Paul Morand: The Allure of Chanel

The hardness of the mirror reflects my own hardness back to me; it’s a struggle between it and me: it expresses what is peculiar to myself, a person who is efficient, optimistic, passionate, realistic, combative, mocking and incredulous, and who feels her Frenchness. Finally, there are my gold-brown eyes which guard the entrance to my heart: there one can see that I am a woman.

A poor woman.

FASHION SHOULD BE DISCUSSED enthusiastically, and sanely; and above all without poetry, without literature. A dress is neither a tragedy, nor a painting; it is a charming and ephemeral creation, not an everlasting work of art. Fashion should die and die quickly, in order that commerce may survive.

At the beginning of creation, there is invention. Invention is the seed, it’s the germ. For the plant to grow, you need the right temperature; that temperature is luxury. Fashion should be born from luxury, it’s not twenty-five very elegant women (dressed, incidentally, free of charge, which is not luxurious), luxury is first and foremost the genius of the artist capable of conceiving it and giving it form. This form is then expressed, translated and disseminated by millions of women who conform to it.

Creation is an artistic gift, a collaboration of the couturier with his or her times. It is not by learning to make dresses that they become successful (making dresses and creating fashion are different things); fashion does not exist only in dresses; fashion is in the air, it is borne on the wind, you can sense it, you can breathe it, it’s in the sky and on the highway, it’s everywhere, it has to do with ideas, with social mores, with events. If, for example, at this moment, there are no indoor dresses, none of those tea-gowns beloved of the heroines of Paul Bourget and Bataille, it is probably because we live at a time when there is no longer any indoors.

I have created fashion for a quarter-of-a-century. Why? Because I knew how to express my times. I invented the sports dress for myself; not because other women played sports, but because I did. I didn’t go out because I needed to design dresses, I designed dresses precisely because I went out, because I have lived the life of the century, and was the first to do so.

Why have the ocean liners, the salons, the big restaurants never adapted to their real purpose? Because they are conceived by designers who have never seen a storm, by architects who have never been out in the world, by interior decorators who go to bed at nine o’clock and dine at home. Similarly, before me, couturiers hid away, like tailors, at the back of their shops, whereas I lived a modern life, I shared the habits, the tastes and the needs of those whom I dressed.

Fashion should express the place, the moment. This is where the commercial adage ‘the client is always right’ get its precise and clear meaning; that meaning demonstrates that fashion, like opportunity, is something that has to be grabbed by the hair. I am looking at a young woman on her bicycle, with her bag on her shoulders, one hand placed chastely on her knees that rise and fall, the material of her clothing cleaved to her stomach and chest, and her dress puffed up by the speed and the wind. This young woman has developed her own fashion, according to her needs, just as Crusoe built his hut; she is admirable and I admire her. I admire her so much that I don’t see another woman who approaches me at full speed. She crashes into me, we fall down together, and I find myself on the ground with my face between her two bare thighs: it’s wonderful. She yells at me, it’s perfect.

“So what were you looking at?” she says to me.

“I was looking at you, Madame, to make sure I was not behind the fashion.”

For fashion roams around the streets, unaware that it exists, up to the moment that I, in my own way, may have expressed it. Fashion, like landscape, is a state of mind, by which I mean my own.

“This dress will not sell,” I sometimes tell my staff, “because it is not me.”

There is a Chanel style of elegance, there was a 1925 or 1946 elegance, but there is no national fashion. Fashion has a meaning in time, but none in space. Just as there are Mexican or Greek dishes, but no authentic cuisine in these countries, there is a regional type of clothing (the Scottish plaid, the Spanish bolero), but nothing else. Fashion came from Paris, because for centuries everybody used to meet there.

Where then does the couturier’s genius lie? The genius is in anticipating. More than a great statesman, the great couturier is a man who has the future in his mind. His genius is to invent summer dresses in the winter, and vice versa. At a time when his customers are basking in the burning sun, he is thinking of ice and of hoar frost.

Fashion is not an art, it is a job. If art makes use of fashion, then that is sufficient praise.

It’s best to follow fashion, even if it is ugly. To detach oneself from it is immediately to become a comical character, which is terrifying. No one is powerful enough to be more powerful than fashion.

Fashion is a matter of speed. Have you visited a fashion house just before the collection is shown? Something I made at the beginning of the collection, I may find outdated before the end. A dress that is three months old! A collection takes shape during the final two days; in this respect our profession is like the theatre; how often does a play only come together between the rehearsals and the final dress rehearsal? Ten minutes before the buyers arrived, I would still be adding bows. At two o’clock in the afternoon, we would still be trying dresses on the models, to the despair of the manager of the fitting rooms, who is responsible for organising these pretty performers’ manoeuvres.

If the role of the fashion designer is reduced by you to so little, to the blithe and brisk art of capturing what’s in the air, don’t you think it’s only natural, people say to me, that others do the same, that they copy you and draw their inspiration from your ideas just as you were inspired by ideas that were scattered around Paris?

But of course: once an invention has been revealed, it is destined for anonymity. I would be unable to exploit all my ideas and it’s a great pleasure to me to discover them realised by others, sometimes more successfully than me. And that is why I have always differed from my colleagues, over the years, about what for them is a great drama, and which for me does not exist: copying.

Working in secret, seamstresses searched every evening on leaving the workshops, counterfeit proceedings, spies, samples that vanish, patterns that are fought over as if they contained the secrets of the atomic bomb, all that is pointless, puerile and ineffectual. I began with two collections a year. My colleagues embarked on four of them, so as to have time to copy mine. (“Only better,” they used to say; and occasionally they were right.)

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.

I remember an evening at Ciro’s where there were seventeen Chanel dresses, not one of which was made by me. The Duchesse d’Albe greeted me with these words: “I swear that mine came from you.” It was quite pointless. And this was what the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld said to a friend, whom she had invited there with me: “I don’t dare meet her, my Chanel dress did not come from Chanel’s.” I retorted: “I am not really sure myself any more that my own dresses are made by me.”

It is because fashion must move on that its fragile existence is entrusted to women. Women are like children; their role in everyone’s eyes is to use things up, to break, and to destroy: an appalling turnover. It is essential for those industries that only exist because of them. The great conquerors measure themselves by the ruins they leave behind them.