Mademoiselle Read online

  The grand Porte Binet entrance to the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, topped by La Parisienne (illustration credit 9.2)

  Fair officials had permitted this substitution of a contemporary Frenchwoman for the more traditional mythological goddesses or feminine abstractions (Marianne, or “La Liberté,” for example) commonly used for ceremonial statuary. La Parisienne effectively promoted the fashionable Parisian woman to the status of allegory. In 1900, thousands of tourists flocked to the World’s Fair to marvel at France’s achievements in every realm, from colonial expansion to technology and the arts—including haute couture, which enjoyed particular pride of place. Apprentice Paul Iribe took the image to heart.

  Iribe’s career as a popular magazine illustrator advanced rapidly, his work an amalgam of fashion, design, and ardent French patriotism. His career also benefited from his uncommon success with women, as when, at twenty-three, Iribe convinced a married woman to divorce her husband and then use her money to subsidize his first publishing endeavor: Le Témoin, a journal of art and politics, on which Jean Cocteau also collaborated. Iribe even founded his own advertising agency during these years, specializing in luxury goods. His signature logo motif—the delicate “Iribe rose”—appeared on products ranging from fine jewelry to fabrics to art books.

  After Le Témoin folded, Iribe and Jean Cocteau launched a wartime journal, Le Mot, which ran for nineteen issues from 1914 to 1915, promoting French patriotism and cultural superiority, along with a strident anti-German stance. (Diagnosed with diabetes, Iribe was unable to enlist in the French Army during World War I.) Paeans to French heroes (Marshal Joffre, Joan of Arc) mingled on its pages with caricatures of sadistic and deformed Germans. While Le Mot did not display the rabid xenophobia and racism of Iribe’s later years, it pointed clearly in that direction.

  Iribe made his biggest splash as a fashion illustrator for such great turn-of-the-century couturiers as Jacques Doucet, Jeanne Lanvin (for whom Iribe designed the still-extant Arpège perfume logo), Jeanne Paquin—of Porte Binet fame—and Paul Poiret. Poiret’s Orientalist, flowing couture was set off to excellent advantage by Iribe’s sinuous lines and keen sense of color.

  Iribe fast became one of the leading lights of the new Art Deco movement. Along with beautiful furniture and fabrics, he designed jewelry, clothes, and theatrical sets—all distinguished by his use of the finest materials (highly polished exotic woods and Chinese silks); vivid, saturated colors; sleek curvilinear shapes; and an elegant balance between the ornate and the restrained.

  Iribe’s career reached its apex, though, during the six years he spent in America designing costumes and sets for film director Cecil B. DeMille. In Hollywood, Iribe enjoyed a larger-than-life, American-style celebrity, socializing with film stars and studio executives, teaching costume design at the Paramount Pictures school and becoming a regular contributor to Vogue magazine, and even traveling to New York City to costume Broadway plays.

  It was in Hollywood that Paul met his second wife, heiress Maybelle Hogan. But Iribe was earning his own fortune—which he enjoyed with all the zeal of the convert. He drove a Cadillac that he christened “Fifi” and bought a yacht he called Belle de Mai. He hired a Japanese valet.

  In 1922, DeMille promoted Iribe to artistic director for the epic film The Ten Commandments, for which Iribe created elaborate and lavish ancient Egyptian settings—aided by more than one thousand craftsmen. And so, although they did not yet know each other, in 1922, Coco and Paul were engaged in similar work: She was costuming Sophocles, he the Bible.

  Iribe began work on DeMille’s next monumental biblical project, The King of Kings, but success had gone a bit to his head. After arrogantly defying DeMille’s wishes on several occasions, Iribe found himself out of a job and obliged to return to France with his family.

  Paul did not cope well with his sudden career reversal. From the toast of Hollywood, he plummeted to a forgotten decorator in France. Feeling discarded and unappreciated, Iribe abandoned himself to extravagance, spending his way quickly through his entire fortune and much of Maybelle’s as well.

  My growing celebrity eclipsed his declining glory … Iribe loved me with the secret hope of destroying me.

