Mademoiselle Read online

  And while the political turmoil of the 1930s distressed and unsettled her, like a good politician, Chanel knew how to benefit from the unrest around her. France’s vexed climate and its culture wars wound up enhancing Coco’s iconic stature. Music, art, theater, and literature all appeared susceptible to the taint of foreign (especially Jewish) influence, but haute couture still seemed securely homegrown. Fashion was the

  country’s greatest native, commercial, and artistic treasure, a foundation stone of national identity, one of its key exports. In 1939, as war approached, L’Art de la Mode wrote, “France’s Great Couturiers … through their ingeniousness, their taste, and their stature … wave high the banner of French glory throughout the four corners of the world. In the midst of our disappointments and political uncertainties, this is a fact that we must recognize.”

  Chanel’s banner waved higher than anyone else’s and she knew it. She was “a national icon of France at its most elegant,” in the words of French historian Patrick Buisson. She represented the ne plus ultra of Parisian glamour, a guarantor of international prestige for France. “She was powerfully aware of her own importance to France,” wrote Marcel Haedrich. In a 1931 interview with Women’s Wear Daily, she loftily brushed aside the (accurate) assumption that she had reduced prices to improve flagging profits, insisting that she had done it out of civic-mindedness: The price cuts increased access to her designs, she claimed, preventing “poor reproductions of her work” from harming “the prestige of Paris.”

  Paul Iribe had had a point when he dubbed the luxury shopping district around Place Vendôme the “vitrine of France,” its showcase to the world. As Iribe had known well, Chanel was the polished pearl at its center, shaping the world’s view of her country. Jean Cocteau imagined Coco as a kind of pagan god, the genius loci of the first arrondissement. “Rue Cambon, Place Vendôme [are] sanctuaries where women prostrate themselves before the idol of Fashion,” he wrote in his 1937 Harper’s Bazaar profile of her.

  Chanel’s press coverage returned repeatedly to such imagery. Le Miroir du Monde lauded: “Gabrielle Chanel … to whom Paris owes, in the grace and beauty of the women, its indisputable glory.” Commenting on the Grecian-style bas-relief that the Maison Chanel used as its icon at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, Femina journalist Martin Rénier referred to Chanel’s business as “a temple of French taste, which she has demonstrated to us for so long.” Chanel’s choice of a Greek temple to represent her company was no accident; she saw her work as classic, timeless, mythic, and worthy of worshippers, a view that had been reinforced by her work costuming the great Greek myths for the French stage. Chanelism had become—and remains today—as much of a secular religion as fascism ever was. (In 2011, when asked to describe the Chanel worldview, a top Maison Chanel executive replied, “It’s a religion.”)

  From national symbol it is but a small, conceptual step to compare her to a military commander, monarch, or even tyrant, and the press routinely likened Chanel to just such figures. In its account of her 1936 workers’ strike, The New York Times positioned Chanel as both a guardian of the nation’s patrimony and a totalitarian leader: “She will not abdicate but will continue to defend French fashions and the French taste.… Mademoiselle Chanel has long been famous as a dictator of fashions.” Throughout the interwar years, The New York Times repeatedly described Chanel as the Parisian fashion dictator, and sometimes as the “leader of the cult of Chanel.” The Times was not alone.

  In 1933, a profile of Chanel for the magazine Le Miroir du Monde announced: “Gabrielle Chanel imposes fashion upon the feminine world like a dictator. She orders, one after the other, the wearing of jerseys, of costume jewels, of short hair; she demands complete luxury, gold, velvet, lace, and all women listen to her as if to an oracle!” That same year, American journalist and gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell—never one to mince words—imagined Chanel as the “miniature female Stalin of the Rue Cambon … imposing her imperious will on the countless armies of the world’s women, whom, like a satirical and sinister Bo-peep, she has turned into willing sheep to baa at her commands.” Winston Churchill described her as a “great and strong being fit to rule a man or an Empire.” Even advertisements borrowed the lingo; “Chanel dictates,” read the running header of a series of newspaper ads in The New York Times for knockoffs of Chanel accessories.

