Mademoiselle Page 19
Chanel understood Diaghilev instinctively. In him she had found another eastern European refugee severed from home and steeped in melancholy nostalgia. Paradoxically, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the Ballets Russes would be their return to traditional Russian folklore and dance. Chanel said aptly that “Diaghilev invented Russia for foreigners.” (Did she know she would later do the same for France?)
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes owed its success at least as much to business savvy and social climbing as it did to talent. He had invented a brand of seductive modernism that mingled high and commercial culture, and turned theatrical performances into prestige-conferring events—enticing spectators with accessible, popular references while presenting challenging new art. In Rite of Spring, for example, Vaslav Nijinsky infused his ballet choreography with moves borrowed from the low-rent, nightclub genre of apache dancing. Nijinsky’s 1912 Afternoon of a Faun mingled classical ballet with sensuous tango steps. Jean Cocteau’s scenarios for Ballets Russes productions made use of everyday sights and sounds such as typewriters clacking and phonographs playing, and borrowed elements from the circus (juggling, acrobatics), and from Hollywood cinema.
Diaghilev also made brilliant use of fashion to offer female supporters of his company the thrilling feeling of entering into a privileged “Ballets Russes world” of style. In 1912, for example, Ballets Russes costumer Léon Bakst collaborated with renowned couturière Jeanne Paquin to transform Bakst’s sumptuous onstage creations into wearable, commercial designs available for purchase. For especially generous patrons of the company, Bakst would occasionally fashion custom-made outfits patterned closely on his stage designs, sharing some stage-star glamour with the “civilian” population.
Like Chanel, Diaghilev knew how to harness the marketing power of celebrity. To give Ballets Russes performances the air of posh, A-list soirées, he lured the glitterati with free tickets. Chanel had done much the same thing when she offered free clothes to aristocratic beauties who became walking advertisements.
Chanel’s first interaction with the Ballets Russes was financial, but Diaghilev and his associates saw more in Coco than just deep pockets. Gradually, Misia’s friends—Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and especially Jean Cocteau—recognized a kindred spirit and talent in Chanel. “By a kind of miracle, she has worked in fashion according to rules that would seem to have value only for painters, musicians, and poets,” wrote Cocteau, who was the first of the group to invite Chanel into their world as an artist. In 1922, while Coco was vacationing with Grand Duke Dmitri by the seashore, Cocteau phoned, asking if she would costume his new play, a radical adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone. That Picasso—who fascinated her—would be designing the sets was argument enough for Coco. She agreed immediately.
“I asked Mademoiselle Chanel to do the costumes because she is the greatest couturière of our time,” declared Cocteau. “And I cannot imagine the daughters of Oedipus badly dressed.” She had already conquered the beau monde, but this was different. Now, the charmed circle of the French avant-garde opened to welcome Chanel, the first dressmaker of any stature to enter this exclusive club. Already something of a self-made mythic and royal character herself (and still faintly hoping for the title of tsarina), Coco would now dress the mythic royalty of ancient Greece. Her wardrobe choices for the characters reveal much about the mythology she was constructing for herself.
Cocteau inaugurated the wave of twentieth-century French playwrights who reconfigured ancient Greek drama for their own ends. A number of these modern dramatists returned repeatedly to Sophocles’ Antigone. The final play in the Oedipus trilogy (although actually written first), Antigone is often understood to depict the struggle between oikos, the domestic realm of love and family obligation, and polis, the outer world of the state and adherence to its law. Its plot is deceptively simple: Creon, ruler of Thebes, forbids his niece, Antigone, to mourn for or bury her deceased brother, Polynieces, in a religious ceremony, because Polynieces is considered a traitor to the state. Antigone defies her uncle and buries her brother, whereupon Creon condemns her to being entombed alive and left to starve. By the time Creon finally relents, Antigone has already hanged herself in her crypt. Upon this, her fiancé, Creon’s son, Haemon, commits suicide in despair.
Cocteau intended, he said, to strip Antigone of all excess and reveal the sleek, fast-moving play that lay beneath. He drastically cut the play’s length. In other words, Cocteau performed a Chanel-style makeover on Sophocles, paring the play down to a sleekly modern version of its former self. The entire production lasted just forty minutes.
