Mademoiselle Read online

  Despite its highbrow façade, fascism’s methods were anything but lofty. Its techniques resembled nothing so much as the physical, visceral manipulations famously used in all forms of mass recreation: organized sports, cinema, and fashion. These phenomena all draw on the same elements: the lure of a privileged group of insiders (team members, stars, the chic); an insistence on youth, fitness, and physical beauty; a distinctly recognizable style; and powerful, charismatic personalities. Fascism, as Susan Sontag famously pointed out, was sexy.

  For some of its glamorous trappings, fascism looked to Hollywood cinema, from which it borrowed the practice of relying on carefully stage-managed charismatic personalities. Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and, later, Marshal Philippe Pétain in Vichy, all availed themselves of movie-star-style publicity techniques to hone their images and develop their cult followings. Benito Mussolini, for example, cultivated the aura of a rugged, perpetually young sportsman (despite being a grandfather), and staged photos of himself piloting a plane or skiing the Alps bare chested.

  Adolf Hitler, unmarried and childless, acquired more the status of a religious idol—rigid, remote, omniscient. But his publicity machine worked as unrelentingly as Mussolini’s. Hitler took on such iconic status that in 1936 it was decreed that the special black uniform jackets of his personal guard, the Leibstandarte, would boast cuffs embroidered with Hitler’s entire name in silver thread, written in script as if he had personally signed each man’s sleeve. In this, fascism combined the Hollywood motif of the star’s autograph—the signature of the idol—with the haute couture concept of the exclusive designer label that bears the magical name of the creator—la griffe (literally, “the claw,” referring to the indelible sign of the artist, “scratched” into the garment)—confirming the elite status of both garment and wearer.

  “Il Duce begins the threshing of the grain, June 1928”—a typical propaganda photograph of Benito Mussolini (illustration credit 10.6)

  Hitler inspects a locker while visiting his SS Leibstandarte, or bodyguard unit. Note the bands on the uniform sleeves, bearing Hitler’s embroidered signature. (illustration credit 10.7)

  To balance, perhaps, Hitler’s more hieratic, robotic charisma, Nazism offered up the considerable sex appeal of its central figure, the new “fascist man,” modeled after the youths and warriors of classical statuary. The epitome of fascist principles, strong and beautiful, this Greek-Aryan warrior defined himself sharply against his physical and moral antitype, the people Paul Morand labeled “vermin”: the Jews. Blond and blue-eyed, muscular and virile—fascist man was a paragon of masculine virtues.

  Psychoanalytic theorists of fascism—notably, Klaus Theweleit—read this hyper-masculinity as a splitting of the self into a “(female) interior and a (male) exterior … [which] were mortal enemies.” And it is true that most fascist propaganda offered an exaggerated stereotypical view of women, insisting upon their role as breeders and nurturers of children and relegating them to home and hearth. According to this interpretation, the muscular discipline of the fascist body represents the willed banishment of overwhelming, feminine characteristics. Once German fascism entered French culture full force, through Vichy and the occupation, similar urgings about exercise and fitness began appearing in popular magazines and in political messages.

  Art of the era abounds with examples of the aestheticized fascist body—in Leni Riefenstahl’s gorgeous photographs of Olympic athletes, and in the sculptures of Arno Breker, Jean Cocteau’s close friend, whose marble monuments to the fascist male ideal earned him Hitler’s passionate devotion, as well as a job as official sculptor of the Reich.

  Germans were hardly alone in their appreciation of Aryan beauty. Breker’s work found a large following in France, where he had lived for years before the war, and to which he returned regularly during the occupation. When in Paris, Breker frequently dined on the rue Cambon with Chanel and her friends, having been introduced to their circle by Cocteau. Cocteau even liked to compare his actor lover Jean Marais to a Breker sculpture come to life; decades later, in 1963, Breker created a bronze sculpture of a still very handsome Marais.

