Paul Morand: The Allure of Chanel

I only like what I create and I only create if I forget.

So, a little over ten years ago, the big fashion designers ganged together and formed an ‘exclusive’ club known as the P A S (Protection des Arts saisonniers) which, under the guise of a league against copying, was a trust. Was it really necessary for twenty or so favoured fashion designers to prevent forty-five thousand from earning their living?

What can these little designers do if not interpret the big ones?

To have to take out a patent for a dress, even less, for a drawing, just as one would on a brake for a quick-firing machine-gun, I repeat, it’s not modern, it’s not poetic, it’s not French. The world has lived off French inventions, and France, for her part, has lived off the development and shaping of ideas invented by other people; existence is nothing more than movement and change. If these couturiers are the artists they claim to be, they should know that there are no patents in art, that Aeschylus did not have a copyright and that the Shah of Persia did not sue Montesquieu for infringement. Orientals copied, the Americans imitated, the French reinvented. They have reinvented Antiquity several times: Ronsard’s Greece is not Chénier’s; Bérain’s Japan is not that of the Goncourts, etc.

One day, in 192– at the Lido, because I was growing tired of walking barefoot in the hot sand, and because my leather sandals were burning the soles of my feet, I had a shoemaker on the Zattere cut out a piece of cork in the shape of a shoe and fit two straps to it. Ten years later, the windows of Abercrombie in New York were full of shoes with cork soles. Weary of carrying my bags in my hand and losing them, in 193– I had a strap attached and wore it on my shoulder. Since then …

Jewellery from jewellers’ shops bores me; I had the idea of getting François Hugo to design clip-on earrings, brooches, and all that fancy costume jewellery that one sees today even in the galleries of the Palais-Royal and the arcades on the rue de Rivoli.

I would be sad if all those little things had a brand name. I’ve given life to all that, but if I had wanted to protect myself, I would have given my own life.

I wonder why I embarked upon this profession, and why I’m thought of as a revolutionary figure? It was not in order to create what I liked, but rather so as to make what I disliked unfashionable. I have used my talent like an explosive. I have an eminently critical mind, and eye too. “I have very certain dislikes”, as Jules Renard said. All that I had seen bored me, I needed to cleanse my memory, to clear from my mind everything that I remembered. And I also needed to improve on what I had done and improve on what others were producing. I have been Fate’s tool in a necessary cleansing process.

In art, you always have to start out with what you can do best. If I built aeroplanes, I would begin by making one that was too beautiful. You can always do away with it later. By starting out with what is beautiful, you can always revert to what is simple, practical and cheap; from a finely made dress, revert to ready-made; but the opposite is not true. That is why, when you go out into the streets, fashion dies its natural death.

I often hear it said that ready-made clothes are killing fashion. Fashion wants to be killed; it is designed for that.

Cheap clothes can only originate from expensive ones, and in order for there to be low fashion, there must first be a high one; quantity is not just quality multiplied, they are essentially different. If that is understood, if people are aware of it and admit it, Paris is saved.

“Paris will no longer create fashion,” I hear people say. New York will invent it, Hollywood will propagate it and Paris will be subjected to it. I don’t believe that. Of course, cinema has had the same effect on fashion as the atomic bomb; the ratio of the explosion of the moving image throughout cinemas knows no bounds on Earth, but I, who admire American films, am still waiting for studios to impose a figure, a colour, a style of clothing. Hollywood can deal successfully with the face, with the outline, the hairstyle, the hands, the toenails, with portable bars, refrigerators in the drawing-room, clock-radios, with all man’s repercussions and knick-knacks, but it doesn’t deal any more successfully with the central problem of the body, which it has not managed to disassociate from man’s inner drama, and which remains the prerogative of the great designers and ancient civilisations. At least until now.

The Americans have asked me countless times to go and launch a fashion show in California. I have refused, knowing that the outcome would be contrived and therefore negative. There are much richer terrains than stony Burgundy or sandy Guyenne; from Persia to the Pacific they have tried to make wine, but they have never succeeded in creating the red wine of the Clos-de-Vougeot, or Vin d’Aÿ. Wealth and technique are not everything. Greta Garbo, the greatest actress the screen has given us, was the worst dressed woman in the world.

A well-known manufacturer of Lyonnais fabrics grabbed hold of me on my way through Lyon.

“I’m going to show you something that will revolutionise dressmaking,” he said to me.

And he brought out some cartoons printed on silk.

“I’ve bought the rights from Walt Disney,” he announced proudly. “What do you think of that?”

“You’re wasting your money on inanities,” I replied.

“Aren’t you keen on the idea?”

“I’m very frightened of ridicule. Walking along with a cow on your behind, it’s there for all to see. I am all for what is unseen. Keep your fabrics. They’ll make charming nursery-room curtains. Would you dress your wife like that?”

“Ah! No. ‘My sovereign’” (that’s what he called his wife) “cannot wear such things.”

Colleagues will say to you:

“Chanel lacks daring. Chanel is a revolutionary who has been overtaken by the revolution.”

I would reply that there can be revolutions in politics, which is a poor thing (since there are but two solutions, ever since the world began, to man’s ability to live in society, liberty and dictatorship, solution A and solution B) and which has only a semi-circle in which to move, a right and a left; but that there can be no revolution in couture, which is something rich, subtle and profound, like the social mores of which it is an expression.

To sum up, prêt-à-porter clothing exists. There is some marvellous prêt-à-porter. Prêt-à-porter has triumphed, and it is already flooding the world, but to mix quantity with quality, is to add apples to pears. France will be the last to be conquered. Paris never will. Our country is too small for prêt-à-porter. Our exiguity rescues us. Citroën thought he was Ford; he came from Holland, he did not understand that Grenelle was not Detroit.

And to go back to imitation in dressmaking, I have asked my colleagues: can they copy us freely abroad? Yes. Do they? Yes. Then it’s totally pointless to take out a patent on a dress. It’s admitting you have run out of ideas. And if you relent against the big international sharks, why take the bread out of the mouths of our little couturiers? Racine and Molière never had to put up with teachers. Along with plagiarism go admiration and love.

People have loathed me for defending this thesis, I’ve been boycotted and I’ve been deprived of raw materials for seven years. But my thesis is as good today as it was yesterday.

If I have dwelt on this argument about copying, it’s because it has created a gulf between my colleagues and me that has never been filled. However much I might introduce new fashions or designs, bring about new manufacturing processes, and keep vast industries alive, the world of couture has not understood a thing. Man is born a bureaucrat, you can’t change him. He codifies everything; he dykes up all the rivers and religions end up in green files.