While not a Ballets Russes production, Antigone gathered an ensemble culled from Diaghilev’s inner circle, including composer Arthur Honegger, Pablo Picasso, and Antonin Artaud. Cocteau reduced the chorus to a single part, which he played himself, speaking his lines through a hidden backstage megaphone.
Chanel’s sleek and simple costumes further modernized the play. In this, her first official foray into costume design (a sideline she would continue to pursue for more than forty years), Chanel established her trademark approach to the stage: She preferred to put actors into highly recognizable versions of Chanel couture. Her creations for Antigone, which debuted on December 20, 1922, at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in Montmartre, resembled nothing so much as they did Coco’s couture collections for fall and winter 1922.
Gènica Athanasiou (right) as Antigone (illustration credit 7.1)
Chanel embarked on Antigone during her “Russian” years, when she was involved romantically with Stravinsky and Grand Duke Dmitri. For winter 1922, Chanel’s collection consisted of heavy woolen coats with jacquard woven patterns, Slavic-style tunics with rope belts, and large costume jewelry pieces, including brooches in the shape of Maltese (also known as “Byzantine”) crosses. The ladies of Cocteau’s Antigone looked like slightly muted, more stylized versions of the Chanel models depicted in that season’s Paris Vogue. Chanel dressed Antigone and her sister, Ismene, in heavy wool garments in neutral tones of brown and white, soberly adorned with geometric jacquard patterns. Antigone, as protagonist and the fiercer sister, merited the more dramatic ensemble, featuring a specially made cloak that drew raves from reviewers: a hand-knitted wrap of undyed raw wool into which Greek vase motifs, in maroon and brown, had been intricately woven.
Ismene wore a simpler, shorter dress with a silvery tone, and no cloak. For Cocteau, the splendor of the sisters’ costumes was proportionate to their nobility and purity of action: “Antigone has decided to act. She wears a coat of superb woolen weaving. Ismene will not act. She keeps her more ordinary dress,” he wrote.
For Creon and Haemon, Chanel designed neutral-colored togas and leather sandals. She indicated their royal status by encircling their heads in hammered metal headband-style crowns, embossed with large gemstones arranged into a shape almost identical to the Byzantine crosses she was making that season in her costume jewelry line (inspired by Grand Duke Dmitri’s royal family jewels), and which also figured as a decorative motif in some of her distinctive tunics.
Cocteau received mixed reviews for the production. Many of the more enthusiastic responses came from conservative critics (including François Mauriac and Ezra Pound), who felt Cocteau had eliminated frivolous theatrical excess and created a respectful, even “virilizing” return to the classicism of Sophocles. New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson was less impressed, dubbing the play “a vest-pocket version of Antigone,” which reduced Greek tragedy to “fiddle faddle.”
In the end, Chanel’s contributions outshone every other aspect of the play, garnering the most enthusiastic critical response. The Christian Science Monitor lauded the costumes for their seriousness, and for remedying a dangerous, “effeminate” trend in costuming classical tragedies:
Special attention must be called to the costumes. They are at the same time primitive and elegant. M. Dullin has resolutely discarded the supple woolens and the crepes de chine introduced by Mounet-Sully [in an 1893 producti
on of Antigone]…[which can become] too luxurious, too refined, too effeminate [and] which did not become the tragic vigor of the piece. The costumes of Antigone at L’Atelier are inspired by the compositions which adorn amphoras. Cut with a refined gaucherie out of beautiful stuffs—heavy because rustic but fine because the matter is rare and well fashioned—enhanced with all the barbarian grace of the epoch, they delight the eye. The dressmaker, Mme Gabrielle Chanel … must be greatly thanked for her artistic sense. The cloak of Antigone shaped like a sack and heavy with embroideries, and the dress with its fine folds and the silvery robe of Ismène—what marvelous discoveries!
Like those conservatives who praised Cocteau’s “virile” approach, the Monitor applauds Chanel’s apparent rejection of the feminine. Her fabrics are worthy for being stiff instead of supple, heavy instead of graceful—the reviewer might as well be talking about bodies, not clothes. The costumes seem to have acquired a manliness demanded by—and commensurate with—the gravitas of a classical Greek text. In the decades to come, this linking of Hellenism (especially Sophocles’ character of Antigone) with masculine strength became a commonplace within a certain strain of European politics. Fascist propaganda routinely posited that the Aryan—the racially pure European man—found his roots in ancient Greece, birthplace of the athletic, superior civilization that had been lost through racial tainting and moral laxity.