  Breker sculpture Die Partei (The [Nazi] party) (illustration credit 10.8)

  Breker’s sculptures wore their nakedness majestically, but fascism gave equal time to the beauty of the covered body as well—to fashion. Keenly aware of the potent power of dress, the fascists created famously beautiful uniforms, especially for officers, which garnered acclaim beyond Italy and Germany. Even Americans found beauty in their enemies’ uniforms.

  Sleek and formfitting, fascist uniforms of both Italy and Germany showed to great advantage the hewn physiques beneath. Finishing touches provided by the high boots, the black leather trench coats, and an elaborate system of badges, armbands, and medals—all adorned with the ubiquitous swastika—made for a total look that bespoke military authority but also masculine beauty. Such attention to dress and accessories might seem to court charges of effeminacy, but the constant underlying threat of violence and destruction offset any potentially emasculating effect. “There is a general fantasy about uniforms,” wrote Sontag. “They suggest community, order, identity (through ranks, badges, medals, things which declare who the wearer is and what he has done; his worth is recognized), competence, legitimate authority, the legitimate exercise of violence.”

  Sontag was right. Mere buttons and badges would have meant nothing without the tremendous power that clearly lay just beneath the glittering surfaces. But uniforms define more than their individual wearers; they also sculpt the collective body, unifying a group into a single whole—a sports team, an army, a nation. Though this is true of all uniforms, fascist uniforms were especially powerful, imbued as they were with the aura of myth—that compelling fascist narrative of a superior race, united under the mystical swastika. This underlying myth added ineffable allure to the uniform for those who watched and admired the soldiers, but also for those soldiers themselves.

  Hitler’s chief of foreign intelligence, the handsome and charming Walter Schellenberg (who was likely Chanel’s lover later on), joined the SS in 1933 as a young law student, a decision explained in his memoirs:

  All young men who joined the Party had to join one of its formations as well. The SS was already considered an “elite” organization. The black uniform of the Fuhrer’s special guard was dashing and elegant, and quite a few of my fellow-students had joined. In the SS one found the “better type of people,” and membership in it brought considerable prestige and social advantage.… I cannot deny that at age twenty-three such things as social prestige and, shall we say, the glamour of a smart uniform played quite a large part in my choice.

  If such remarks make the brutally violent SS sound like a well-heeled college fraternity or a posh country club, that was precisely the point. The Nazis sought out recruits like Schellenberg, educated and polished men who not only could serve as glossy advertisements for the movement, but were themselves highly susceptible to the seductive elitism that came with the job. Another high-ranking Nazi official, Reinhard Spitzy, echoed Schellenberg’s remarks when he was asked about his early induction into the SS: “[I]n the SS … we [understood that we were] … the future aristocratic spine bone of the German Nation.… And then the uniform was very beautiful. Black, no? Of course one liked the uniform and boots and all that.”

  Youth, virility, social status, national identity—in a kind of visceral alchemy, the fascist uniforms distilled these highly charged elements and conveyed their essence back to the wearers and even to civilian audiences. Private citizens could participate, since objects bearing the swastika insignia found their way into every aspect of daily life. A wide range of Nazi merchandise saturated the marketplace: watch fobs, lapel pins, matchbooks, pendants, jackets, banners, and lingerie, all emblazoned with the swastika and all for sale.

  The swastika took on talismanic properties, tying the country together under a single graphic symbol. As a ubiquitous fashion accessory, the swastika per
mitted everyone access to the magic inner circle and telegraphed adherence to the sect. In its mass dissemination of this mystical-seeming symbol, Nazism proved it had become “a civic religion.” The party went so far as to invent secular versions of Christian rituals, including a Nazi version of baptism, in which children were inducted into the party before an altar displaying Hitler’s photograph instead of an image of Christ.