  —COCO CHANEL

  Chanel had no illusions about Iribe’s mixed feelings toward her. She recognized early on the sharp contrast in their careers at the moment they met. Yet, they had so much in common, including Chanel’s recent experience in Hollywood. In February 1931, she left for Los Angeles at the invitation of Samuel Goldwyn, whom she had met in Monaco through Grand Duke Dmitri. With American cinema suffering in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 1929, Goldwyn was looking for new ways to lure audiences, especially women, back to the theaters. In Chanel he saw a golden opportunity to make his movies irresistible—they could double as Paris fashion shows! He offered Coco a guaranteed $1 million if she agreed to come to Hollywood twice a year, in spring and fall, to dress his stars both offscreen and on. He was specific on one point: Chanel was to put the actresses in styles “six months ahead” of fashion, in order to offset the inevitable delay between filming and release. Explaining his decision to The New York Times, Goldwyn said, “I think that in engaging Mademoiselle Chanel I have not only solved the difficult problem of how to keep clothes from being dated, but also there is a definite service rendered American women in being able to see in our pictures the newest Paris fashions—sometimes even before Paris sees them.”

  Chanel did not say yes immediately. She kept Goldwyn waiting an entire year—something no one else had ever dared do. She didn’t need the money, and she already had a thriving clientele among America’s wealthiest women, including many actresses who wore Chanel in their private lives. Eventually, though, Coco realized that Hollywood offered opportunity on a new, grander scale. All of America would come to know her look, which would then be copied by more manufacturers, who would all want to buy from Chanel’s textile company Tissus Chanel, which she had founded in 1928.

  In April 1931, Chanel set sail for the United States aboard the SS Europa, bringing Misia Sert along for company. Much cinematic hoopla attended Mademoiselle’s first trip to the United States, and no expense was spared. In New York, Maurice Sachs joined them, and the three friends boarded a specially commissioned all-white luxury express train for California. Onboard, Chanel was treated like visiting French royalty, plied with champagne and flattered by the accompanying American journalists.

  To fete her arrival in Los Angeles, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer even trotted out Greta Garbo to welcome Coco with European-style kisses on both cheeks as she stepped off the train onto the station platform. The Hollywood press covered it as “The Meeting of Two Queens.” Chanel stayed long enough to create costumes for three Goldwyn productions, Palmy Days (1931); Tonight or Never (1931); and The Greeks Had a Word for Them (1932).

  But before the last two were even out of postproduction, Coco left Hollywood disenchanted. The outsized luxuries of Hollywood did not appeal to her. “Their comforts are killing them,” she said of the Americans. She was also put off by Hollywood’s high quotient of Jews (although the Jewish Goldwyn, apprised of her prejudices, had taken care to minimize her exposure to others of his faith). She did enjoy, however, one acquaintance she made in California, actor-director Erich von Stroheim, telling Edmonde Charles-Roux: “With him at least the extravagance had a purpose. He was taking on a personal vengeance. He was a Prussian who persecuted lower-level Jews. Since Hollywood was essentially Jewish … the Jews of Central Europe found in Stroheim a familiar nightmare. At least this was not fakery. Together they were living an old story whose aftershocks they knew in advance and to which they were all definitely rather attached.”

  It was an odd, but perspicacious, even psychoanalytic, interpretation of what she’d witnessed—but Coco did not have all the facts. In Hollywood of the 1930s, von Stroheim was known as an Austrian aristocrat, son of a count and a baroness, who had left Europe after a career as a military officer. In truth, this Prussian
aristocratic officer was but another Jewish immigrant in Hollywood. Erich Stroheim—he added the “von” when he got to America—was the son of practicing Viennese Jews. His untitled parents had run a small millinery shop in Vienna, and Erich had neither attended the Austrian military academy nor had a distinguished military career. But von Stroheim had aspirations very like Chanel’s, and when he arrived in the United States he had entirely shed his ethnic identity and fabricated an aristocratic past for himself. A good actor, he carried it off for years. In her acceptance and appreciation of von Stroheim’s “performance” of Austrian nobility, Chanel may have intuited the deep similarity between them. They were both gifted poseurs who’d made careers out of their personal fantasies.

  Gloria Swanson (right) in Tonight or Never, costumed by Chanel (illustration credit 9.3)

  Chanel also chafed at being an employee, however grand, of a film studio. For their part, the Hollywood kingpins were less than thrilled with Chanel’s work anyway. While stars such as Ina Claire and Gloria Swanson loved to wear her clothes in their private lives, the studios found that Chanel’s muted tones and simple lines did not “pop” onscreen.

