderly Russian countess: “Mademoiselle had told us to… put back in the old lady’s little box the cents she had saved with great effort, and which she would give to us as tips. We had been ordered to let the countess believe that we kept the money in order not to hurt her feelings.” 20

Now that some of the most distinguished and trendsetting European and American women were Gabrielle’s clients, the socially prominent, utterly fashionable and supremely self-important writer Princess Marthe Bibesco was regularly to be seen wearing Chanel couture. She even had Gabrielle design a wardrobe especially for her airplane travel. Gabrielle may have “worked” for Marthe Bibesco, but her own renown was now such that Bibesco gave a thinly veiled portrait of Gabrielle — albeit ironic and patronizing — in one of her fashionable novels. The couturier became Tote, an autocrat of fashion who

drains the wealth of about ten capitals and of at least three continents… All the women who wear Tote sweaters, her flower [the gardenia], her dress or her striped scarf, have twins and would recognize their lookalikes in New York, London, Rome or Buenos Aires… Tote’s bicolor scarf had made them coreligionists…

One could say that civilization starts and ends with Tote’s customers. Isn’t the product that she exchanges for the most solid currencies in the world quite simply her intelligence? The precious matter, the imponderable, inexhaustible, and forever renewed, with which she floods the world’s markets every six months. 21

Gabrielle was a master of the developing art of advertising, and she capitalized on an updated form of self-promotion initiated by the sharper couturiers before the war. The great courtesans and actresses, then the leaders of fashion, had sported both their charms and the couturiers’ new clothes at the races, that most prominent of social platforms. But with the demise of the great courtesans, society women were now fashion’s foremost promoters.

Once again bearing in mind the inordinate vanity of most of her clients, Gabrielle presented a dress here, another one there, to a financially reduced young woman of good family. This publicity was multiplied when Gabrielle invited some of these same young women to act as her mannequins. At one time or another, a number of Gabrielle’s friends — for example, Misia Sert — were also to be found on the list of employees at the rue Cambon. Among her other duties, Misia was a saleswoman — Gabrielle had often witnessed her formidable efforts as agent on her husband’s behalf. Misia was also sometimes a Chanel model, her name good for publicity.

While Cocteau’s con man friend Maurice Sachs would never work in Gabrielle’s salon, she gave him ample funds to assemble her a library at the Hôtel de Lauzan. Sachs misused the large monthly sum she paid him, took a hotel suite, a secretary, a chauffeur, and launched himself on a spree of dissipation. At the same time, he bought less than first-class examples of all that Gabrielle should read. For someone as astute as Gabrielle was, she had allowed herself, untypically, to be duped by this charming and insinuating young parasite.