Mademoiselle Page 41
These years also saw Chanel improving upon the construction of her designs. She had always fashioned her garments to maximize comfort and the wearer’s range of motion. Now she continued that tradition with subtle new details that added to the “impeccable” look of a Chanel. In 1956, for example, Chanel started inserting elasticized waistbands into her blouses. These invisible strips of elastic anchored the blouse in place, keeping it from riding up or ballooning unevenly over the tops of skirts. In 1957, a new Chanel skirt appeared whose deep pleats began low on the hips, emerging from a tapered, flat waist. With this, Coco had solved the fashion conundrum of how to create an elegant, tapered skirt that is nonetheless comfortable and easy to walk in. She had produced pleated skirts as far back as the 1920s, but this one represented a distinct improvement.
Pleated skirts are comfortable and conducive to strolling, but can add unattractive bulk around the hips and waist (think of Catholic schoolgirls’ uniforms). Narrow skirts (like Dior’s “hobble skirt”) have a slimming effect, but can be tight and hinder walking. But Chanel’s inventive skirt managed to slim the hips and waist while allowing for a longer stride—her deep pleats providing a generous amount of room in which the leg could move forward.
The skirt was an instant hit, and manufacturers at every level scurried to run up copies of it. Few if any knockoffs, though, could re-create the elegance of the original, which depended entirely on Chanel’s meticulous craftsmanship. An article offering advice on how to spot a fake Chanel skirt explained that “A real Chanel [skirt] ‘falls’ to give the walk a supple allure, at once dignified and dancing, which is inimitable.” Princess Hélène Obolensky, who’d worked as a personal assistant to Chanel, elaborated on the same theme: “The purpose of the skirt tailoring is to minimize the hips, flatten the back, and, by lifting the skirt line in front, add a graceful swinging stance to the body.”
That graceful swing propelled Chanel through the 1950s. And while she regained her footing in France, it would always be America to which she owed the success of her comeback. As a child Coco had imagined a father making his fortune off in America; now she was living out that dream for herself.
America formally hailed Chanel as its conquering fashion hero on September 9, 1957, when Stanley Marcus bestowed upon her the Neiman Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion, also known as “the fashion Oscar.” Chanel flew to Dallas to receive the golden plaque, which bore the following citation:
To the great innovator who emancipated the feminine silhouette … who was the first to recognize that the casualness of the twentieth century must be reflected in the clothes women wear … who elevated the status of costume jewelry to a position of fashionable respectability … who was the first to bring perfume from the chemists’ shop to the couturier’s boutique … who was never afraid of being copied … who as an ex-champion had the courage to stage a successful fashion comeback in 1954, whose past accomplishments have had a tremendous influence on present fashions … to Chanel for her contributions … past, present, future.
Coco groused her way through Texas. She complained about the long lines of people waiting to shake her hand, and about the chilly air-conditioned rooms. She disparaged Americans’ excessive casualness, their lack of elegance: “They don’t understand luxury, real luxury. A country that understands only comfort is screwed!” But in photographs from that day, Chanel’s smile as she accepted the award from Stanley Marcus looks genuine. Coco was surely thrilled by all the accolades. She knew her second career was in some ways even more astonishing than her first. And it was precisely Americans’ love of “comfort”—the very quality she disdained—that made it all possible.
One year earlier, the recipient of the Neiman Marcus award had been that apostle of discomfort, Christian Dior, the man who’d seemed to herald Chanel’s obsolescence. Now just one year later (and only three years after returning to work) Chanel had knocked her rival off his pedestal. America was confirming the rightness of her vision, declaring her once more the priestess of modernity. Dior himself would pass away one month after Chanel’s trip to Dallas, in October 1957, to be succeeded by the young prodigy Yves Saint Laurent.