  This promotion of mass national unification by means of icons, colors, objects, clothing, crowd formation, and so forth proved so essential to the Nazi machine that it earned its own name within the party’s lexicon: Gleichschaltung. Meaning literally “same switching,” the word has been translated as “coordination,” “uniformization,” or “bringing into line,” and refers to the gradual tightening and centralization of control over all aspects of life—processes that lie at the heart of the totalitarian project. Gleichschaltung consisted also of political, cultural, and legal measures, among them: imposing compulsory membership in sanctioned cultural organizations, such as Hitler Youth, government takeover of sports and recreational activities (there was even a Nazi chess club), the suppression of trade unions, and the dismantling of all non-Nazi political parties. Over all of this vast process of “same-ification” loomed the swastika, the most powerful commercial logo ever invented.

  The use of the swastika reminds us of just how closely Nazi propaganda methods resemble fashion branding techniques. In fact, in their similarities we find their parallel structures—what they share as means of social manipulation. Fashion has long been driven by some of the same mechanisms that propelled fascism. Certainly, fascism made expert use of the charms of well-cut clothes and eye-catching accessories. But the two systems also resemble each other on a deeper level. Both play upon the struggle between two basic and contradictory impulses: the desire to conform and the desire to be original. Both exploit the power generated when vast numbers of people imitate a given behavior.

  The fascist movement shared certain core strategies with the fashion industry—including the marketing and manipulation of strong desires for adornment, for identification, and for a sense of transcendence, all of which led thousands of people to find meaning and beauty in fascist myth and iconography. Hitler himself had an eye for women’s fashion and preferred to see the women in his life chicly dressed. Eva Braun raised party eyebrows with her exorbitant dressmaker’s bills, but Hitler paid them without complaint. The uniforms worn by women under the Reich for sports teams, political leagues, youth groups, and the like displayed little of the high-fashion sensibility so evident in the men’s military versions. Unhappy at one point with the plain uniforms proposed for the League of German Girls, Hitler insisted they be redesigned.

  The topic of commercial women’s fashion proved vexing to the fascists because Germany and Italy had long marched to the rhythm set by Paris. In the early 1930s, though, the fascists resisted permitting a rival country this degree of aesthetic influence. But French fashion proved too powerful to control. The Reich’s multiple attempts to create a pure “German fashion” all failed. Upper-class German ladies, including many Nazi officers’ wives, would not be deprived of Parisian style, and ultimately a number of French designers, including Jacques Fath, Marcel Rochas, and Nina Ricci, kept their own houses afloat during the war by transacting business with Berlin.

  Even far chicer Italy failed in its attempt to create a pure “Italian” fashion purged of French influence. French couturiers—and especially Coco Chanel—dominated Italian couture until the second half of the thirties. Women’s love of Parisian clothes consistently trumped government policy. Fashion, it seemed, would not submit to the process of Gleichschaltung. These failures, though, bespeak more than a misunderstanding of the workings of fashion. They point to a significant fault line running beneath the surface of fascism: its deeply contradictory view of women.

  Fascist propaganda used sex to cleave the world in two. As much as it exhorted men to serve their countries through athletic and military prowess, it exhorted women to serve through motherhood and housewifery. Although Germany and Italy had differing versions of this restrictive stereotyping, the results were the same: Social progress for women in both countries was dramatically reversed.

  All aspects of emancipated, modern womanhood came under attack. In Italy, abortion, birth control, and sex education for children were banned, and Italy’s version of the Chanel-style flapper, la maschietta, was reviled for undermining the traditional feminine roles of wife and mother. Similarly, the Nazis established their famous “three-K model” for womanhood: Kinder, Kirche, Küche (children, church, kitchen), insisting on women’s duty to repopulate the fatherland with Aryan children.

  Fashion, of course, had no place in the virtuous woman’s life. Nazi propaganda posters featured full-bosomed women—Aryan Madonnas—wearing the humblest clothes possible—the housewife’s apron, the peasant’s muslin dress, or, in the occasional nod to antiquity, a Grecian robe. The fascists may have lured male recruits with fashionable uniforms, but chic attire for women was morally suspect. Reinhard Spitzy, who admitted joining the SS for the uniform, recalled that, before his induction, part of the screening process including an interrogation of his wife about “whether she likes too much dresses or perfumes, or if she wants to be a perfect German wife.”

