Mademoiselle Page 39

  On February 12, 1947, Christian Dior’s first collection hit the Paris fashion scene like a supernova. His ultrafeminine dresses, sculpted of dozens of yards of expensive fabric, bade a defiant farewell to wartime sacrifice and compromise, seeming to herald both a return to traditional femininity and a renewed prosperity. “Monsieur Dior, you’ve given us such a New Look!” exclaimed fashion editor Carmel Snow in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, and the term stuck. The style that harked back so clearly to an earlier century would be known, paradoxically, as “the New Look.”

  Fashion insiders were entranced. “A Paris sensation,” hailed American Vogue. The Dior woman was a curvy ship of state, sailing into rooms with a voluminous, swaying skirt held out and away from the body by wide, padded hips—which seemed even wider in contrast with the corseted waist, cinched down to doll-like proportions. Dior dubbed these upside-down flower-skirted pieces his “corolla line.” Boned and shaped bodices (the flowers’ “stems”) held the torso firmly in place, and stiff, padded bras molded breasts into conical shapes, positioned high on the chest. Some dresses even featured drapery in the back that created an unmistakable “bustle effect.” High heels and wide-brimmed hats (or the precariously tilted, tricornered “tambourin” hats) completed the look. Encased in so much armature and fabric, a woman’s body did not actively lend shape to a Dior dress (as it would in a Chanel) so much as passively surrender to it—held captive to a new, hyperbolic femininity.

  It was an oddly perfect metaphor for the period of regression in women’s political freedom in the years just following the Liberation. Although France had finally, in 1945, granted women the right to vote and run for public office, the onset of the Fourth Republic saw the rise of another natalist, or pro-birth, movement, which came with the usual lineup of conservative policies designed to encourage the “feminine mission” of baby making. The war had sent thousands of women venturing into the workplace for the first time, but upon the return of the soldiers, women were being encouraged to quit their jobs, exchange their trousers for dresses, and return home to the urgent task of rebuilding the French population, to producing the “twelve million beautiful babies in ten years” explicitly requested by General de Gaulle in a speech on March 5, 1945.

  Along with its celebration of traditional femininity (with special emphasis on what are sometimes called “childbearing hips”), Dior also bolstered the country’s ailing fashion industry, which had foundered badly since the war. His extravagant New Look proclaimed the return of French luxury and plenty.

  Dior came naturally to his affluent aesthetic. He had been born into wealth (albeit of inelegant provenance—a family fertilizer business), and enjoyed the support of a rich patron, Marcel Boussac, whose investment in the Maison Dior was estimated at 700 million francs.

  An elaborate Dior gown, 1950 (illustration credit 12.3)

  The fashion press welcomed Dior as the couture messiah. He became a household name virtually overnight, the artist of the new female silhouette. Carmel Snow could not resist a military analogy: “Dior saved Paris as Paris was saved in the Battle of the Marne.”

  But though his look was copied at every price point, and bargain shoppers at Ohrbach’s could snap up “petal” dresses for $8.95, the truth was, Dior’s style resisted low-rent imitation. Unlike Chanel, Dior relied on large quantities of expensive fabric, which demanded time-consuming stitchery. Attempts to achieve similar results using inexpensive synthetics sewn by machine resulted in visibly poor-quality garments. His style suited to perfection only those able to pay the highest prices, and in this, offered a compelling defense of real French haute couture, rapidly breathing new life back into the industry. Within two years, a staggering 75 percent of France’s couture exports were Diors, which amounted to fully 5 percent of French export revenues overall.

  The economic symbolism of his work did not escape Christian Dior. “Abundance was still too much of a novelty to reinvent an inverted snobbery of poverty,” he recalled—taking a subtle swipe at Chanel. He also differed markedly with Chanel on the subject of imitations. Coco had loved to see her looks reproduced everywhere, but Dior had no patience for democracy in fashion. He strove openly to keep his couture exclusive, and in 1948, went so far as to prohibit legally the use of his name on any reproductions retailing below $69.95 for dresses, or $135 for coats (or approximately $694 and $1,260 respectively in contemporary currency). Like Chanel’s long-ago love Paul Iribe, Dior subscribed to a patriotism of opulence. “In an epoch as somber as ours, luxury must be defended inch by inch,” he declared.