The press coverage of her trip to the States (which included stops in New York City and New Orleans) was one long love letter. Announcing the award on its front page, France-Soir called Coco “the magician of French couture.” The New York Times called her return to work “the most incredible comeback in fashion history” and lauded her as the “ageless designer whose young look is America’s favorite.” Brendan Gill and Lillian Ross declared in The New Yorker that Chanel’s “designs have begun to affect women’s styles (and apparently their minds) every bit as powerfully as her designs of thirty odd years ago did.” And like so many other journalists, Gill and Ross took note of Coco’s youthful vigor and appeal: “At 74, Mademoiselle Chanel is sensationally good looking with dark brown eyes, a brilliant smile, and the unquenchable vitality of a twenty-year-old.”
Chanel’s appearance and youthfulness, which she’d likely helped along surgically, were hardly incidental to her comeback. Unlike virtually any other designer, Coco had created a persona inextricably woven into her designs, infusing her clothes with the glamorous narrative of her life. Wearing a Chanel had always offered the promise of acquiring a bit of Coco’s own charisma. Very few women of over seventy, though, could have hoped to resurrect themselves as charismatic objects of emulation. But, at least for a time, Chanel pulled it off. She amazed observers by still telegraphing the youthful energy and appeal that had been her calling card. (“At 75, she is still a stunning woman,” wrote The New York Times in 1958.)
Chanel’s vitality, freedom, and athletic allure meshed perfectly with America’s image of itself, especially after World War II. The United States was the world’s hero now, the dominant force of roaring economic power and commercial influence, a young, can-do country unfettered by Old World rules. Somehow, Chanel’s long-standing aesthetic—while born in pre–World War I Europe and long the quintessence of Frenchness—now seemed the inevitable, nearly Whitmanian expression of the American ethos. Chanel, the elderly collaborator barely back from exile, was gone, metamorphosed into an American heroine who made it all seem perfectly natural. “The youthful philosophy of dress originated by the French designer has come to be taken as the classic American look,” explained The New York Times.
Vogue even connected Chanel with the American women’s suffrage movement: “She was the first fashion naturalist, the first to design clothes with the freedom and understated elegance Americans like best.… Chanel began thinking that way in 1919, the year … that American women gained the vote.… Chanel’s clothes have a natural immediate appeal to American women.”
Chanel had not needed to do anything specific to appeal to Americans. Her success in the States required no publicity stunt, no special rejiggering of her look. On the contrary, there had always been something latently American in the Chanel aesthetic, in its unfussy, athletic version of femininity, its blend of democracy and elitism, and—especially—in its inherent myth of self-creation. Chanel style had always been a Horatio Alger story writ in fashion, the promise that elegance and status were within everyone’s reach, and could be put on like a well-fitting jacket.
Chanel owed her American redemption not to the high-priced couture she created for socialites, but to her most practical, most reproducible, day- and sportswear: suits, sweaters, and easy dresses of tweed or jersey. These items compose what might be called the fashion unconscious of postwar America, the elements that held visceral appeal for women. “Her return collection was just what American women wanted,” wrote one fashion journalist. “The essence of Chanel … [is] the classic American look,” declared another. “Any woman … knows the Chanel signs … the dash, the sense of luxe in the colloquial, the overall sensibleness of the Chanel approach.… American women look marvelous in … Chanel.”
Chanel had always had a genius for absorbing and reflecting back the most desi
rable aesthetic impulses around her. Now, after fourteen years of inactivity, Coco focused on the elements of her style that had the most in common with America’s, mirroring back to American women an idealized, irresistible version of themselves. “See?” she seemed to be saying. “Your taste is instinctively good—it matches mine!” “Most American women know that they owe [Chanel] a debt of gratitude,” pronounced The New York Times.
Thus did Chanel entirely remake herself one last time. As if by sheer intuition, she attached herself to the most powerful ally available, blended into its culture, and then disseminated it around the world. The woman who had tried to help the Axis powers win the war was now squarely on the side of the victorious Allied forces. All was forgiven. Or just forgotten.
Yet, however American the Chanel brand increasingly seemed, Chanel herself remained unmistakably French. Ingeniously, she’d found a way to package her francité as a readily accessible attribute for Americans seeking a quick hit of refinement—the fashion equivalent of some other postwar rituals of feminine cultural improvement, like the college girl’s semester in Paris or the housewife’s French cooking class. Now, even more than before her retirement, Chanel represented the face of Parisian chic. And she knew it. “For many Americans,” Coco told Paul Morand, “France is me!”