  But the fascists could never entirely squelch women’s modernity, nor did they wish to. Despite the rhetoric of a return to home and hearth, fascism was invested in progress and technology. The modern world required (and already had) a modernized female population. Italy’s fascist dictatorship even celebrated that avatar of national progress, the Nuova Italiana, or “New Italian Woman.” Coherent social and national identities for women could never emerge from the illogic and hypocrisy of totalitarianism.

  The political backlash against liberated women inevitably found its way to France. In 1935, France’s population was only half that of the increasingly menacing Germany (forty million French to eighty million Germans)—a disparity that rekindled debates about population decline and spurred the creation of an antifeminist movement known as retour au foyer (return to the home), devoted to getting women out of the workplace and back to the nursery. A vocal right-wing group, the National Alliance for the Growth of the French Population, launched massive propaganda attacks against la femme moderne for her interest in career, her unpatriotic neglect of child rearing, and her love of fashionable clothes. (Paul Morand figured among the many intellectuals who supported this movement.)

  The French pronatalist, or pro-birth, movement especially scapegoated women’s fashion—even as the thriving fashion industry was being touted as one of France’s most precious remaining resources. Fashion was the province of the harlot; it lured women away from family life. In 1939, the Vichy-backed pronatalist women’s magazine Votre Beauté attacked couturiers for reducing the contemporary woman to “a caricature, a sad doll that lives only for her body, her clothes, her sex appeal.” Catholic philosopher Gustave Thibon lamented the poor moral character of young women who “read Marie Claire.”

  If young women could be corrupted by Marie Claire, then Chanel was the devil incarnate, since no one’s name graced the fashion pages more frequently than Coco’s. Considered in the context of French interwar politics, then, Chanel was a paradox. Her personal beliefs put her squarely in the camp of the protofascists: She was a staunch nationalist, an archconservative, and a German sympathizer. She was a royalist, antiunion, anti-Semitic, anti-parliamentarian, and had no patience for women’s rights movements. Yet Chanel was also a never-married, (presumably) childless, professional woman, who lived openly with lovers. She virtually embodied the “sad caricature” lamented in pronatalist and fascist propaganda. What’s more, she had founded a cult of imitators, branding women throughout Europe with her black-and-white letter Cs. Chanel was the patron saint—not to say one of the creators—of the fascists’ reviled femme moderne.

  On the surface, the paradox poses no dramatic historical proble
m. It mattered little that Chanel flouted entirely fascism’s dictates for women—she hardly belonged to the targeted demographic. The rules for the masses do not apply to multimillionaires or global celebrities, which is also why Chanel felt no need to support feminist causes—she was doing just fine. At its highest social and cultural levels, fascism accommodated a spectrum of personal beliefs and private behavior. And in certain circles, fascism mingled comfortably with many facets of progressive modernism.

  But Chanel cannot be reduced to a fascist fellow traveler with a privileged modern lifestyle. Her contradictory relationship to fascism worked itself out not in her personal beliefs or even in her professional activities, but in the way her movement, Chanelism, partook of fascism’s tenets and aesthetics, participating in the “domestic” French version of fascism. Chanel actually built her global empire by using tactics and philosophy that deeply and startlingly mirrored the fascists’, creating an odd symmetry between her movement and theirs. One could argue that Coco proved the more adept at wielding these tactics. After all, fascism ultimately met defeat, but Chanelism continues to this day, tapping into what Susan Sontag has called “the fascist longings in our midst.”

  My epoch was waiting for me. I needed only to come, it was ready.

  —COCO CHANEL

  At the zenith of her pre-World War II career, Chanel’s public persona existed on a scale far beyond anything previously associated with a fashion designer or businesswoman. She was acquiring the aura of a world political figure. Her power, reputation, influence, and press coverage resembled those of the crowd hypnotizers amassing followings throughout Europe. She had become a symbol of the French nation and one of its wealthiest citizens. Millions knew her name and image at a glance; millions admired and copied her style.