Antiquity served the fascists as a handy aesthetic symbol of a fallen cultural elite, which they longed to reinstate. The story of Antigone lent itself especially well to this scenario, offering a young, virtuous heroine who refuses to compromise her principles. For the French right wing, Antigone became an allegorical figure of a purified France—like Marianne or Joan of Arc—young, inspirational, self-sacrificing, female but not feminine, a woman of manly virtues. Writers such as Jean Anouilh, and fascist supporters Robert Brasillach and Charles Maurras returned repeatedly to Sophocles’ story, especially throughout the 1940s.
In 1922, Cocteau’s politics were somewhat inchoate, and he had not yet acquired his reputation as an ardent nationalist and Nazi sympathizer. But his Antigone whispers an affiliation with the Antigones to come.
Chanel, too, would find her place among the extreme French Right, even becoming a kind of emblem for it. Coco was happy to assume this role, deeply drawn to any movement that seemed to offer membership in an elite and confirmation of her national and historic importance. In 1922, her political sentiments were still evolving, detectable more in her choice of lovers and friends than in her actions. But the critical reception to her Antigone costumes foreshadows Chanel’s later popularity among the French nationalist movement, in that critics found her style lofty, monumental, and worthy of the association with France’s grand, Hellenic past.
Reviewers consistently praised Chanel for her ease among the ancients, particularly the way her costumes bespoke high-culture seriousness. Her creations sent French Vogue, for example, into raptures: “These woolen dresses in neutral tones give the impression of ancient clothes rediscovered after centuries. Their cut adds to the character of each role, and the cloak seems to envelop strangely the daughter of the House of Atreus. Chanel has become Greek while remaining Chanel. Her unusual costumes prove this. Antigone’s dress of coarse white wool woven with brown in places, is exactly the dress revealed to us by the friezes of Delphi: This is a beautiful reconstruction of an archaism, illuminated with intelligence.”
The praise was well deserved. Chanel had, in fact, created beautiful and evocative costumes. But the extravagant attention paid to her contributions conveyed more than aesthetic approval; it proved the social and historic power of Chanel’s “wearable personality.” Vogue said it all: Chanel had become Greek while remaining Chanel. She had evoked ancient Greece but remained true to her own fictive universe and to “Coco”—a character more potent and identifiable than even Antigone. Instead of dressing actress Gènica Athanasiou like Antigone, she had dressed her like a Chanel runway model for winter 1922, imprinting upon Sophocles’ play the indelible Chanel fashion signature. “Becoming Greek” in this context meant “rising to the stature of myth”—a process Chanel had long been perfecting. Her designs, both on- and offstage, conveyed historical depth, gravitas, and even a touch of Byzantine royalty (via her well-known connection to a Romanov duke)—all characteristics associated with Antigone.
The classics of ancient Greece had always formed the cultural bedrock of European civilization, and Sophocles was part of the cultural pedigree of upscale, educated French audiences. By 1922, Chanel—the uneducated, orphaned peasant girl—had created a public identity and style adequate to the demands of illustrating such a high-cultural text. Her tireless campaign to refashion herself as a noblewoman with a prestigious pedigree had succeeded: Chanel couture could hold its own against the grandest and most ancient cultural backdrop imaginable.
Esteemed literary critic Roland Barthes agreed, declaring that Chanel ought to be considered a canonical French literary figure: “Today if you opened a book on the history of our literature, you should find the name of a new classical author: Coco Chanel. Chanel does not write with pen and paper … but with fabrics, forms and colors. Nevertheless … she has the authority and flair of a writer of the ‘grand siècles’… Racine … Pascal … La Rochefoucauld … Mme de Sèvignè.… Chanel … endows [fashion] with all the classical virtues.”
