Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Meanwhile, concerned at the possibility that the longed-for improvement in their rights — paid holiday, family support, unemployment insurance — might not happen, the workers came out on strike in the largest working-class demonstration France had ever seen, and before the new prime minister had even taken office. Airplane-factory workers came out, car-factory workers came out and, after a while, a virtually unheard-of thing happened: the textile workers went on strike, too. The country was in turmoil. To Gabrielle’s amazement, this contagion even spread to her own workers. One morning, she found that her way was barred to the rue Cambon salon by a group of her saleswomen, who were smiling at the cameras. Gabrielle’s fury made no difference. They refused to let her in, and she was forced to beat a retreat over the road to the Ritz.

Her lawyer, René de Chambrun, was called, and advised an irate Gabrielle to stay calm and be moderate. He persuaded her to meet her workers. But when Gabrielle again crossed rue Cambon over to Chanel from the back of the Ritz, she was once more turned back. Chambrun advised her to wait and see. Eventually, the new premier, Léon Blum, sat down with a workers’ delegation, with whom he spent the night drafting an agreement. This was to gain for French workers a set of rights they had never known before.

The strike continued for several days longer, but by the end of it, Gabrielle’s workers, too, had gained the right to wage increases, the right to belong to a union, a forty-hour week, and an annual two-week paid holiday. Germany and Britain had both already achieved the principle of collective bargaining, but it was only with these, the Matignon agreements, that France had done the same. Gabrielle was outraged and instantly sacked three hundred of her workers, but René de Chambrun and her financial directors advised her that if she didn’t relent, and quickly, she would be unable to present her forthcoming autumn collection. Years later, Gabrielle still railed against what she saw as domination by a workforce who should have been grateful to her for employing them. To all intents and purposes, Gabrielle’s stance was that of the classic conservative from a modest background. She had worked tremendously hard to achieve, so why shouldn’t her workers?

As always, however, Gabrielle was contradictory and frequently paradoxical. And while her politics were not particularly sophisticated, one should never forget her intelligence or that, at some residual level, she remained deeply antiestablishment. As a result, her politics were more ambivalent than straightforward provincial conservatism. Despite her apparent dislike of left-wing politics, in 1936, for example, Gabrielle designed the costumes for her friend Jean Renoir’s film La Marseillaise, which hailed the rights of the French people united against exploitation. In that same year, she was the second financer of Pierre Lestringuez’s powerfully left-wing magazine, Futur. She would also, as mentioned, make the costumes for Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, his lacerating satire of the establishment.

In these years leading up to the Second World War, the rich in France had little confidence in the government. As a consequence, they exported their capital, the Banque de France lost billions and the political climate was increasingly unstable.

In December 1936, Winston Churchill had come to Paris with his son, Randolph, and dined with Gabrielle (and Cocteau) in her suite at the Ritz. Churchill was there to prevail upon his friend Edward VIII not to marry his lover, Wallis Simpson. During the course of the evening, Churchill was reduced to tears at the thought of the abdication of his king. However, a few days later, he was obliged to help the king with alterations to the speech in which he was going to do just that. The following year, when Edward VIII’s abdication had made him the Duke of Windsor, he married his divor-cée, Wallis Simpson, and Gabrielle sent gifts. Shortly afterward, Léon Blum’s Popular Front government was out of power, replaced by Camille Chautemps. After several rapid changes of French government, in March 1938, Hitler sent troops into his native Austria and was cheered as the country united with the Third Reich.

In the late thirties, Gabrielle had been drawn, uncharacteristically, into the flourishing theme of escape then popular among the couturiers and their clients. Ornate and extravagant romance, inspired by a revival of nineteenth-century style, nostalgically recalled apparently better times. Hand in hand with the political turmoil of the period, these years saw a crescendo of particularly extravagant themed balls, to many of which Gabrielle was invited as one of the star attractions. She attended Comte de Beaumont’s ball, the American ambassador’s party, and the astonishing Lady Mendl’s party for seven hundred at Versailles. In diamonds and white organdy, the hostess was ringmaster to ponies, clowns and acrobats in white satin. Gabrielle’s escort that night was Arthur Capel’s longtime friend the Duc de Gramont, and the guests danced on a floor built upon thousands of tiny springs that swayed to their movements.

While Gabrielle’s day clothes retained their typical simplicity of line, one could argue that with evening wear her famed restraint sometimes deserted her. This may well have been because she was neither immune to the political turmoil around her nor to the competition she was experiencing from a handful of talented newcomers, such as Balenciaga. Unusually, one glimpses a hint of indecision in Gabrielle’s work, giving an impression of less self-assurance in this period. And while her attacks on Schiaparelli’s inadequacy were essentially correct, at the costume ball of the season, Gabrielle let slip her position of haughty superiority, revealing her defensive feelings.

The painter André Durst’s mansion, already more stage set than home, was conceived as the house from Alain-Fournier’s elegy for those times recently lost, Le Grand Meaulnes. Durst wanted his ball to be a reenactment of the one in the novel. Bettina Ballard was there:

His guests fell quickly into the mood of fantasy. They made their entrances by the pool; one group came as a flight of birds; another as three trees walking solemnly toward the guests… Maria de Gramont, as a leopard, glided across the fields with Bébé Bérard as a frolicking lion…

[T]here was a near disaster when Chanel… dared Schiaparelli… to dance with her and, with purposeful innocence, steered her into the candles… The fire was put out and so was Schiaparelli — by delighted guests squirting her with soda-water. The incident added enormously to the anecdotes about the party that provided Paris with conversation for many days. 3

Careful to remain in the public eye, Gabrielle continued socializing and was noticed at one great costume ball after another wearing dramatic revivalist outfits. Interestingly, to the modern eye, for the first time, she looks a little dated. Having contributed so much to the look of her century, somehow the clothes of the previous one just don’t look right on her. It is ironic that the woman who had become successful through her radical simplification of women’s dress, in the years before and after the First World War, on the eve of the next cataclysm joined in this escapist attention to the past.

Hôtel Ritz letterhead, dated 1938

Dearest Coco

I arrived just when you had left rue Cambon after an afternoon of colossal “gnawing pains.” Don’t forget about me! I would like to see you tomorrow morning… I will telephone you…

Dear Beautiful little Coco

I will write to you… Earlier, when Hugo told me you were clinging on to the other end of the phone, it scared me to death… and my legs were shaking a little bit… a compulsive tenderness seized my throat… After this phone call I had a… representation of your little face, there was a kind of melancholy which I had never seen before… a kind of melancholy which is probably… absolutely exclusive to you…