  Fashion magazines painted Chanel as a heroic figure on the international political stage, someone advancing and protecting the cause of La Belle France. In 1938, when the countess Géraldine Apponyi—future queen of Albania—commissioned her entire trousseau from Chanel, Marie Claire magazine recounted the transaction with the fanfare normally reserved for major political announcements. The article’s title, printed in oversize, screaming block letters, declared: “A new treaty alliance has been signed between Albania and the Rue Cambon. German fashion to refuel here in Paris.”

  In 1935, Femme de France proposed fashion as the cure for France’s spiritual malaise, and likened Chanel’s contribution to a valiant military salvo: “It would be to misunderstand Paris to believe for one moment that it would … give in to discouragement. Our great designers continue to adorn our feminine beauty.… Mademoiselle Chanel opens fire [with] a varied collection … joining youth and femininity.”

  These were the voices issuing in the 1930s. They cast Chanel’s authority and reign over European culture in terms that other contemporary voices used only for the decade’s military leaders—and the phenomenon of fascism. Such language persisted throughout Chanel’s life, used especially by anyone who had occasion to watch Coco in action at her studio. “She reigns with authority … over this army of workers. There on her battlefield, she has the audacity and spirit of a young general of the French Empire,” wrote a journalist in L’Express in 1956, when the young general was seventy-three.

  “The mood in the salon changes with Chanel’s, as if it were the court of Louis XIV,” wrote The New York Times in 1964. Chanel employee Marie-Hélène Marouzé recalled an atmosphere of “terror.” Actress Jeanne Moreau remembered visiting rue Cambon and finding Chanel “[like a] spider in her web, magnificent … a royal princess.”

  “Many people feared her,” according to former model Delphine Bonneval. “[When they knew she was about to arrive] the entire studio staff would stand at attention, hands on the seams of their trousers, like in the army.”

  Whether general, dictator, princess, or the Sun King himself, Chanel consistently inspired comparisons with leaders of a distinctly non-democratic kind—the sort growing more powerful throughout interwar Europe. Like them, she ruled alone, demanding absolute authority. Chanel’s longtime assistant Lilou Marquand recalled, “Mademoiselle put herself on a par with heads of state. She thought it was a pity that world leaders did not consult her.” Describing her own career to Paul Morand, Chanel referred without irony to her “life as a dictator, success and solitude.”

  Like all charismatic dictators, Chanel had mastered her relationship to the crowd. But she did not need to stage huge rallies. Her crowds of women amassed themselves voluntarily all over the world, gathered together by fashion. Between 1923 and 1938, the Nazi Party convened annually for the Nuremberg rallies with their vast hordes of identically dressed participants. The year 1939 saw the biggest gathering of Italian fascist women, when seventy thousand uniformed female forces marched in Rome, an occasion that historian Victoria de Grazia has called a “[reconciliation] of fascist military aesthetics and female fashion consciousness.” During those same years, Chanel cultivated her own following of clones. Throughout Europe and America, hundreds of thousands of women were striving daily to look like Coco, dress like Coco, smell like Coco, live like Coco, and wear Coco’s own mystical symbol on their bags, scarves, jackets, and belts—that double-C insignia, created only one year after Hitler appropriated the swastika as his emblem.

  Coco understood that as much as fashion is the most intimate of art forms, it is also the most public. Fashion borrows its shape from the
individual bodies that wear it. A dress is but lifeless fabric until it is granted warmth and motion by the woman wearing it. Yet at the same time fashion lends shape to a group, stamping a collective visual “signature” on the world it encompasses, creating the look of a street, a city, a nation. Chanel grasped this essential paradox. Unlike any couturier before or since, she could tempt women to buy her clothes (and the many imitations of them) by persuading them that personal elegance could be found in mass uniformity. In Coco’s eyes, crowds held a strange beauty, which she described quite philosophically to Paul Morand:

  [No one] understands the concept of the mass. What makes the beauty of the herbaceous border [spoken in English] in an English garden, is the mass; one begonia, one chrysanthemum, one delphinium, isolated, have nothing sublime about them. But twenty feet deep, this floral unit becomes something magnificent. “But that takes all originality away from a woman,” [some might say]. Wrong: women keep their individual beauty by participating in a group. Take a chorus-line dancer in a music hall, isolate her from the rest and she’s a hideous puppet; put her back in her row and not only will she regain all her qualities, but, through comparison with her fellow dancers, her own personality will stand out.

