Mademoiselle Page 10

  Chanel’s image came sharply into focus in wartime Deauville. By following her own instincts (and with Boy’s ongoing counsel), she intuited the sea change in women’s lives to be brought by the war. Coco came to represent a new kind of womanhood—breezy, athletic, and unfettered. Always her own best advertisement, she walked around town in the simple outfits she made for herself, outfits that conveyed at once an air of chic and great comfort: long, loose jackets belted low (and featuring large, menswear-style pockets), flowing straight skirts worn without corsets, polo shirts, and simple hats with broad brims—all in neutral colors.

  “I was the person people talked about the most.… Everyone wanted to know me, to find out where I got my wardrobe,” she said. Coco eschewed the fussy, complicated garments that encumbered women—fabric fortresses of whalebone and crinolines, enormous hats, and floor-sweeping trains. “Those dresses dragged all over the ground, picking up [debris],” she recalled with distaste. Coco saw the body as a moving, breathing, sexually alive entity, which needed to be dressed as such.

  Chanel was doing more than inventing a new way of dressing; she was inventing a new way of being, and women clamored for a piece of the liberating fantasy she conjured. Wearing a Chanel was starting to meld into wearing Chanel, taking on the Coco persona itself. Chanel may have looked like no one else, but soon everyone else began to look like her. Four years after her start in business, a revolution had begun.

  Coco described the powerful transformation she unleashed in Deauville:

  At the end of that first summer of war, I had earned 200,000 francs.… What did I know of my new profession? Nothing. I didn’t know there was such a thing as designers. Was I aware of the revolution I was creating? Not at all. One world was ending, another was being born. I was there, chance offered itself, and I took it. I am the same age as this new century, and it was therefore to me that it addressed itself for its sartorial expression. It needed simplicity, comfort, cleanness, I offered it all that, without realizing it.

  Chanel’s remarks here reveal something about her method. As she admits, she did not know much about designing. She had never formally studied fashion or apprenticed in a couture house. Her strength lay in imagination and instinct. Coco knew what she wanted to look like, and she understood how much her vision could appeal to other women.

  Her other great attribute was a tremendous flair for the tactile, developed, perhaps, during early childhood when she lived among rural artisans who brought objects to life with their hands—candlemakers and blacksmiths. Like them, Coco had a deep, physical relationship to her materials, an innate sense of how fabric should drape and flow over a body. She threw herself physically into the act of creation.

  “Chanel works with ten fingers, with her nails, the side of her hand, with her palms, pins and scissors, right on the dress … sometimes she falls to her knees and grasps it firmly, not to worship it but to punish it a little more,” wrote the novelist Colette after watching Coco in her studio. In keeping with the laws of physics, the kinetic energy that went into the creative process emerged on the other end, in the final product. Chanel’s clothes radiated life. For her, the female body was not something to be obscured or suppressed, but a source of vitality and energy—the spark that animates the clothes. There was virtually never anything revealing or overtly sexual about her clothes, but they were indisputably sensual—precisely because Chanel gave pride of place to the body’s simple materiality: the flesh, muscle, and bone beneath the cloth. “For an outfit to be pretty, the woman wearing it must give the impression of being completely nude underneath it,” she said.

  It was a radical notion for the time. Critics sensed this, which is why even the earliest reviews of her work praise the beauty in the sway and texture of her fabrics. In this, Chanel resembled a sculptor, or even a choreographer, more than she did a traditional fashion designer. She could spend hours on her knees before a model, molding and pinning—and would continue to do this even into her eighties. She saw clothes and bodies in organic relation to each other, and knew how to cut garments to maximize movement. For Coco, the back, shoulders, and arms needed to be accorded their full range of motion:

  No two women have the same arm circumference, the shoulder is never placed the same way, everything is in the shoulder, if the dress doesn’t fit the shoulder well, it will never fit at all. The front doesn’t move, it’s the back that works.… The back must give, at least ten centimeters, it must be able to bend, to play golf, to put on one’s shoes, one must measure the client with her arms crossed.… A garment must move with the body.

