Mademoiselle Page 31

  The nuns at her orphanage would surely have approved of Chanel’s modest clothes, but more than her Catholic upbringing may have motivated Coco’s sexually muted style. Downplaying the body may also have begun as a form of self-defense for Coco, a way to deflect sexual menace. After all, until at least her midtwenties, Chanel lived a life of extreme vulnerability: She was a pretty young girl, with neither money nor family to protect her. Surely during these early, precarious years, Chanel fell prey to the wrong sort of masculine attention, whether violent or merely menacing, and surely she considered how best to guard against it—including dressing unobtrusively.

  An anecdote from Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie—dating to the late 1930s, when Chanel’s work grew especially modest and androgynous—confirms that Coco indeed imagined clothes as sexual protection. In the summer of 1938, after vacationing with Coco at La Pausa, the twelve-year-old Gabrielle needed a traveling outfit for the train ride home to Lyon. Always generous, “Auntie Coco” suggested a shopping expedition to Monte Carlo. The girl grew baffled, though, when Chanel steered her to the boys’ department of a local haberdashery: “[Coco] chose … grey flannel trousers and a garnet-red [sweater], all quite chic but a bit surprising, as in those days, twelve-year-old girls didn’t ever wear trousers. ‘People look at you in a dirty way on trains,’ [Coco] explained. ‘Dressed like this you’ll be decent.’… My aunt was always very strict with me.”

  We have here a partial explanation for Chanel’s trademark boyish style: Masculine attire offered not only physical freedom and ease of movement, but a way to fend off male aggression. It’s sexual armor.

  Through the 1930s, even her fragrance business—the real source of her wealth—kept in step with this male/military theme, reflecting the times. In 1936, she and Ernest Beaux introduced Cuir de Russie (Russian Leather), a woman’s perfume marketed with a masculine twist, via advertising featuring romanticized military images and other gender-bending details. A lengthy advertorial in Votre Beauté magazine for Cuir de Russie waxed positively Tolstoy-esque:

  Cuir de Russie evokes old billfolds forgotten in drawers Leather is one of the most luxurious scents in the world, conjuring well worn gloves, richly bound books, soldiers’ dress boots … big armchairs.… It conjures the dashing officer packing his bags … Imperial Russia and the grand old hotels of Moscow, built for love and the good life, where Grand-Dukes drank French champagne.… It conjures old thatched cottages in far-flung corners of the Ukraine.… Cuir de Russie is a perfume for the slightly masculine brunette, the one who always wears a suit, even at Maxim’s at midnight, one of those women who play poker and draw out of their fine leather bags the cash they’ve lost at the gaming table, separating banknotes from the love letters and stock certificates that scent the bills with their sharp, slightly savage fragrance, the scent of polished leather.

  The prose here condenses much of Coco’s own cinematic life into a paragraph. Those in the know would recognize the clues: ghosts of Chanel’s former lovers—dashing officers, Russian grand dukes; money in casual abundance, and glamorous nightlife. And the heroine at the center of this romantic tableau? An androgynous brunette in a suit. As ever, Coco plays a dual role, both creator and ideal customer. But in this case, something else happens: The idealized woman is practically a man. Cuir de Russie does not promise to help women attract Russian dukes or dashing officers in leather boots, but to help them become more like these alluring heroes. The perfume promises to endow women with the scent of manhood and, by extension, the privileges and protections it brings: wealth, nobility, travel, gambling, sex without shame or vulnerability (in hotels “built for love”), and military might. The message was simple: Wear the Chanel uniform—which includes the perfume—and step into this Cococentric fantasy of modern womanhood.

  Chanel’s “uniform,” moreover, included more than just clothes and accessories. It included also those intangible, unbuyable elements that telegraphed “Coco” and her garçonne appeal: the bobbed hairstyle, the suntan, and—crucially—the “Chanel” body, modeled on her own—youthful, athletic, and boyish, without which nothing else looked right. Even into her old age, Chanel was fiercely proud of her fitness, often inviting friends to confirm for themselves the firmness of her tiny derriere.