  Her aesthetic appreciation of “the mass” was surely authentic, but her claim that it enhanced “originality” was disingenuous at best—although it remains one of the party lines promoted by the Maison Chanel. Employees there tend to speak of the way Chanel style “brings out each woman’s individuality.” It may be true that the very sameness of the style does highlight the personal qualities of the diverse women wearing it. But that was not Chanel’s primary concern. On the contrary, she consciously intended to create a world of replicas, perfectly aware that the more simulacra of herself she created, the more original she would seem. She acknowledged this plan overtly—and with considerable lyricism—when speaking with Louise de Vilmorin:

  As a child I had only two dresses. Perhaps this is why I created so many later on, all conceived by me. As a child, I had only one shadow, then I became a woman whose own shadow, for thirty years, burst forth from her, thousands of times, via those thousands of dresses worn by other women. There was an era when one had to be “Chanel.” A Chanel dress, or more precisely, the Chanel dress, seemed to have talismanic power, which could absolutely control [one’s] destiny. My charm was perhaps that I resembled no one else.… This charm or privilege compelled a great many women to want to look like me and marked them all with the same appearance, while this repetition of my own fantasy left me alone in my exceptionalism.

  By the late 1930s, Chanel had made her fantasy come true. By dint of the nearly magical power of the clothes she called “talismanic” (the word reminding us of Coco’s superstitious, mystical side), she could indeed see her own shadow cast by thousands of other women. “She is the image of what she has created,” wrote a journalist for Marianne in 1937. Chanel’s passion for self-replication remained undimmed throughout her life. She took great pleasure, for example, in outfitting in identical light gray Chanel suits the 130 women sent by France as guides for the 1961 Moscow Expo. “She couldn’t believe that any woman would want to look any way except the way she looked,” recalled famed fashion editor Carmel Snow.

  Women no longer exist, all that’s left are the boys created by Chanel.

  —MARQUIS BONI DE CASTELLANE, CELEBRATED PARISIAN DANDY

  “Fashion,” wrote Jean Cocteau in his 1937 profile of Coco, “is a nearly military discipline. It inflicts a uniform.” In Coco’s case, this was more than just a metaphor. From the earliest days of her career, when she coaxed fine ladies into little jersey sailor suits, Coco had drawn inspiration from military styles. Beyond just their clean lines and athletic ease, uniforms attracted Chanel with their aura of power and desirability—the same elements that spoke to men like Walter Schellenberg and Reinhard Spitzy.

  By the interwar period Coco had long established many of the basics that make up the Chanel uniform to this day: skirt suits, slim-fitting blouses, boyish trousers, the signature tweeds and jerseys (made now in her own factories), ropes of costume jewelry, newsboy caps, medallion-like brooches, and, of course, the double-C insignia. And in the later 1930s, with war looming, Chanel’s army-officer style seemed timelier and more pronounced than ever. She featured a number of overtly military-style suits, and went so far as to design red woolen ankle wraps modeled after soldiers’ leggings. Even her designs for day dresses fell in line with this theme, as when she introduced a white canvas linen frock that Vogue likened to a “schoolgirl’s uniform.”

  Chanel military-inspired suits, 1938 and 1939 (illustration credit 10.9)

  More than ever, the Chanel look was simple, sleek, and practical—and much copied by other designers as France grew increasingly somber. In 1939, Marie Claire enumerated the many military trappings popping up on different runways: “brass buttons, epaulets, Scotch caps, even topcoats cut in military manner … [and] English officers’ polished boots.” Even formal wear could incorporate military design elements. In 1937, Chanel produced an elegant evening pantsuit, covered in sequins.