  Over the next decade, Dior produced some of couture’s most gorgeous clothes. Keeping silhouette his primary focus, he drew and redrew the outline of the female figure, moving from the “corolla” look to the “Zigzag” (with a pronounced décolletage); the “Oval” (spotlighting rounded hips); the high-necked “Tulip”; and more—all of them crafted of the finest materials, tailored for maximum drama. He used jeweled beads, mink, and gold lamé. He created billowy “leg o’mutton” sleeves, vast skirts too wide to fit into taxis, and ultra-narrow “hobble skirts” (a turn-of-the-century style), which made walking nearly impossible. This opulent if impractical vision set the tone for couture, and Jacques Fath, Pierre Balmain, Cristóbal Balenciaga, and other designers produced similar visions of Cinderella glamour in the late forties and early fifties.

  Dior expanded his business at an unheard-of rate. By 1957, his sales grossed more than $15 million per year (or the equivalent of $120 million today).

  Of course, not everyone loved Dior. In 1948, in what soon became a famous incident, a group of angry older women dressed in pauper’s rags set upon several younger women wearing Dior, literally ripping the dresses off their bodies—a staged protest against what the older women deemed a disrespectful and shocking waste of materials. With the travails of wartime still fresh in people’s minds, Dior’s excesses felt like a bitter slap in the face to some. Similar sentiments arose in America and Canada, where disgruntled women formed groups with names such as “the Women’s Organization to War on Styles” (or WOWS), and the “League for the Prevention of Longer Skirts,” in an attempt to forestall the new expensive, uncomfortable, and retrograde fashions. In California, one group of shapely provocatrices, dressed only in revealing swimsuits, picketed a dress shop, holding signs with slogans, including “Do we need padding?”

  Chanel felt about ready to join the picket line. She could hardly believe the turn fashion had taken, how far it had strayed from her own vision. “Fashion has become a joke, the designers have forgotten there are women inside the dresses.… Clothes must have a natural shape.” Asked specifically about Dior (whom she’d met when he assisted her back in 1937, on costumes for Cocteau), she exploded, “Dior? He doesn’t dress women, he upholsters them!” Restless, bored, and dismayed at the work of her new Paris colleagues, Coco began thinking about the unthinkable: a return to an active designing career in Paris—a comeback.

  Financial concerns played a role in her considerations—although Chanel later denied this. The latest deal with the Wertheimers had left her quite rich, but in the summer of 1953 Pierre Wertheimer came to the Hôtel Beau Rivage to announce to Coco that, for the first time in thirty years, perfume sales were lagging. While the perfume division was (and remains) the most lucrative arm of the Maison Chanel, its success had always depended partly on the reflected prestige of the couture line and Coco’s personal visibility. But there had been no new Chanel fashions for fourteen years, and Chanel herself had been in exile for nearly a decade. With Coco’s name fading from public consciousness, the brand was losing much of its cachet.

  Coco proposed to Pierre that they market a new fragrance to revive business, but Wertheimer thought the idea too risky. When she accepted his decision without argument, Pierre assumed that Coco intended to remain permanently in retirement. Those who knew her in Switzerland assumed the same thing. They had all misread her completely.

  Chanel seized this moment to act upon her gro
wing intuition that she could do it all again—return to fashion and succeed. It wouldn’t be easy. She was seventy years old, tainted by her Nazi affiliations, and had been off the cultural radar screen for fourteen years. But Coco had always flown the highest when defying expectations. Within a few days of her meeting with Pierre Wertheimer, she returned to the apartment she still kept at the Ritz.

  Her new life would be sparer and more focused than ever before. Knowing she’d need money and having had her fill of “vacationing,” Chanel sold her beloved villa La Pausa. The buyer was literary agent Emery Reves, whose most famous client, Winston Churchill, wound up writing much of his memoirs while relaxing at the house, which he had visited decades ago when Chanel lived there with Westminster.