If Chanel’s fashion signature sharpened and enhanced Antigone’s nobility onstage, Coco’s offstage celebrity enhanced the play’s box office sales, and turned Antigone into something of a society happening. Reviews tended to focus on Chanel’s costumes to the exclusion of every other aspect of the play. Vogue and Vanity Fair failed even to mention Honegger, Artaud, and Picasso. This didn’t concern the play’s producer, Charles Dullin (also the portrayer of Creon), who later wrote: “Society people came to the performances because of Chanel.… Sophocles was only a pretext.” Chanel, too, seemed convinced of her own importance in the production and tended to dominate rehearsals. When asked one day to step aside to allow the actors to rehearse with the text, she was reported to have said, in genuine confusion, “Text? What text?”
Antigone was so perfectly suited for Chanel’s induction into the French avant-garde that one suspects Cocteau of choosing the play for that express purpose. Sophocles’ Antigone is an unusual woman, an outsider who has lost her parents, defies society and its laws, and forgoes marriage and motherhood: “Not for me was the marriage-hymn.… My curse is to die unwed,” she laments. While Chanel’s life may fall somewhat short of the Sophoclean, a shadow of Antigone lived within her.
By all accounts, Athanasiou wowed the opening-night crowd with her magnificent cloak, but she was not wearing her intended costume at all. Instead, that first night, Antigone appeared onstage dressed in Coco Chanel’s own coat, which had been flung about Génica’s shoulders at the last minute. Minutes before the curtain was to go up, Chanel—in a foreshadowing of the peevish temper of her later years—noticed some small flaw and began pulling angrily at a thread on Antigone’s cloak, ultimately unraveling it so badly that it became unusable. While the elderly costume assistant who had knitted the coat wept, Chanel threw her own dark brown jacquard-weave winter coat over Athanasiou and sent her out onstage to huge acclaim, confirming that “costumes” were not necessary here; Chanel’s everyday couture was more than regal enough. “It’s funny, the theater,” Coco said later about the incident, “I threw my own coat over the actress’ shoulders, well, that’s what made the play!”
Chanel proved an excellent collaborator for the theatrical style of Diaghilev and company, and after Antigone, she worked on more productions. She costumed two more in Cocteau’s series of Neohellenist dramas (which she called his “bazaar of antiquity”): Orpheus (1926) and Oedipus (1937), as well as his medieval drama The Knights of the Round Table (1937), on which she was assisted by a young Christian Dior. In the realm of dance, she entirely costumed Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes seaside fantasy The
Blue Train (libretto by Cocteau, sets by Picasso, and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava Nijinska), in addition to contributing designs for various other Ballets Russes productions, including the mythology-themed Zephyr and Flora (1925, choreographed by Léonide Massine) and Apollon musagète (1928, score by Stravinsky, choreography by George Balanchine, starring Serge Lifar); as well as Les Biches (choreography by Nijinska, music by Francis Poulenc).
In nearly all cases, Chanel adhered to her ingenious practice of forgoing overt “costumes” in favor of tweaked versions of her own highly recognizable couture. For Zephyr and Flora (a story set on Mount Olympus), she translated anaphoric designs by set designer Georges Braque into garments. For Balanchine’s Apollon, she redesigned earlier costumes by painter André Bauchant when the ballet reopened for its second run in 1929, dressing only the Muses, who each wore a typically Chanel-esque knit tunic cinched in three places by men’s neckties from Charvet (the classic haberdashery on the Place Vendôme, once favored by Boy Capel). And in Les Biches, which featured a glamorous hint of lesbianism, the “flapper” character instantly telegraphed “Coco” by wearing a long strand of oversize pearls and carrying a cigarette holder.
While Chanel yielded somewhat to the demands of the historical period for certain productions, she always included enough of her signature style to conjure the classic “Chanel look.” For Knights of the Round Table, for example, Chanel’s fur and velvet fantasies looked more like medieval versions of couture than like costumes. As Cocteau said in an interview: “These are not … the costumes of a costumer. They are realistic, cut from fabrics of authentic opulence.” The review in Vogue lauded the costumes for Knights as: “sumptuous … brocades, ermine and lame fabrics, evoking the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts of the past.” In the novelist Colette’s review of the play, Chanel’s sometime friend wrote, “Thanks to [Chanel] the actors are as beautiful as princes in a tapestry, beautiful like the figures on tarot cards. One slightly monastic dress, in off-white, touched me like a line from a spiritual text.”