  Beginning in 1936, Chanel passed through a red, blue, and white period, perhaps in solidarity with her political cohort. After outbreaks of antistrike violence, the leftist Popular Front government had cracked down on the protofascist leagues and prohibited their use of emblems and banners. In response, extreme nationalists among the Paris bourgeoisie (a group that included many Chanel intimates) began ostentatiously displaying the French flag and its colors and wearing tricolor rosettes—appropriating these patriotic symbols as signs of resistance to the red flag of the Popular Front. Chanel’s sudden interest in flying the national colors may have represented her contribution to the cause. And surely the tricolor palette reminded her of Paul Iribe, who’d telegraphed his ultra-patriotism by using only these colors for every cover of Le Témoin. In the wake of Iribe’s shocking death, a still-bereft Chanel seemed increasingly to embrace Paul’s politics and extremism, incorporating the absent lover. As Marcel Haedrich observed, “The ideas … of Iribe … comforted her after the explosions … of 1936.”

  Chanel sequined evening trouser suit and blouse, 1937–38 (illustration credit 10.10)

  Subtle military and patriotic touches turned up on Chanel’s 1938 evening gown of red silk chiffon and satin grosgrain. Its tight bodice, fastened with hook-and-eye closures, looked like a short, military jacket, while the red, blue, and white grosgrain ribbon shoulder straps and piping evoked both the French flag and the military decorations that often hang from tricolor ribbons. The motif appeared as well on a 1939 evening dress made for Mona Williams (wife of American millionaire Harrison Williams, with whom Chanel had a flirtation), whose ruffled bolero-like bodice featured tricolor striping floating over a skirt edged in the same pattern—all embellished with rosettes. It’s an unusually “busy” and distracting print for a Chanel gown.

  Just as Chanel was favoring a more spartan and military look, she also seemed, oddly, to start favoring a distinctly different quality: frilly girlishness. From 1935 to 1939, she whipped up a series of uncharacteristically sweet dresses, frothy confections of lace, sequins, and full skirts, often in pastels. A few had flowing semidetached side panels meant to be draped over a woman’s arms as she danced—the sort of fussy encumbrance Coco typically eschewed. The fashion press took note.

  Chanel’s girlish ruffled evening dresses, pattern illustrations from McCall’s Magazine, April, 1935.

  Femme de France magazine described Coco’s 1935 spring collection as being “under the sign of youth and femininity.” In March 1937, Vogue praised the “romanticism” of her “baby dresses”—a term never before applied to Chanel’s typically very grown-up styles. In March 1938, she was lauded for putting “sugar and spice in the Paris collections,” and later that year a white tulle Chanel dress trimmed with “baby lace bows”—suitable perhaps for a debutante ball—was crowned “glamour dress of the season.” Even some day wear
started prettying up, with floral print dresses appearing in 1939, along with little cloche-style silk hats, “smothered with flowers,” prompting Vogue to declare that Chanel had acquired a new “Air of Innocence.”

  Chanel had always leavened her simple styles with outré feminine luxury touches such as lavish gemstone brooches and silk jacket linings in glossy prints. But this was different. She was tampering with the bones of her creations, wandering away from her structural abstemiousness, venturing past “youthful” and into territory bordering on “juvenile.” As if to confirm this new attraction to girlishness, Coco herself took to wearing a startling and incongruous accessory for a woman over fifty: a big floppy satin bow tied around her hair. What accounts for this turn of events?

  Claude Delay refers to this bow as “the ribbon of her past” (le ruban de son passé), a wonderful locution conjuring both the hair ribbon Coco might have worn as a schoolchild and the almost mythological image of a ribbon made of time itself, like the threads of destiny spun by the three Fates.

  Delay was onto something. Having lost her only fiancé, facing the possibility of another war, Chanel took refuge in a wistful melancholy, a nostalgia for a younger, less dangerous time. She had sat out the last war secure in Deauville, in love with Boy Capel, designing whimsical sailor outfits. Now, twenty-five years later, she was far too established and mature to ignore the coming cataclysm, and too solitary to find refuge in anyone’s arms. Bouncing between two opposing stylistic modes—cream puff and soldier girl—Coco’s designs from this period suggest a conflicted inner state.

  Yet these two stylistic genres are not as different as they seem. Both are about defying death. With the sweet dresses and her big bow, Chanel was thumbing her nose at age and other grim matters, digging her heels into lighthearted girlhood. (Chic as she was, she managed never to look ridiculous in that bow.) Her military style, too, crafted of sturdy wools, suggested a defense against death, evoking the protective, masculine force of the army repelling a murderous invader. Both styles, moreover, held a woman’s sexuality somewhat at bay.