  Chanel next turned to her friends in America, who had been so useful in her perfume wars with the Wertheimers. She contacted powerful editor Carmel Snow and told her that she was seeking an American manufacturer to reproduce Chanel models for the United States ready-to-wear market. Coco’s business instincts were still sharp. Americans were now the world’s heroes, their economy was booming, and its ready-to-wear industry was growing exponentially—it was the perfect place for her reentry into fashion. As expected, Carmel Snow responded with alacrity. On September 24, 1953, she sent a telegram to Chanel reading in part:

  Know first-class ready-to-wear manufacturer interesting in reproducing your line.… When will your collection be ready?… Happy to help you.

  Chanel responded in a letter drafted with the help of lawyer René de Chambrun, in which she offered her reasons for returning:

  I got the idea it would be fun to go back to work, because work is all my life.… The current climate in Paris in which more and more women are shown collections they cannot afford is pushing me to do something completely different. One of my primary goals is to have an American manufacturer produce a ready-to-wear line on a royalty basis. I feel that this would arouse considerable interest throughout the world. My first collection will be ready on November 1.

  Contacting New York was only part of the plan. Chanel made sure that news of her proposed comeback and of her correspondence with Snow was leaked to Pierre Wertheimer, who, as Coco surely expected, wanted in immediately. In a meeting with Pierre, Chambrun, and Parfums Chanel CEO Robert de Nexon, Coco obtained a financial commitment from the Wertheimers: They agreed to back her new venture, footing 50 percent of all expenses related to her fashion launch. Pierre knew well that a successful Chanel couture collection (and subsequent American copies) would only enhance perfume sales.

  In the late summer of 1953, Chanel plunged back into her working life, reopening two of the dusty, deserted workrooms on the third floor of 31 rue Cambon and renovating the still-functioning perfume boutique below. As part of her new austerity mode, she sold off the adjoining buildings on Cambon that she owned. For reinforcements, she summoned some of her former lieutenants, the women who’d helped run her empire before the war. “Come quickly,” she told them, for she thought they would have no more than ten good years left to work (an underestimate, as it turned out). Lucia Boutet, known as Madame Lucie, was among the first to return to her role as chef de cabine. A plump woman with an authoritarian personality (and rumored to be another of Chanel’s lovers), she knew how to keep things running smoothly and punctually—although some of the models found her overbearing. Madame Lucie had been Chanel’s forewoman on Cambon, and, since the war, had been operating her own couture shop at 18 rue Royale. There, she and a number of former Chanel employees were continuing their mentor’s tradition, turning out two-piece suits in a Chanel-esque style, as well as garments patterned after other couturiers. Madame Lucie leapt at the chance to return to Coco and closed up shop. She did not go alone. Accompanying Madame Lucie were about thirty of her employees, prime among them, Manon Ligeour, who’d also started with Chanel, working for Coco as an apprentice in 1929, at the tender age of thirteen, and working her way up to première.

  In 1946, when Manon had gone to work with Madame Lucie, she took with her some of the seamstresses left unemployed when Chanel had closed her doors. Now these same women agreed to work once more for the House of Chanel. Their return testified to both their personal loyalty and their trust in the durable magic of the Chanel name. “We were all greatly excited,” Manon told Pierre Galante. “Mademoiselle had such guts!”

  It posed no difficulty to hire middle-aged seamstresses and fitters whose careers had begun in the 1920s or ’30s. Hiring runway models was another matter. Chanel needed a new crop of beautiful young women on whose bodies she would sculpt her designs directly. She knew the look she wanted—regal, confident, poised, refined, and not unlike Coco herself. “It was required that we resemble her a bit somehow,” said one former model. Professional models would not do. In secrecy, Coco began hiring the debutante daughters of France’s finest families, wealthy and titled young ladies like Princess Odile de Croy; Countess Mimi d’Arcangues; and the beautiful eighteen-year-old Marie-Hélène Arnaud, whose father was a director of the Rothschild Bank. Forty years before, the grandparents of girls like these would have been reluctant to acknowledge Chanel in the street.