  In the early years of the Depression, American movie plots tended toward escapist fantasies, and costume choices leaned more toward marabou stoles, flowing silk gowns, and diamond jewelry (worn even for daytime scenes) than toward tweed suits or jersey dresses. Chanel disdainfully referred to onscreen Hollywood fashion as “sartorial anarchy.” But the anarchists rejected Chanel’s brand of governance. “The most elegant Chanel … was a washout on the screen,” explained Hollywood costumer Howard Greer. “When you strip color … and the third dimension from a moving object, you have to make up for the loss with dramatic … contrast and enriched surfaces.… Overemphasis was essential.” The New Yorker put it more bluntly: “[Chanel] made a lady look like a lady. Hollywood wants a lady to look like two ladies.” In 1932, when Katharine Hepburn, starring in A Bill of Divorcement, requested Chanel as her costumer, the producers flatly refused. Hollywood would later come to favor more restrained or realistic wardrobes for its stars, but in 1931, Chanel and Iribe would certainly have agreed on the frustrations of working in American films.

  Chanel in her own clothes (illustration credit 9.4)

  En route home from Hollywood, Chanel and Misia spent a few days in New York City, where Chanel discovered an American phenomenon far more attractive to her than Hollywood had been: S. Klein department store on Union Square. At this downscale emporium, Chanel found knockoffs of her own (and others’) designs. While Americans had long been copying aspects of Chanel’s styles, S. Klein was selling blatant replicas of her work, albeit in cheaper fabrics and at bargain prices. Most designers would have been furious; Chanel was delighted. Although she admitted to disliking the inelegance of discount stores like S. Klein, she recognized the value of such publicity.

  When she returned to Europe, she set about organizing an event based on what she’d seen in New York. Prevailing upon her still-warm relationship with Bendor, she borrowed his town house in London to host a charity fashion show for more than five hundred society women and actresses, including fabled beauty Gertrude Lawrence. Chanel explicitly invited the ladies to bring along their seamstresses, so that they could make sketches and take notes. She was openly offering her clothes as models to be copied. “I prefer copying to stealing,” she wrote years later. “Seriously, there are forty thousand little dressmakers in France. Where can they find their ideas, if not among us? Let them copy. I am on the side of women and seamstresses not the fashion houses.”

  “Mademoiselle Chanel has authorized being copied,” wrote London’s Daily Mail incredulously. Such practices would later enrage Chanel’s couturier colleagues, who never shared her democratic view of fashion and did not fancy seeing their designs reproduced by others.

  But for Coco, seeing copies of her clothes multiplied across the social spectrum and the world brought only pleasure—all the more so for her recent failure to win over the vast markets offered by Hollywood films. She remained as invested as ever in achieving ubiquity of style, a “nation” of style, “when all the people in the street are dressed like you,” as she would later remark.

  Coco was something of a style nationalist—the possibility of her look becoming the uniform for all of France (and beyond) excited her greatly. To dress an entire country, to become synonymous with its style, fed her yearning to belong. Chanel craved something beyond success, wealth, or fame. She wanted to be a symbol of and for France—to achieve the deeply rooted, almost genealogical, legacy that had been denied her by birth and by her several near misses at attaining aristocratic stature. She would not be tsarina of Russia; she could not produce an heir for a duke; but she could do better. She could engender a race of French (and European and American) women who all dressed exactly like her. In anyone else, such a plan might indicate madness; for Chanel, it was a plausible goal.

  Fascinated as he was with nationalism and feminine style, Iribe was deeply drawn to Chanel, someone as invested as he was in patrimoine—the treasure trove of French culture. Though their relationship began as business, Chanel found Iribe charming and seductive. He even displayed some jealousy early on, asking her about her many former lovers. “My past tortured him,” Chanel told Paul Morand, not without some pride.