  And here once more, Chanel was treading on the fascists’ aesthetic territory. Their ideal being, intended for mass reproduction, was a sleekly dressed, sun-bronzed, disciplined athlete-soldier; so was Coco’s. If, in its association with physical perfection and flawless surfaces, the fascist (particularly, the Nazi) avatar suggested a gay or effeminate aesthetic (as many critics have noted), Chanel’s imagined ideal featured a complementary tinge of androgynous, even lesbian chic—a look reminiscent of the 1920s flapper and still associated in the 1930s with independent, sexually ambiguous women.

  And here lies the key to Chanelism’s paradoxical relationship to fascism. While Chanel’s lifestyle may seem to conjure the dangerous femme moderne, so vilified in fascist propaganda, Chanelism actually inducted millions into a kind of parallel army, stamping them with an aesthetic image, not of the ideal fascist woman, but of the ideal fascist man. Even as Chanelism countermanded principles of traditional womanhood as preached by the fascists, it simultaneously led women marching in lockstep to the aesthetic template of fascist masculinity, creating what amounts to an odd mirroring, the “fascist look” for men through the looking glass of women’s fashion. As it turns out, the parallels between Chanelism and the fascist aesthetic universe proved deep and numerous.

  The many interdependent components of Chanel style added up to what was called her “Total Look”: an English term coined by the American press and adopted by the French to describe her revolutionary approach to fashion. Other designers had dabbled in accessories and jewelry (Poiret had even created furniture), but only Chanel achieved this kind of “totality” of vision, raising fashion to the status of an all-encompassing worldview, a Weltanschauung. French film star Romy Schneider understood this: “One adores [Chanel style] or one rejects it in its entirety. Because it is a coherent logical whole, ‘ordered’ in the sense of ‘Doric order’ or ‘Corinthian order,’ there is a ‘Chanel order.’ With its own reasons, rules, and regulations.”

  To find an analogy for Chanelism, in all its classical totality, Schneider turned to ancient Greece, to the Doric and Corinthian architectural orders. (Nazi intellectual Alfred Rosenberg specifically cited the Doric people for having “protected the [Aryans’] creative blond blood.”) In its own way, Chanel’s fashion revolution created a Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete mode of living, dressing, and looking that resembled a secular, aesthetic, nationalistic religion over which she reigned. Both Germany and Italy had failed in their attempts to standardize women’s fashion and to create an aesthetic identity that appealed to modern European women. Coco, however, had managed it all on her own. She achieved same-ification, the fashion equivalent of Gleichschaltung.

  Like a charismatic fascist leader, Chanel founded her totalizing vision upon an origin myth, the story that unified her much-publicized life of luxury, her design universe, and the childhood she’d manufactured for herself. Gradually, as her personal life diminished, that glamour-girl myth seemed to overtake Chanel completely.

  A 1934 profile in Fashion Arts magazine nicely outlined the Chanel myth, including a list of Coco’s “typical” activities so extravagant and clichéd that the article reads like a parody: “Riding to hounds in the forest of Compiègne, lunching in the sunlit gardens of her villa at Roquebrune, a brilliant hostess in the spacious majesty of her great eighteenth century house in the Faubourg St Honoré, entertaining the smartest of women, imposing diplomats and international wits, Chanel is a true woman of the world.” It sounded like satire, but it was all accurate. Chanel had seen to it that her life was indistinguishable from—fused with—the romance novels she’d loved as a child. It was this fusion of herself to her myth that she was really selling.

  A 1937 advertisement for Chanel No. 5 expl
icitly invoked Coco’s personal life as a template for other women’s fantasies. Accompanied by a photograph of Chanel lounging at the Ritz, the highly theatrical ad read: “Madame Gabrielle Chanel is above all an artist in living. Her dresses, her perfumes are created with a faultless instinct for drama. Her perfume #5 is like the soft music that underlies the playing of a love scene. It kindles the imagination; indelibly fixes the scene in the memories of the players.” The message was simple: Chanel’s existence was a performance for which one could buy a ticket, not to sit in the audience, but to step onto the stage and get in on the act. Chanel’s personal life was as much for sale as the perfume. To this day, Chanel boutiques all over the world are built as exact replicas of Coco’s apartment, inviting customers to play at reincarnating the mythic heroine.