Chanel’s prestige continued to grow throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Hollywood stars flocked to her studio, among them Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, Jane Fonda, and Elizabeth Taylor—seeking to add refinement to their splashy American celebrity. Fonda was brought by her then husband, French director Roger Vadim, who was trying to lend her French cachet. And while Chanel appreciated Elizabeth Taylor’s talent and beauty, she deplored that famously voluptuous figure, which Taylor liked to showcase and Coco felt ruined the line of elegant clothes. French cinema stars also made the pilgrimage to Cambon, including Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Catherine Deneuve, Anouk Aimée, and Brigitte Bardot (brought, like Fonda, by Roger Vadim, to whom she also had a brief marriage).
While Chanel helped young movie stars gain sophistication, she was just as helpful to older clients seeking youthfulness. The magic of Chanel seemed always to grant each group exactly its needed measure of glamour or gravitas. Political wives found, chez Chanel, a uniform that connoted power tempered with femininity. “When my wife dresses in your clothes, I feel reassured,” President Georges Pompidou told Chanel. Madame Claude Pompidou, nearing sixty, looked slim and vital in her Chanels. The young American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy looked more distinguished and polished in hers. The famous raspberry pink wool suit and matching hat worn by Mrs. Kennedy on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination was a Chanel (or a Chanel-approved replica). When she insisted on wearing the blood-spattered outfit throughout the subsequent swearing-in of Lyndon Johnson, the suit became a symbol of Kennedy’s martyrdom and the besmirchment of Camelot.
During these comeback years, Chanel went on to invent some of her most iconic garments, accessories, and details—features that still instantly say “Chanel.” Prime among these is the wool bouclé suit (1954), whose jacket with braided trim—sometimes adorned with Brandenburg, or “frog”-style, closures—declared its clear descendance from the elegant French cavalry uniforms Chanel had observed in her youth.
Other comeback inventions include Chanel’s 1955 quilted leather shoulder bag with the chain link strap and, in 1957, the cap-toed beige and black sling-back pumps, whose black toe area gives the illusion of a smaller foot. Such items were easily copied, and reproductions flooded the market at every price point. “Paris is filled with little Chanels,” declared L’Intransigeant in 1961. Nothing could have pleased Coco more.
Chanel runway show featuring hussar-style suit with “Brandenburg,” or frog-style, closures, 1959 (illustration credit 12.4)
Copying and fashion piracy, though, had long been the bane of the couture industry, and frustrated designers continually sought to thwart this problem. The Maison Dior, for example, required fashion buyers to put down a very steep security deposit (or caution) before viewing collections—money withheld in the event of any illegal copying of the designs seen. But Chanel had no interest in security deposits, or in “security” of any kind. She welcomed copies of her work at all levels. “Fashion should run on the streets,” she told a journalist.
Chanel’s fashion did run on the streets—all over the world. Knockoffs of her suits were sold out of handcarts at weekend flea markets in Europe, and copied in sari material and sold in the bazaars of New Delhi. In Egypt, the Nile-Hilton Hotel of Cairo outfitted its female elevator operators in copies of Chanel suits—substituting blue scarab buttons for the gold ones found on the originals. Coco reveled in this degree of imitation even though it flew directly in the face of many regulations imposed by the Chambre syndicale de la couture, the trade organization founded by Lucien Lelong. Devoted to preventing piracy, the chambre required couturiers to prohibit press photographers at collections, and to grant access only to “trade professionals,” meaning buyers and journalists. Chanel disregarded such regulations and invited not only photographers into her runway shows, but also nontrade visitors, including private dressmakers whose avowed intention was to reproduce Chanel styles for their own customers. Once, she even opened her runway show to a contingent of nuns who directed a sewing workshop, surely recalling her own childhood guardians. On July 25, 1958, Chanel took a formal stand against the association’s constraints and sent a letter of resignation to Raymond Barbas, president of the chambre. Now she was free to disseminate her designs as she saw fit. Inspired by Coco, Hubert de Givenchy and Cristóbal Balenciaga both followed her example and resigned from the chambre, prompting the organization soon after to drop its press embargo.