  Paul and Coco grew close as they planned their most significant artistic collaboration, a diamond jewelry collection for the De Beers corporation. De Beers, the South African gemstone company founded by British imperialist Cecil Rhodes (a close associate of Lord Alfred Milner’s), saw its profits sinking during the first years of the Depression. Seeking to boost sales with an injection of Parisian glamour, they had approached Chanel about designing for them. Diamonds had never really interested Chanel, who famously preferred costume jewelry to the ostentation of expensive jewels, which she likened to “wear[ing] your checkbook around your neck.” But Iribe sensed an opportunity and did his best to convince Chanel to accept De Beers’s offer. She agreed—perhaps for the thrill of expanding into a new area of design, or—more likely—to please Iribe.

  As independent and successful as Chanel was, one part of her always remained the cocotte careful to appease her man. Chanel attributed her surprising new interest in precious gems to the European economy. “During times when luxury is too readily available, I always found costume jewelry devoid of arrogance. This consideration disappears during periods of financial crisis, when the instinctive desire for authenticity returns.” Starting to sound more like Iribe, Chanel resorted to the language of nationalism. Jewelry, she told an interviewer, was “a very French art,” and her exhibition was intended to promote patriotism. Never before had Coco attributed such motives to her work.

  Whatever her initial motivations, Chanel enlisted Iribe’s aide in creating what proved to be one of her most enduringly beautiful collections of jewelry—costume or real. Coco did not sketch or draw, and much of her jewelry up to this point had been designed by others, including Fulco di Verdura and Count Etienne de Beaumont, so the designs were likely executed by Iribe, with extensive input by Chanel. Stylistically, the collection suggests a harmonious blending of both of them, featuring Iribe’s ornate whimsy somehow contained within Chanel-esque simplicity.

  Relying on three basic decorative shapes—a star, a bow, and a feather—the collection of all-white diamonds was sleek and modern. The settings—all in platinum—were rendered nearly invisible, so unobtrusive that the diamonds appeared to be floating. The pieces were cleverly versatile: Earrings converted into hairclips; brooches could become necklaces. A meteor-shaped choker stayed on with no clasp at all, looking like a streak of glittering light across the neck.

  Items from the De Beers jewel collection designed by Chanel and Iribe, displayed on a wax mannequin, 1932 (illustration credit 9.5)

  Chanel debuted the collection for two weeks in her own home in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in November 1932. Members of the fashion elite, who had all received
elegant engraved invitations, filed through Chanel’s drawing room, marveling at the diamonds and the unusual way they were displayed. Instead of being laid out on velvet cases in vitrines, the jewelry adorned old-fashioned hairdresser’s mannequins, whose lifelike wax features wore lipstick and eye makeup. They created a slightly surreal lineup of bodiless heads, brilliant with jewels. Even more surreal, perhaps, was the sight of armed men in uniforms conspicuously circulating among the elegant guests. De Beers had hired security guards to protect the priceless gems. De Beers did not sell a single item, nor was that the intention. The company had commissioned the collection and exhibition entirely for publicity, to raise its profile via a new association with Paris and Coco Chanel. The results exceeded all expectations. Two days after Chanel introduced her collection, De Beers’s stock rose twenty points on the London stock exchange.

  Iribe saw his own stock climbing, too, as he stood beside Chanel and basked in her spotlight. He’d often depended on wealthy women, but Chanel was different from the heiresses he’d once pursued. She had earned her success, and it outstripped anything Iribe had ever achieved.

  Paul tried to balance the scales by extracting an emotional toll from his benefactress. As a lover, he proved demanding and controlling, prone to harsh and contradictory judgments of her life. Having successfully persuaded her to work in the most expensive medium imaginable—diamonds—he was equally insistent that she lived too expensively herself, accusing her of extravagance. Iribe accused her of having too many possessions, dining too lavishly, of keeping too many servants.

  Chanel was not blind to the hypocrisy of such reproofs coming from the owner of Fifi the Cadillac. But, to please Paul, she moved out of her town house in Faubourg Saint-Honoré—firing her devoted longtime butler, Joseph Leclerc—and into an apartment at the Ritz, which she completely renovated, covering the walls with her Coromandel screens, even putting in a new bathroom. (She stored her clothes in another apartment she kept above her offices at 31, rue Cambon.) The result was a jewel box of an apartment, intimate, elegant, and—as usual for Coco—furnished with more lushness and baroque detail than one would expect from such a priestess of modernism. The Ritz would remain her primary residence in Paris for the rest of her life.