  Chanel had not lost her command of public relations. She allowed rumors of her return to circulate but refused all press interviews, trusting that she could create more and better buzz by remaining inaccessible. By December 1953, when she formally declared her intention, the fashion press was already writing articles devoted to Chanel. Since she had provided no new information about herself, journalists had to make do with the materials they could find. As a result, coverage consisted largely of old photographs and stories about Chanel as she had been: young, beautiful, and the most important designer in the world. She had, at least for the time being, presented an image of herself preserved in amber, willing the public to remember a Coco untarnished by either age or collaboration. There could have been no better publicity.

  Such brilliant use of the press came at a price, though. By trading on her former reputation, Chanel was raising the ante in her own high-stakes game, inviting expectations perhaps too high to meet. On December 21, 1953, The New York Times announced Chanel’s return in an article proving how high the bar was now set: “Chanel’s re-opening is a real bombshell for the fashion folk, not only because of the nostalgia … but also because … her reappearance makes the big houses more than a little nervous.” With a hint of ressentiment, French journalist Patrice Sylvain evoked the grandeur still attached to Chanel’s name: “The news ran through Paris, Chanel was re-opening!… Chanel, with her legend of lavishness and wealth, her 150 million-franc profits, her fifteen studios, her yachts, her châteaus, and the magic of her expensive adventures, all of that was rising up out of a past still recent yet unbelievably far away.”

  At the start of her career, Chanel had contended with the rigid class hierarchy of France, along with obstacles to professional women too overwhelming to be contained within the modern term “sexism.” Now, new hurdles awaited that were scarcely less daunting. Could Chanel overcome her political past, her advanced age, and the ghost of her own former glory?

  No one knew what to expect of Chanel’s new collection, but everyone clamored for an invitation to her first runway show, which promised to be the biggest event of the season. As she always had in the past, Chanel scheduled the show for the fifth day of the month, five having always been her lucky number. When the big day—February 5, 1954—came (several months later than Chanel had predicted to Carmel Snow), there were not enough gilt chairs to accommodate the hordes waiting in front of 31 rue Cambon—a mix of elegant former clients, assorted countesses, artist friends, and the entire international fashion press.

  Louise de Vilmorin was there, as was Luchino Visconti, who’d brought the beautiful young actress Annie Girardot. Former Ballets Russes dancer Boris Kochno made an appearance. Many more tried to make their way into the overcrowded downstairs salon. “Two thousand people wanted absolutely to get in,” recalled model Liane Viguié. “
People were being trampled and pushed, some fell down the stairs, a baroness was wounded. They had to call the police to prevent a riot. Some of Mademoiselle’s older clients couldn’t even find a seat. It was frightening.” Not even high priestesses of the fashion world Carmel Snow and Marie-Louise Bousquet could snag a chair; they were forced to perch on the last two unoccupied steps of the famous winding staircase—which had been commandeered as an impromptu bleacher section. George Salou, editor in chief of L’Officiel de la Couture, strained to see from his place in fashion Siberia—the eighth row. Together, all craned their necks, looking for Mademoiselle at the top of those stairs, her customary surveillance point in years past. But Coco wasn’t there. Counting on the invisibility trick that had worked so well to that point, Chanel was hiding upstairs watching, but unseen.

  Finally, a hush fell over the crowd as the first model made her appearance, wearing a cardigan suit of black jersey christened—in Chanel’s customary manner—with a number instead of a name. The model wearing this simple outfit carried the small card that identified it—this was Chanel’s only method for labeling garments; she offered no printed programs for her runway shows, unlike most other designers. Although the cardigan suit was the first offering of the day, it bore the title “Number Five”—again that lucky number.

  But Coco’s magic numeral had lost its power. The audience quickly understood that Chanel was offering nothing new. The show featured 130 items, including dozens of simple skirt suits in wool jersey and tweed (with slim skirts and square cardigan jackets), paired with blouses of white piqué or printed silk that matched the suits’ linings, along with slender coats in neutral tones, several simple black dresses (one with sequins) with slightly flared skirts, and a few sheath dresses. In short, Chanel seemed to have put together a retrospective of her work from the 1930s.