Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

She branched out into the couture to glorify the hard elegance of the ugly woman… Hard chic made her exactly right for those extravagant years before World War II. Shocking pink… was a symbol of her thinking. To be shocking was the snobbism of the moment and she was a leader in this art… Paris was in a mood for shocks, and Elsa Schiaparelli could present hers in well-cut forms and with an elegance no one could deny. 1

Pre — First World War, shock tactics had already become part of the raison d’être of artistic modernism. For the postwar Dadaists and surrealists, to shock was virtually orthodoxy.

Schiaparelli not only surrounded herself with artists, just as Gabrielle had, she also persuaded them to work with her on her creations. (Gabrielle believed that art came before artisanship and, when working with artists, put herself very much in second place.) Schiaparelli was forever pushing her artists to experiment, the more suggestively and outrageously, the better. Bettina Ballard quoted the great couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga commenting wryly that Schiaparelli “was the only real artist in the couture,” which didn’t mean that he thought that art and dressmaking were good companions. 2These, of course, were Gabrielle’s sentiments exactly. Balenciaga was one of the only colleagues for whom she had real respect.

Gabrielle was on the defensive, but her understanding of fashion was profound. And she now declared that novelty was not necessarily modern. She went further, saying that superficial seasonal changes were not what she offered. What she offered was “style,” and that wasn’t the same as fashion. When Gabrielle objected to Schiaparelli’s work, she was accused of going against that very avant-garde couture she had led since before the First World War. She retorted that her own modernity derived from placing herself in the classic tradition and understanding something more fundamental about her times. At her best, Gabrielle had created a style that was almost “beyond fashion.” In creating clothes for a century whose art had lost much of its elitist character, her underlying theme had been inspired by a powerful aesthetic: superrefinement without elitism. Angered at feeling misunderstood, she lashed out with the brilliant comment that Schiaparelli’s “futurism” was an optical illusion that had “nothing to say of the future.” Looking carefully at what Gabrielle meant, it is correct that surrealism is an “optical illusion,” and this was not what Gabrielle believed dressing, or style, was about.

During the thirties, women’s bodies had gradually reemerged, and the angular tyranny of la garçonne — the flat-chested, Eton-cropped figure of the twenties — was banished. Clothes remained slim line, but had rediscovered the curves of women’s bodies and now followed the line of the bust, the waist and the hips. Smooth, sultry fabrics such as satin were much in vogue, and cutting cloth on the bias, so as to accentuate the curves of the body, became popular. The bodice was often slightly bloused and waists were emphasized with tight belts, while below the fitted hips, skirts were very feminine and billowed out and flowed. Bias-cut clothes were the invention of Madeleine Vionnet, a couturier admired by Gabrielle for her simplified “architectural” styles. She disliked anything distorting the curves of a woman’s body, and her clothes were sought after for accentuating the natural female form. Influenced by Greek sculpture, the apparent simplicity of Vionnet’s styles belied their lengthy process of creation: cutting and draping fabric designs onto miniature dolls before recreating them on life-sized models.

Gabrielle began using big bows at the neck, and shoulder pads (Schiaparelli is supposed to have introduced them) to exaggerate the smallness of the waist. The hemline had dropped significantly to approximately six inches above the ground, while full-length evening dresses were once again the mode. As an escape from the challenging financial climate of the period, evening wear became more luxurious and sometimes exaggeratedly feminine. Pale satins were the rage throughout the thirties, and Gabrielle succumbed, too, making her own versions of the fashionable white, cream and peachy pinks.

At this time, her suits were made of gently fitting tweeds with contrasting open-necked white shirts, showing cuffs or crisp frills around the neck. Gabrielle’s signature look for the time became these same white collars and cuffs as the contrast on a black dress. Black and white had become the underlying theme of many of her day clothes, with hints of green, red, brown, purple and mustard. From the midthirties, she used the new patterned elasticized fabric Lastex, afterward called latex, an up-to-date version of her favorite, jersey.

Schiaparelli was now making jackets with tightly pulled-in waists and stiffly jutting peplums set over narrow skirts of pin-thin pleats. Gabrielle had come to be regarded by some as the designer for unassertive, self-conscious women whose elegant reserve made them fear, above all else, the epithet “bad taste.” Schiaparelli’s increasingly avant-garde designs were for the woman who saw herself as daring, and who was acquiring a new kind of notice with the designer’s intentional “bad taste.” This group of Schiaparelli devotees were self-assured exhibitionists who loved the attention caused by their red eyelashes, black gloves with red fingernails, pancake hats and blue satin leggings, revealed under the lifted hem of a black evening dress.

The magazines and newspapers luxuriated in the rivalry of these two very different designers, and Vogue reported that the new mode “is neither streamlined nor sentimental, it is casual, bold and chunky.” In 1934, Time put Schiaparelli on its cover and made a definitive statement, saying that Chanel was no longer the leader in fashion. Instead, Schiaparelli was one of “a handful of houses now at or near the peak of their power as arbiters of the ultramodern haute couture… Madder and more original than most of her contemporaries, Mme Schiaparelli is the one to whom the word ‘genius’ is applied most often.” Schiaparelli’s surrealist clothes were challenging the notion of good taste, giving exotic and outrageous flights of fancy an allure previously confined to fancy dress for a costume ball. There was no doubt: Schiaparelli had made surrealism the utmost in chic.

Schiaparelli and young Dalí’s evening dress had a skirt printed with a life-sized lobster, complemented by a bodice bearing a scattering of “parsley.” It was received with a fanfare of publicity when Beaton photographed it being worn by the Prince of Wales’s lover, Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Dalí’s one regret was that he was forbidden to splatter the dress with real mayonnaise. The young Balenciaga, whose austere clothes were yet feminine and ultramodern, and are to some the ultimate in twentieth-century elegance, would make an astonishingly acute observation: “You see, Coco had very little taste, but it was good. Schiap, on the other hand, had lots of it, but it was bad.”

In the spring of 1936, France went to the polls. To the dismay of the Right, there was a huge turnout, and a left-wing coalition was now in charge of France. Many believed that the new Popular Front would be the party that would finally push through long-overdue reforms. Those to the right with privilege were fearful that the country was teetering on the brink of communism, while the Left luxuriated in the May Day celebrations. Léon Blum, the socialist leader of the coalition, was openly taunted in the Chamber of Deputies for his Jewishness by the right-wing deputy Xavier Vallat. He said, “For the first time this old Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew. I dare say out loud what the country is thinking, deep inside: it is preferable… to be led by a man whose origins belong to his soil… than by a cunning Talmudist.” This reflection of growing anti-Semitism was confirmed in one of the dailies’ headlines: “France under the Jew.”