  Coco’s myth, of course, was born of her deep yearning to be seen and known, to belong. Although Chanel had always been independent, until Iribe’s death in 1935, she still believed she might find stability or belonging as someone’s wife. When that hope died on a Riviera tennis court, Chanel refocused all her energy on honing her iconic status. By creating her own cult, she could knit herself a group that she could not only join, but rule. In a rare moment of candor, Chanel told Louise de Vilmorin: “A loveless childhood developed in me a violent need to be loved. This need … explains, I think, my whole life.… I consider my success as proof of love, and I like to think that, when people love what I create, they are loving me as well, loving me through my creations.” Such was the indirect and impersonal human relationship for which Chanel settled: the love of customers for the commodities they purchased.

  Photo accompanying a 1937 advertisement for Chanel No. 5, depicting Chanel in her Ritz apartment (illustration credit 10.12)

  Following her habit of understanding her life in terms of French nationality, Coco explained to Vilmorin her long-standing sense that her humble roots undermined her French identity, causing her a kind of national anomie: “In France, an unknown foreign woman is never suspect … but for Frenchwomen it is not the same: one must be known in order to be recognized. That was not my case.” Her solution to this problem of French anonymity was simple: “I wanted to escape and become the center of a universe of my own creation instead of staying in the margins or even becoming part of the universe of other people.”

  In this, she succeeded admirably, translating her “universe” into a buyable luxury commodity. Fashion theorist Gilles Lipovetsky lays out the process necessary for establishing a luxury brand: “The creation of a luxury brand … [requires] building a myth. It is through references to a mythified past, to origin legends, that great [luxury] brands are created. Luxury is nothing … until it manages to recast its perishable goods in the ‘timeless’ realm of myth.” This describes precisely how Chanel founded her empire.

  Lipovetsky also illuminates just how much Chanel’s creation of her luxury brand resembled the fascist project (this despite the fascists’ ostensible rejection of capitalist consumption). In both cases, nationalist fervor merged with a deliberately manufactured myth. Both offered an accessible kind of glory and belonging, democratic elitism, created via cults of personality and the canny use of branding, identification, uniforms, and magical symbols. Both lay claim to the creation of a new, revolutionary kind of being: the “fascist man” and the Chanel woman. And both beckoned followers with the trappings of aristocracy—insignia, medals, uniforms—stripped of exclusionary requirements, creating an aristocracy of nation. Finally, while the requirement of noble birth had been explicitly obviated by both, in both cases a new demand replaced it: that of youth and physical fitness.

  Just when much of Europe, including France, felt most adrift, searching precisely for new national identities, Chanel offered women a story of community and identity, a virtual nationality of fashion. From the 1920s through the dawn of World War II, a new kind of crowd was forming in Germany, Italy, and France—drawn to the charismatic leaders Hitler, Mussolini, and Marshal Pétain, who all wove myths around themselves and their nations to attract and keep followers.

  Like those men, Chanel was a charismatic leader offering an uplifting story, a story of glory by association. Just as she did routinely with the environments of her lovers and friends, Chanel absorbed and synthesized her political environment. Coming of age professionally just as those new mass movements took shape, she channeled her talents into a version of such a movement, which was heavily inflected by the beliefs and iconography of fascism, to which she was deeply attracted.

  Coco may not have intended this to happen, despite her own right-wing, pro-Nazi worldview. Yet her fashion revolution wound up echoing and even, perhaps, abetting the social and psychological tendencies necessary to any mass political movement rooted in exclusionism, racism, fervent nationalism, and myth.