As in her earlier career, “copying Chanel” meant far more than merely copying specific designs. It meant copying—being like—Coco herself. Even in these elder years, Chanel imposed herself as an icon to be emulated by her customers and, more than ever, by her models and staff. As Coco’s world of friends and intimates dwindled, she seemed to place ever more stringent demands on those near her, becoming increasingly domineering. With no one close enough to check her, she grew into a caricature of herself, both physically and emotionally.
“In the end, we are left with two mythic uniforms from this era,” Claude Delay wrote. “Charlie Chaplin’s and Coco Chanel’s.” It was an astute observation. Especially after the war, the Chanel uniform crystallized into a constellation of instantly recognizable parts: the straw boater; the bouclé, ribbon-trimmed skirt suit; the two-toned pumps; the quilted bag; the piles of pearls. But Chaplin’s look belonged to his “Little Tramp” character, which was distinctly separate from Chaplin the man, offstage. The same could not be said of Coco’s trademark look.
Chanel never “took off” her persona. She would wear the same (usually beige, ribbon-trimmed, bouclé) suit daily for an entire season (sometimes even wearing holes through the elbows). Her signature boater hat remained firmly on her head at all times, even indoors, to disguise her thinning hair, through which patches of her scalp were now visible. Refusing to go gray, she kept her hair an improbable jet-black color, dying it herself—perhaps to keep any coiffeur from seeing the extent of her hair loss. Blue-black bangs emerged from under the brim of that hat, which were either dyed or, as many thought, actually part of a hairpiece sewn into the hatband.
Keeping her slim figure remained paramount to Coco, who ate increasingly lightly and weighed in at about one hundred pounds on her barely five-foot-three frame. But, as often is the case with older people, her thinness started looking like fragility. “She eats nothing,” wrote Cecil Beaton of Chanel, “and one feels it is only her spirit that keeps her going.” As if to compensate for her vanishing body, Coco began using a very heavy hand with makeup. Every day she redrew her sparse eyebrows with the thickest, blackest pencil and colored her wide mouth the deepest red.
Chanel in her apartment, 1956 (illustration credit 12.5)
As Chanel’s personal appearance hardened into extremes, she required ever more confirmation and duplication of her image from her employees. These women, both staff members and models, did not necessarily dislike reproducing Chanel’s style—many, in fact, looked up to her as a fashion icon. But whether they liked it or not, imitation of the boss was a job requirement. “When you had to go see her,” recalled Delphine Bonneval, “you had to be perfectly coiffed and made up, and in your white blouse. I remember one day when [Mademoiselle] was going up the stairs and ran into a model on her way out for lunch whose skirt was too short or something. And she was dismissed.”
When not modeling or preparing for a fitting, the models all wore a kind of uniform, including the same white blouse, beige-and-black Chanel shoes, and a blue or black suit. Many went beyond the call of duty, trying to mimic every distinctive “Coco” detail. Bonneval recalled that she imitated Chanel so well that she became a kind of “pastiche” of her, cutting her hair into bangs, and affecting a straw boater, scarf, cigarette, and pearls. Even outside of work, many of these women remained foot soldiers in Chanel’s army.
“We wore nothing but Chanel,” says Princess Odile de Croy. Manon Ligeour goes further, admitting, “I copied her a lot. I had her style.… I would never have worn something that was not in the Chanel style. I made myself suits in her style.… That way of being able to move, it was unique. The image people had of me on the exterior, my friends, my husband, my son, it was me in a Chanel suit.” Born to poor parents—a chimney sweep and a laundress—Ligeour felt that she owed her escape from those humble roots to her association with Chanel, to her successful projection—and internalization—of a Chanelified image: “In my life as a woman, she [Chanel] changed many things. She granted me social ascension.”
Chanel’s stylist and assistant Lilou Marquand makes the same implicit connection between her own faithful imitation of Chanel’s style and the profound changes Marquand experienced as a result of her career with Mademoiselle: