Mademoiselle Read online

  Any system of signs that conferred social power appealed to Chanel. Fashion is just such a system, of course—as Chanel knew long before social theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu examined the topic. “Where is the equivalent of [ancient magic] in our society?” Bourdieu asks in an essay on fashion and culture. The answer: “In the pages of Elle … in the couturier … who performs an act of transubstantiation.”

  From early in her career, Chanel had performed this kind of transubstantiation, by inventing her own talismans of power: design details that mimicked royal insignia or military medals and were intended to convey the transformative aura of social privilege. She routinely sewed heavy gilt buttons onto her simple jersey separates, for example, giving them the air of officers’ uniforms, like the ones she had mended in Moulins. She would add further embellishment by embossing the buttons with elements borrowed from the occult, including astrological and folkloric symbols that resembled the identifying emblems of royalty: lions’ heads (for her zodiac sign of Leo) and four-leaf clovers (for good luck).

  The buttons looked remarkably like heraldic crests, and in a sense they were—they were the emblems of a new, parallel aristocracy, Chanel’s self-created fashion elite. Rasputin had nothing on her.

  Chanel’s crash course in Romanov history furnished her with a new range of totems and icons of power, which she quickly subsumed into her aesthetic. Prime among these were her new Russian acquaintances themselves, especially Dmitri, of whom she made canny use at her salon. “Dmitri was the éminence grise of Rue Cambon,” wrote Claude Delay, referring to the Duke’s habit of hanging around Chanel’s studio, looking royal. Chanel enhanced the effect by hiring Dmitri’s friend Count Koutouzov, former governor of the Crimea, as her chef de réception—the first person clients would meet—as well as some of Dmitri’s young and pretty female acquaintances, who worked as models in her showroom. With all the Slavic aristocrats on display, kissing Dmitri’s hand when he entered a room and referring to him pointedly as “Majesty,” Chanel’s boutique soon took on the air of a miniature Alexander Palace.

  Along with all the Russian émigrés, the luxurious elements of Russian design invaded Cambon: brocade and tapestries, velvets, deep jewel tones, and fur. Though a departure from her humbler jersey styles, filtered through Chanel’s social and aesthetic vision, these Old World, aristocratic details reemerged looking fresh, modern, and accessible. Her collections in the early 1920s featured sleek versions of typically Russian-style high-necked, embroidered, and intricately woven jacquard coats, red velvet gowns, and long tunics. Coco obtained much of her authentic Russian textile work from Dmitri’s sister, Princess Marie, who—with Chanel’s patronage—established her own embroidery business, known as Kitmir. “Grand duchesses did my knitting,” Chanel later recounted with pride.

  Through Dmitri, Chanel also encountered the sumptuous world of Russian imperial jewels. While such items might seem too Old World for Chanel’s pared-down aesthetic, versions of them came to occupy an important place in her work, although often with a populist twist. We can trace most of what is still known as Chanel’s signature jewelry pieces to this period, including the distinctive Maltese crosses of colored gems, which Chanel would later copy in inexpensive materials and pin to her suits; oversize emerald or ruby pins (again, often refashioned cheaply with colored glass stones); and the most iconic of all: long ropes of pearls. Dmitri had given Chanel one of the few heirlooms remaining to him: a strand of Romanov pearls. Rather than treasure this historic gift, Coco promptly had oversize paste copies made, and took to looping long garlands of them around her neck, sometimes irreverently mingled with the priceless originals. Somehow, instead of looking garish, the obviously cheap beads seemed fresh and insouciant swinging against Chanel’s neutral solid colors and tailored shapes. Layers of imitation pearls soon became one of the most famous and enduring trademark elements in the Chanel “lexicon”—a dense little symbol that neatly sums up the Chanel paradox, suggesting at once an ostentatiously democratic view of jewelry and a continuing love of the tokens of Old World inherited wealth. “One does not wear jewelry to appear rich, one wears it to be adorned. When costume jewelry is well made, it is meant to demolish real jewelry,” observed Chanel.

  Three Russian- or “Byzantine”-inspired designs by Chanel, 1922: embroidered fur-trimmed coat, embroidered tunic top with Maltese cross motif, and beaded tunic dress (illustration credit 4.2)

  • • •

  Chanel’s Romanov interlude also gave rise to the two innovations most crucial in securing her lifelong fortune and fame: her first perfume, Chanel No. 5, and the initial logo of interlocking Cs. Even before meeting Dmitri, Chanel had long intuited that a fragrance could serve as an anchor or linchpin of her design universe. She knew that women who could not afford her high-priced garments would likely spring for a small bottle of perfume, in order to enjoy a bit of her glamorous aura. “Fashion is in the air, borne upon the wind,” Chanel said. A signature perfume would literalize the metaphor.

  Uncertainty surrounds the creation of Chanel’s signature perfume. Some accounts date its inception to 1920—one year before the affair with Dmitri began. Others insist that Dmitri first introduced Chanel to the man who would become her chief perfumer, Ernest Beaux—which would mean the perfume was launched at least one year later, in 1921. On these points, we must remain unenlightened, and accept what has likely been deliberate obfuscation on the part of the Maison Chanel, intended to maintain an aura of mystery around its most lucrative product.

  However he entered Chanel’s life, Ernest Beaux, former perfumer to the tsars, was the crucial catalyst for her perfume career. Beaux had been working for François Coty, but he agreed to take on Chanel’s project, whereupon she traveled to his headquarters of Grasse, the fragrant town in the South of France, considered the perfume capital of the world. There, Coco spent days working with Beaux in his laboratory, proving herself as discerning of scents as she was of design. “In the lily of the valley they sell on the 1st of May, I can smell the hand of the kid who picked it,” she liked to say. Beaux was impressed. Together, they hit upon the concept that eventually made Chanel a billionaire by today’s standards: a perfume that evoked a new century and a new, modern kind of woman—a crisp scent to be marketed in a new way. While she was not the first couturier to create a fragrance—Paul Poiret had produced several, as had the Callot sisters—Coco revolutionized the concept entirely. Her perfume was to be an extension of her personal, highly modernist signature.

  In 1921, perfumes were based on a set number of highly recognizable floral, herbal, or animal-derived essences, but Chanel insisted that hers have no overtly natural scent. “I don’t want hints of roses, of lilies of the valley.… Perhaps a natural perfume must be created artificially,” she said. To accommodate her wishes, Beaux combined floral and botanical essences (including ylang-ylang, neroli, sandalwood, vetiver, tuberose, and jasmine) with synthetic aldehydes, which made for a fresher, less recognizable scent, in which no one flower could be detected. Sounding like the modernist artist she was becoming, Chanel proclaimed that her perfume would smell like “a bouquet of abstract flowers.” According to Beaux, the aldehydes added a note of clean northern air, the scent of Arctic snow, a “winter melting note.” Of all the essences used in No. 5, jasmine predominates, although not noticeably so. Chanel insisted upon using a massive quantity of jasmine for one simple reason: Beaux had informed her that jasmine petals were impossibly expensive, and Chanel wanted to invent the “most expensive perfume in the world.”

  To package her perfume, Chanel again broke with tradition. Traditionally, perfumes came bottled in elaborate flacons bearing labels that evoked romantic or “Oriental” fantasies, such as “Nuit de Chine,” “Forbidden Fruit,” or “Lucrezia Borgia.” Chanel had no patience for such exotic escapism. For her, only one fantasy was worth marketing: that of being—and smelling—like Coco Chanel. Accordingly, she eschewed a poetic title for the perfume, in favor of her own name—a first in the i
ndustry. The implication was clear: To wear the perfume was to wear Chanel herself, to take on a bit of her essence and mythic identity. Paradoxically, she had made borrowing that identity seem like the height of unique, modern individuality for all other women. “Women tend to wear the perfumes that men give them,” she told Claude Delay, “but you must wear perfumes you love yourself, that are yours alone! When I leave behind a jacket, everyone knows at once [from its fragrance] that it’s mine!”

  Reinforcing the modernity of that Coco identity was the startling addition of a scientific-sounding numeral, the number “5,” reputed to have been included because Chanel felt it was her lucky number. Perhaps she was remembering the five original children of her family, memorializing all but the youngest—baby Augustin—who’d died in infancy.

  The bottle featured similarly modernist lines. Doing away with the usual decorative flacons, Chanel created the simple, sharp-cornered geometric container globally recognized to this day. The provenance of the bottle’s design remains in dispute. It is possible that Chanel patterned it after one of Boy Capel’s cologne flasks; it is possible that it was designed by Jean Helleu, who worked for Chanel for many years. But it is equally possible that, like so much from this period, the bottle owes its distinctive look to prerevolutionary Russia, since according to some sources it was actually designed by Dmitri, in imitation of the vodka flasks carried by officers of the Imperial Guard.

  Chanel launched her perfume in the subtlest of manners, eschewing overt advertising. The very first night after she and Beaux settled on the formula, they dined out together with friends in Cannes. Having placed an atomizing flacon of the perfume on the table, Chanel surreptitiously spritzed every woman who passed by. “The effect was amazing,” she later said. “All the women … stopped, sniffing the air. We pretended not to notice.”

  Back home in Paris, Chanel continued her campaign of subliminal seduction. Instead of putting her perfume on sale right away, she had her saleswomen spray the fitting rooms at Cambon throughout the day. When clients asked about the heavenly scent drifting around them, Coco would play dumb. “Perfume? What perfume?” she would ask, and then claim to recall a “little perfume” she’d “stumbled upon” while on vacation. Next, she began slipping bottles (she’d brought back hundreds from Grasse) to wellborn women of her acquaintance, as gifts—inciting the kind of word-of-mouth buzz that strengthened her clients’ sense of belonging to a knowing elite. Finally, after a while, with no fanfare, the bottles began appearing discreetly on the shelves of her boutiques. By this time, demand had been whipped into a frenzy for this exclusive, mysterious product, and the staff could barely keep the store stocked.

  In this way, much as perfume itself slowly unfolds and makes its presence known, the reputation of Chanel No. 5 expanded. It was to become the most successful perfume in the world, and its sales secured Chanel’s fortune for the rest of her life. Chanel’s intuition had been correct—perfume proved her most marketable and lucrative creation.

  Chanel owed her great perfume success to more than just her good instincts. Within three years of launching this branch of her business, she dramatically enhanced its scope and profits through her professional collaboration with Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, the young German-Jewish brothers who owned Les Parfumeries Bourjois, the largest cosmetics and fragrance company in France.

  It was Théophile Bader, owner of the Galeries Lafayette department store (where Chanel had once bought her stock of straw boater hats), who drew her to the attention of Pierre Wertheimer—the more charismatic of the brothers. Bader saw the potential of marketing Chanel No. 5 on a far bigger scale, and knew that the Wertheimers could provide Coco with the necessary financial backing and distribution network. In 1924, he arranged for them all to meet at the Longchamps racecourse (the Wertheimers were passionate racehorse owners), where a deal was quickly struck. Chanel sold Parfums Chanel to the Wertheimers, signing a contract that granted her a mere 10 percent of the enterprise. Théophile Bader received double that figure—20 percent—for having brokered the deal. And the Wertheimers, in exchange for developing the brand, distributing the perfume globally, and assuming all financial risk, kept 70 percent.

  For decades thereafter, Chanel would claim to have been swindled in this deal that, admittedly, left her the smallest portion of the company. The truth was, the Wertheimers helped make Chanel one of the richest women in the world, and Chanel, in turn, helped the Wertheimers become far richer still. Their relationship grew only more complicated and tempestuous with time (and there were rumors of an intermittent love affair between Coco and the handsome Pierre), but when it began in 1924, all parties trusted one another so completely that they used the same lawyer. Pierre and Paul had instantly felt Coco’s distinctive magnetism. Keen businessmen, they understood that they would be selling not only perfume, but also the captivating woman who’d created it.

  To drive home the tight connection between the perfume and its creator, bottles of Chanel No. 5 were the first items ever to display the initial logo that Coco designed herself—the interlocking double Cs, which remains the company’s trademark to this day. To wear Chanel No. 5 was to enter into Chanel’s famous life, to take on her very essence, to be branded with, signed by, those interlocking Cs. The Cs represented the first use of a designer’s own initials as an aesthetic motif in its own right.

  The iconic bottle design for Chanel No. 5, in its most recent version

  The logo soon eclipsed all of Chanel’s other motifs, appearing on jacket buttons, belts, shoes, and purses and acquiring enough cachet to turn into an abstract, impersonal status symbol, while still conjuring the person behind the initials. It became inextricable from the identity of the Chanel brand, appearing somewhere on nearly every accessory and all perfume packages. (Labels in her couture garments bore her entire name, “Gabrielle Chanel,” instead of initials.)

  Chanel now had her own sign system. Her identity, symbolized by those Cs, now conferred its special magic upon anyone who wore them. In a deft move, Chanel had turned initials—that highly individual sign of personal ownership—into a stamp of a privileged group identity.

  Initialing garments held another, particular resonance for Chanel as well. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, embroidering a young girl’s initials on linens and lingerie was part of an important preparatory ritual for marriage: the creation of the trousseau. Growing up in an orphanage, Chanel surely did not have her own trousseau, but she cared enough about the symbolic weight of the ritual to claim that her “aunts” had forced her to prepare one: “Embroidering my initials on the tea towels of my future household; cross-stitching my nightgowns for a hypothetical wedding night, made me nauseous. I spit upon my trousseau in a fury.” In the bitterness of this faux recollection, we hear the displaced anger of the girl deprived of such traditional rites of passage.

  And so, instead of embossing her initials on her personal, household goods, Chanel figured out a grander plan: She would imprint her initials on the entire world. The double-C logo crystallizes the paradoxical brilliance at the heart of Chanel’s empire: It granted prestige through uniformity, through mass identification with one idealized individual. Nearly everyone could own something with a Chanel logo, and nearly everyone wanted to. Coco had invented the cult of Chanel.

  The provenance of the logo has sparked many stories and interpretations. Archivists at the House of Chanel have discovered that the sixteenth-century Catherine de Medici used a nearly identical emblem as her own identifying symbol, and it’s perfectly plausible that Chanel fancied herself a latter-day Medici. Others have pointed to a similar linked-C pattern lurking in the stained-glass windows of Chanel’s childhood orphanage at Aubazine. Chanel biographer Lisa Chaney has found a similar motif of entwined half circles (or “Cs”) on the Arthur Capel Cup, a silver polo trophy presented by the Paris Polo Club, donated by Berthe, Boy’s sister, with the likely (but unmentioned) support of Coco, who might well have designed the trophy’s lettering. I
n this case, the first unofficial use of the double-C logo would have appeared, fittingly, on this object memorializing the life of Chanel’s greatest love. Dmitri may have had a hand in the design as well: Some of the idle drawings decorating the margins of his diaries in the early 1920s recall Chanel’s logo as well as her perfume bottles.

  Finally, the C logo bears a resemblance to a four-thousand-year-old Indo-European symbol of good luck—the swastika—adopted officially by Germany’s National Socialists in 1920, and an icon to which Chanel and Dmitri would have had considerable exposure, given Dmitri’s close ties to Germany’s Nazi Party and its White Russian supporters.

  Grand Duke Dmitri’s diary drawings, including a sketch of Coco’s favorite number

  By the time Chanel’s initial logo took shape, the swastika figured widely on Nazi paraphernalia readily accessible to her and her social circle, emblazoned on everything from uniforms to artillery. The swastika functioned in much the same fashion as did Chanel’s Cs—as the mark of a brand, betokening membership in an elite yet accessible community, the symbol of a highly attractive, demotic elitism. Nascent fascism and its symbols clearly appealed to Chanel, who went on to establish her own close connection to the Nazi Party. Over time, she gravitated increasingly toward a reactionary, nationalist, and often deeply anti-Semitic social set, and her work continued to evolve into a curious blend of populism, militarism, and a kind of willed aristocratism.

  Chanel’s anti-Semitism must be read, in fact, in the context of her keen desire to manufacture a distinguished lineage for herself. Both Dmitri and Coco would have been inclined to distance themselves from the Jews, whom they regarded as a benighted, unaesthetic race lacking a country. Dmitri made the point most plainly in his diary, where he compared his plight with those of the Jews: “My God how much has happened since 1914! Papa is no more and there is not even that which only the Jews do not have—our motherland, our Mother Russia no longer exists.”