  The Chanel revolution operated, then, on two distinct, seemingly contradictory levels. Unquestionably, it created a modernist, freeing, sexually exhilarating universe of desire and consumption for women. Both Chanel’s independent personal life and her unfettered designs seemed to bespeak a progressive, even feminist worldview—a politics completely at odds with the retrograde vision of womanhood endorsed by the protofascists. Yet at the same time, Chanel’s universe mirrored with startling precision many of the tenets and techniques of fascism—its nostalgia for a lost (or nonexistent) noble past, its democratic elitism, its creation of a secular religion, its insistence on athleticism and fitness, its glorification of youth, and even its dependence upon a cult celebrity figure. But—and herein lies the crucial element that renders the apparent contradiction possible—the fascist vision reflected in Chanelism was largely the version marketed for men, not for women.

  Chanel had managed a historically unique trick: She succeeded in embodying the masculinist ideals of fascism while turning them into a liberating worldview for women. And just as Germany and Italy were devoting themselves to blotting out all traces of French influence in their fashion, Chanel was busy inventing a design universe that jibed perfectly with fascist ideology while also being inextricably bound to French identity.

  It just may be, therefore, that Coco Chanel and her free-spirited fashions came along at exactly the right time to provide women—especially in France—with an alternate route to the manipulations of fascism, an ostensibly emancipatory worldview that seemed an appealing antidote to constraining sexism and reactionary politics, while achieving nonetheless the psychological goals of fascism. The high modernist style of Chanelism must be classed, finally, with the other modernist movements that coexisted with and even furthered the aims of fascism, all of which participate in what Roger Griffin calls “a complex causal nexus … [that] relates the strands of modernism concerned with aesthetic and social hygiene to the regime that attempted to enact the Nazis’ eugenic and genocidal projects of Europe’s purification.”

  Chanel never overtly acknowledged the deep parallels between her own revolution and the rise of fascism. She did not need to. The world she’d built around herself, her friends, lovers, lifestyle, and fashions had re-created a fascist universe in microcosm.

  I was the instrument of Destiny to effect a necessary cleansing operation.

  —COCO CHANEL

  Sustained romantic love had eluded Coco since the loss of Paul Iribe, but at the end of the decade another Spaniard in Paris drew Chanel into the last erotic partnership she would have with an artist: Catalan sculptor Apel-les Fenosa. Handsome, driven, and possessed of an arresting dark-eyed gaze, Fenosa was superbly talented, only erratically solvent, and a homeless refugee—a combination that proved highly attractive to Chanel. Like Iribe and Reverdy, Fenosa was an artist she could both subsidize and romance—an intriguing but seemingly controllable man. Their affair would last about a year, and while it followed some classic patterns for Chanel, it also cast light on how much she had changed.

  Like Chanel, Fenosa had grown up an outsider, although they were poles apart politically. His progressive parents (“green anarchists
” he called them) ran a hotel and vegetarian restaurant in Barcelona. “It was odd,” he recalled. “I was a vegetarian until I was twenty, which made me see myself as very different, as if I were a Muslim.” (In fact, Fenosa had cause to believe he might be of Jewish descent.) Apel-les was different physically, too—weak and of uncertain health. A childhood bout of encephalitis had left him with a permanent tremor in his left hand, but this handicap only strengthened his determination to become a sculptor.

  Apel-les Fenosa in his studio (illustration credit 11.1)

  Apel-les enjoyed defying expectations. Solitary and contrary, he had begun running away from home as a young child. At five, he was gone for three days before his frantic parents discovered him on the docks, being cared for by some kindly sailors. Fenosa turned out to have an innate talent for finding “rescuers”—people who would bail him out of trouble. This ability served him well when, at fourteen, he announced his refusal to take over the family hotel business and found himself thrown out of the house by his enraged father. Left penniless, Apel-les was forced to eke out his own existence, relying on odd jobs, generous friends, and the secret help of his more sympathetic mother. “I just threw myself into the adventure. I had no plans.… I still don’t know how I managed it,” he recalled. Yet manage he did, even enrolling from 1913 to 1918 at the Escola d’Arts i Oficis, where he studied sculpture and drawing.