Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

At another party, George Cukor introduced Gabrielle to his new “find,” Katharine Hepburn.

Gabrielle was taken around the studios, saw how films were made, saw the clothes, met the costumers, understood what the camera wanted and learned that her role was to create clothes that accentuated the personality of the stars. She was supposed to design costumes that would still be in fashion two years after she had created them; that was how long it took to make a film. She wasn’t impressed by Beverly Hills, and the ruthlessness of the studio system appalled the woman who had fought so hard for her own independence. She believed the stars were “producers’ servants,” and didn’t have much time for many of the actors either. She thought that “once you’ve said the girls were beautiful and there were a lot of feathers around, you’ve said it all… You know perfectly well that everything “super” is the same. Supersex, super productions…” Gabrielle would, however, enjoy quoting Garbo, saying to her later, “Without you I wouldn’t have made it, with my little hat and my raincoat.”

The woman who put fashionable women into raincoats had met the stars, met the producers, wasn’t that impressed and became impatient to get back to France. En route, she stopped again in New York, for what turned out to be a most useful set of encounters. She met Carmel Snow, now editor of Harper’s Bazaar; Margaret Chase, editor of Vogue; and Condé Nast, the extraordinary magazine publisher who had a gift for making money; he lived in a thirty-room penthouse on Park Avenue. Nast had amassed a fortune through his publishing company; this included Vogue and Vanity Fair. His manipulation and machinations were legendary, and Gabrielle would always have a difficult relationship with this gifted yet unscrupulous man.

Something that impressed Gabrielle perhaps the most about the United States, and was to have a lasting effect on her attitudes, was the way she saw clothes sold in the great metropolis of New York. Taking a trip around the most elegant department stores, including Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Saks, she also visited the Seventh Avenue garment-making district, and was fascinated by S. Klein’s, the huge discount store on Union Square.

Samuel Klein had begun, in 1912, with six hundred dollars, and by 1931, he owned the world’s largest women’s-wear store, selling as much as twenty-five million dollars’ worth of clothes every year. This was then a vast sum. Klein made no attempt at aesthetics — the floors were bare, and there were no salespeople. Riffling through crude iron racks, customers selected dresses (all copies of one kind or another) without assistance and tried them on in crowded public dressing rooms. Klein didn’t advertise, relying on rapid turnover and a markup of around 10 percent. If something on the $7.95 racks was there for more than two weeks, it was marked down a dollar. At the end of another two weeks, its price was cut again. Sometimes, dresses were sold for as little as one dollar. Large signs in Yiddish, Armenian, Polish and English read: “Don’t try to steal, our detectives are everywhere.” Today, versions of this type of clothes shopping are common, but in 1933, Gabrielle was amazed.

S. Klein would become part of American mythology, and Gabrielle returned to France, confirmed in her prophesy to her fellow couturiers that copying was inevitable and Klein’s selling policy was a sign of things to come. Refusing to believe this, the couturiers exerted themselves each season to prevent the pilfering of their ideas. And Gabrielle would say, “Fashion does not exist unless it goes down into the streets. The fashion that remains in the salons has no more significance than a costume ball.” 4She said she wouldn’t have been able to realize all her ideas, that she liked seeing them used, and that copying was not the drama for her that it was for other couturiers: “What rigidity it shows, what laziness, what unimaginative taste, what lack of faith in creativity, to be frightened of imitations! The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.” 5(Gabrielle meant she had already moved on.)

By the twenties, Gabrielle had come to believe that haute couture would inevitably be translated “down into the streets.” And her increasingly unfitted and simple shapes could now be replicated relatively easily; they also required less yardage than previous dresses and could be copied in cheaper fabrics. New synthetics, such as rayon, were emulating much rarer textiles, such as silk, and the haute couture copies were being made up at a fraction of the cost. The line of descent began with the unofficial drawings taken — secretly — from the shows. Specialist copying houses made a living out of less costly versions of designer clothes. This idea went down through women’s personal dressmakers until it reached the cheaper, mass-market end of the garment trade and the “woman in the street.”

Following through her thought that she was quite willing for her clothes to be copied, in 1932 Gabrielle presented a fashion exhibition at the Duke of Westminster’s London house in aid of charity. (The two remained on close terms.) The idea was that dressmakers and manufacturers should come along with the express intention of copying Gabrielle’s designs. Five hundred or so society and entertainment personalities attended over the course of several days. The Daily Mail reported how “many visitors bring their own seamstresses because this collection is not for sale… Mademoiselle Chanel has authorized it being copied.” The other designers in Paris went to great lengths to protect their designs and were absolutely opposed to Gabrielle’s initiative.

Sam Goldwyn had been unconcerned about Gabrielle’s return to France and agreed that she could design the costumes for Gloria Swanson’s forthcoming film, Tonight or Never, when Swanson was in Europe. When she came over to Paris, Gabrielle’s designs for her were deemed perfect. However, after two seasons of Gabrielle’s fashion dictatorship, the stars rebelled, and refused to wear clothes designed by the same person in all their films. Confirmed in their belief that Hollywood was more significant than Paris, they didn’t care if the designer they were rejecting was Coco Chanel. As a result, Gabrielle felt released from her contract with Goldwyn and didn’t return to Hollywood. The New Yorker published a witty piece on the reasons for her retreat:

The film gives Gloria a chance to dress up in a lot of expensive clothes… the gowns are credited to Chanel, the Paris dressmaker who recently made a much publicized trip to Hollywood, but I understand she left that center of light and learning in a huff. They told her her dresses weren’t sensational enough. She made a lady look like a lady. Hollywood wants a lady to look like two ladies.

Gabrielle and Goldwyn remained, nonetheless, on the best of terms, for their relationship had been mutually beneficial. Gabrielle’s success in Hollywood raised her status yet further in France; she had become grand on an international scale. It was also good for Goldwyn, who kept the prestigious association between the designer and his films.

While Poiret was going bankrupt — creditors seized all his assets — and many of Gabrielle’s rivals cut their prices, her own two Hollywood stipends of one million dollars were a considerable help in those tough years. She had lost a number of English and American clients, and while the Americans would eventually return in force, there were still many rich women in India and South America who could well afford her couture. Vogue, meanwhile, told the world that Coco Chanel had revolutionized Hollywood by putting the actress Ina Claire into white satin pajamas.