  Chanel would maintain this focus on bodily freedom throughout her career. In this, she remains an outlier. Few other couturiers have ever cut jackets, for example, as perfectly as did Coco Chanel. Even today, to slide into a vintage Chanel jacket is to experience a welcoming, silky ease that defies description.

  But vision and pinning alone do not suffice when founding a clothing empire. Someone needed to do all the work. Chanel quickly began hiring seamstresses—a situation that brought out perhaps her most useful talent of all: Coco was a natural commander, a leader of women, someone with no difficulty communicating her high standards for quality and low tolerance for error. In an interview, one of her first employees, Madame Montezin, recalled her experience at the Cambon atelier. Her remarks blend equal parts admiration and resentment: “Everything I know, I learned from Mademoiselle.… She possessed the art of giving orders and directing an establishment. Always the first to arrive and the last to leave, she ruled over the salon and the two large workshops in which she employed forty or so people. Difficult but just, Mademoiselle was horrified by mediocrity.”

  Later in life, Chanel acknowledged her own ignorance of fashion technique, while taking some subtle swipes at those more skilled than she: “I admire infinitely people who know how to sew, I myself never knew. I prick my fingers. Anyway today, everyone knows how to make dresses. Ravishingly handsome gentlemen … shaky old ladies know how … these are entirely nice people. I, on the contrary, am an odious person.”

  Chanel exaggerates here, as she did know how to sew—she’d learned in the convent, and her first job had been as a seamstress—and certainly could have refined her skills. But she chose not to. Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie believed her aunt deliberately suppressed any early aptitude she’d had with a needle: “She refused to sew, not even a button. She used to sew when she was younger of course, but she’d forgotten it all.” Instead, Coco dreamed up her creations, communicated her vision to the workers, and let them assume the responsibility of execution. She was a creative visionary—management not labor.

  She makes the distinction clearly: “Nice” people sewed clothes, she was an “odious” person. Being odious set her apart from the worker bees and became a part of her professional demeanor—and little wonder. How else might Coco have accomplished all she did, while barely out of her twenties? Living in an era of rigid social hierarchy and lacking any precedent for what she was doing, Coco could hardly afford to be “nice.” She needed to establish her authority over her growing staff, and to overcome a thousand prejudices against her. This need to assert herself firmly, along with her indefatigable work ethic, the dyspeptic and wary temperament she’d developed, and her ongoing insecurity over her lack of a pedigree—in either fashion or society—combined to forge a professional personality befitting a young emperor. She was demanding, arrogant, unyielding, and hubristic—qualities that served her brilliantly, at least in her professional life.

  Business continued to grow in Deauville, and Chanel kept pace by expanding rapidly. She incorporated more menswear-inspired items into her merchandise—sailor suits with patch pockets and three-quarter-length jackets; sweaters and caps inspired by those the local fishermen wore, pullovers like those worn by horse trainers—to which she added small feminine touches. One of her earliest innovations involved cutting open the front of men’s sweaters and adding buttons or ribbon trim—thus giving rise to the precursor of
the cardigan, which later became one of her staples. The origin of this idea had been simple: Coco disliked pulling men’s sweaters, with their tight neck openings, over her head and mussing her hair. To remedy the problem, she simply took a scissors to the sweaters and cut them down the front, inserting herself into these garments in a new way. “I cut an old sweater.… I sewed a ribbon [around the collar]. Everyone went crazy, [saying] ‘Where did you get that?’ ” It was a perfect metaphor for her entire life: When Coco couldn’t squeeze herself into something one way, she simply found—or created—another way, even if she needed a sharp instrument to do it.

  Coco also took a scissors to her hair and gradually cut it shorter until it reached the chin-length bob level with which she is famously associated. “ ‘Why are you cutting your hair?’ [people asked me]. ‘Because it bothers me.’ ” The new style was irresistible on Coco, setting off her fine, long neck and accentuating the natural curl of her nearly black hair. Immediately, her aunt Adrienne cut her own hair into the very same style, making her look even more like Coco. Soon fashionable women from Paris to Deauville were following suit, and, in no time, the centuries-old convention of elaborate coiffures had met its demise.

  The foreign press noticed Chanel’s influence before the French did. In July 1914, Women’s Wear Daily ran an item about Chanel’s sweaters:

  Gabriel [sic] Chanel has on display some extremely interesting sweaters which embrace new features. The material employed is wool jersey in most attractive colorings as pale blue, pink, brick red and yellow. Striped jersey, one inch wide, in black and white or navy and white is also employed. They slip on over the head opening at the neck in front for about 6 inches and are finished with ball shaped jersey covered buttons; the buttonholes are bound with taffeta silk in the same shade as the jersey, thus they can be fastened up close around the throat or left open in a slight décolleté effect. The sleeves are wide enough to slip on easily over a shirtwaist though they fit snugly around the wrist and are finished with buttons and taffeta-faced buttonholes, the same as the front of the sweater.

  Soon, the war reached Deauville. By September 1914 reserve troops arrived from Paris and a local hotel, the Royal, was repurposed as a hospital. Aristocratic ladies volunteered to serve as nurses. Tending to the wounded required simple clothes that permitted rather than hindered movement—precisely Chanel’s strong suit. She began creating uniforms for these new, upper-class caregivers—crisp white blouses (not unlike those she’d worn at Aubazine), simple skirts, and white hats. She summoned Antoinette from Paris to help her and called upon her aunt Adrienne as well. All three Chanel women found themselves together again, and the clothes sold faster than they could restock them.

  Chanel’s sport costumes [are] increasing in popularity daily on the Riviera.… It is not unusual for smart women to place orders for three and four jersey costumes … at one time.

  —WOMEN’S WEAR DAILY, 1916

  To look once at a Chanel jersey costume is to desire it ardently.

  —VOGUE, 1916

  Beyond her stylish nurses’ uniforms, Chanel was selling more and more of her separates. Her clothes offered the perfect solution for women dressing for a new world—for the war upended everything, not least gender roles. With an entire generation of European men torn from their normal lives and pressed into combat, millions of women stepped up gallantly to do the jobs they had left behind. For the first time in European history, upper- and middle-class women found themselves going to work every day. These new women workers flooded the streets, creating a sight unusual enough to startle passersby. They served not only as nurses, but as bus conductors, truck drivers, telephone operators, and office workers—freeing the men for military duty. Their clothes had to accommodate these women’s newfound need to do rather than simply be.

  Beyond sartorial concerns, a powerful shift in mentality accompanied this alteration in women’s daily routines—a new way of thinking about women’s lives. Prior to World War I, European women enjoyed few civil rights. They generally could not serve in the armed forces; they could not vote; they had only limited access to higher education and virtually no options for professional careers. The advent of war, however, seemed to harbinger change. No one could deny how brilliantly women were now succeeding in the working world. Performing their duties with grace, grit, and ability, Europe’s female workers presented a seemingly airtight case for extending rights to women in all areas. And so amid the unspeakable bloodshed and destruction of World War I, glimmers of hope appeared in this one domain. A vision began to take shape of more equality between the sexes, and a world in which women’s lives might expand beyond the confines of home and hearth. In this way, war proved enlightening to those women privileged enough to find meaningful work during these years (and those not requiring wages). Working-class women, however, suffered high unemployment and salary cuts during the war. Just as such changes provided fertile terrain and thousands of willing customers for Chanel’s new and unusual look, they also eased the way for her somewhat new and unusual persona—the independent career woman.

  Chanel’s style and persona also dovetailed well with the logistical constraints imposed by war. With war obligations depleting fabric supplies, keeping clothing simple became a matter of exigency as well as of style. Coco herself suffered from shortages but met this challenge with her customary verve—and a little help from her friends. Etienne Balsan, whose family fortune came from textiles, helped her obtain silks and broadcloth from Lyon; Boy helped her import some tweeds from Scotland. But her mainstay during this period was simple jersey. In 1914, Chanel encountered textile manufacturer Jean Rodier, who was sitting on a surplus of machine-knitted jersey, a fabric used primarily at the time for men’s underwear and nightshirts. But Coco saw its possibilities and, in a now-legendary stroke of foresight, bought out the entire stock—much to Rodier’s surprise.

  Jersey was an ignoble material, considered unworthy of being used for any garment seen in public. It came only in beige or gray; it shredded easily, showed any mistake or correction in sewing, and tended to pucker. In the hierarchy of fabrics, jersey occupied the lowest rung. Jersey was working-class. But Chanel knew something about making the most of humble circumstances. She turned those yards of jersey into tubular chemise dresses and skirts—garments that hung loose and straight, requiring a minimum of stitching and draping. She used it in its natural, undyed state, but she also started having the fabric dyed an array of beautiful colors in Lyon—France’s textile capital. By necessity, since the fabric did not permit much tailoring, her jersey garments skimmed rather than defined the waist.

  With this, Chanel confirmed and popularized a new feminine silhouette—straight and sleek. She was not the first designer to experiment with suppressing the waist; Paul Poiret had accomplished that earlier in the century with his loose, uncorseted styles and “harem” pants. Nor would Chanel be alone in favoring this geometric, linear look. Madeleine Vionnet and Jean Patou—among others—created similar looks. But only Chanel embodied and publicized a concomitant lifestyle and growing personal celebrity, which echoed and underscored the social message of this new silhouette. (“Gabrielle Chanel … is known the world over,” declared American Vogue in late 1916.) As a result, from the mid-teens onward, Chanel’s name was associated with this new, freeing style that allowed women to dress and undress quickly and alone—no longer requiring a second pair of hands (be they a husband’s or servant’s) to hook buttons, lace a corset, and then hoist, smooth, and fluff yards of heavy fabric into the massive, sculptural outfits that entirely encased the female body.

  It is a bit reductive, though, to insist that, by casting aside the corset, Chanel “liberated” women’s bodies. The truth is somewhat more complicated. There is no question that wearing clothes without a corset felt deliciously freeing to some women who’d been raised in the rib-crushing undergarments. And the soft jersey fabric moving over the unbound body beneath added a sensual pleasure to Chanel’s clothes, both for the w
earer, who could enjoy the sensation on her skin, and for the viewer, whose eye could appreciate the clothes’ modern, visual “speed.” But Chanel’s designs didn’t only “free” women from corsets, they also “deprived” them of corsets. The Chanel customer had no choice. No one wearing a jersey dress could wear a corset, for the simple reason that every hook and stay would be visible under the thin fabric, as would the mounds of displaced flesh—bosom, back, or haunch—that tend to spill over and beneath the edges of corsets. Since Coco’s slim, young body needed no corset, jersey suited her to perfection. But not all women could say the same. Chanel’s clothes did not flatter all older women, or women with fuller figures, whose curves transformed into something more like lumps under Coco’s sleek styles.

  Such insistence upon youthful fitness early on distinguished Chanel from other designers. She was the first to turn the look of youth into a desideratum of fashion. To wear a Chanel successfully, it helped to be young or at least very slim. For those not so lucky, it required dieting and exercise—or “internalizing the corset”—in order to achieve a body more like Coco’s. Of course, war brought shortages of food as well as fabric, which meant that everyone was eating less. In any case, the voluptuous beauties of the recent past were now refusing dessert under the diktat of the woman once deemed too scrawny to be classically beautiful. In this, Chanel imposed her own brand of stylish revenge on the world. She was, as always, completely aware of what she had done: “I created a brand-new silhouette, to conform to it, with the help of the war [when food supplies dwindled], all my customers became slim, ‘slim’ like Coco.… Women came to me to buy thinness. ‘Chez Coco, we look young, do what she’s doing,’ they told their seamstresses.”