Coco Chanel (13 page)

With a dressmaker already working at 21 rue Cambon, the law forbade Gabrielle to do the same thing. (Manufacturing knitwear and jerseys would get around this prohibition because they were not counted as dresses.) It is said that Gabrielle merely chanced upon this site, but our little milliner had in fact chosen it with great care, fully aware of its prime position. It was at the heart of that quarter encompassing the rue de la Paix, rue Royale, rue Saint-Honoré and the streets leading off and around the magnificent place Vendôme. For many years, this Parisian district had been the one where the most costly silks, jewels, furs, hats, perfumes and fashions were to be found.

8

As a collective visual statement, fashion is about the appearance of the individual and of the group. It is at once about self-presentation and conformity. Like music, it is improvisation within a structure. As the human condition doesn't appear to respond well to too much repetition, fashion could be described as one of our antidotes to boredom. It must be new, but not too new; novel rather than radically different. A kind of planned spontaneity, it is
applied
art, making use of potentiality. Clothes can change more rapidly than other artifacts; although they are functional, they are
statements
too. Fashion could be described as the cultural genome of clothes.

Writing on fashion appears almost universally to accept the idea that fashion follows power. At the courts of rulers and kings, this was undoubtedly the case. By the seventeenth century, Louis XIV of France had understood perfectly the connection between fashion and power. His dramatic self-presentation was about manipulating clothes as actual and symbolic reflections of the greatest power—in other words, his own. But the idea that fashion always follows power is far too simplistic and is only an approximation of what actually happens. In Gabrielle Chanel's case, the story is more complex and interesting than that.

Over time, the most fashionable rendezvous in Paris had been exclusive or semiprivate. As the nineteenth century wore on, however, its sweeping changes were reflected in the fact that one of the most significant and fashionable places to be “seen” was now on the city's new boulevards—in public, on the streets. Here the populace “treated life as a spectacle . . . and intensely enjoyed their own and everyone else's performance.”
¹

Between 1830 and 1860 alone, Paris almost doubled its population, rising from half a million to almost a million, spreading ever farther outward. And still it grew, and the city's social problems multiplied. After years of division, plots, counterplots, massacres and the raising and breaking down of the barricades, in 1851, the Machiavellian nephew of Napoléon I, Louis Napoléon, led a coup d'état
.
Having hoodwinked the nation, he was soon installed by referendum as Louis Napoléon III, absolute monarch of France.

Over the centuries, many had attempted to organize the chaos of Paris, but when Louis Napoléon took on as his assistant the engineer Georges-Eugène Haussmann, all was set to change. Louis and his accomplice were quintessential representatives of “industrial progress” and saw the hundreds of streets in the city's busy, cramped, ancient quarters as a series of dreadful anachronisms. In an almost messianic urge to drag Paris into the modern industrial world, the two men conceived an unprecedented urban renewal. Haussmann envisaged “the Imperial Rome of our times,” while Louis saw Paris as the modern capital of the world, and a monument to his power.

Beginning as they meant to go on, in one great onslaught, neither the monarch nor Haussmann, calling himself the “demolition artist,” gave a jot about the Parisians' sense of their buildings or their neighborhoods, or that the city's grandeur was found in the densely interwoven layers of its past. For years, as much as one fifth of Paris's workforce was occupied in making continual noise and dust as buildings, streets, whole quarters were ruthlessly torn down and replaced by acres of large, uniform apartment blocks lining the wide, stately new boulevards. These were too expensive for the working classes, who were pushed to the jerry-built outer suburbs. There they were deprived of either the benefits of the age-old system or those of the new one.
²
In addition, the railways, bringing food from far and wide, squeezed out the traditional providers of much of the city's food and drink. The vineyards, market gardens and farms ringing the outskirts of the city for centuries gradually dwindled to a handful. Artisans, small-scale industrial enterprises, merchants large and small, the rich, the middling sort and the poor had always lived and worked cheek by jowl in each of the city's quarters. For the first time, they were separated, as the new neighborhoods became bound by class.

And while Paris's great new inner boulevards, road junctions, squares and vistas were quite breathtaking in scale, this modern city par excellence had lost much of its previous intimacy. Many were troubled by the loss of “old roots.” Not only were at least 350,000 displaced by the “Haussmannization” of Paris, but one critic also complained that for the first time, the city was physically divided in two: the rich and the poor. It was said that the continual destruction of Paris had led to a destruction of its “society,” and as a symptom of this loss, Parisians were more detached from one another. Paris had become superb, but it was also slightly chilling.
³

But France was a world power and Paris was its capital. Emulating London's Great Exhibition, with the expositions of 1855 and 1867, Louis Napoléon succeeded in attracting millions. These trade fairs celebrating the nineteenth-century cult of technology were nowhere invested in so heavily or used so impressively as in France. The Paris Expo of 1878, for example, launched the first experiments with electric street lighting; 1889 saw the building of the Eiffel Tower. This masterpiece of technology, at first condemned by the literary and artistic establishment as “the dishonor of Paris,” soon became one of the most iconic city emblems in the world. With the Expo of 1900, the Paris underground network, the Métropolitain, was opened.

While these fairs dazzled on an enormous scale, another type of urban spectacle was locating itself in a new kind of marketplace: the department store—
le grand magasin
. As multistory temples to modernity, the department stores overflowed with goods never seen before under one roof. (At Le Bon Marché one could find fifty-four different types of crinoline.) Lined up along Haussmann's
grands boulevards
, these vast palaces of consumption became household names. They included La Belle Jardinière and La Samaritaine on the Right Bank by 1870; Le Bon Marché and the Galeries Lafayette, well established on the Left Bank by 1900. In ultramodern settings, using the latest technology, the
grands magasins
displayed their myriad luxuries in fabulous interiors at a range of prices everyone could manage, “from the duchess to the flirt and from the millionaire to the beggar.”
⁴
At least, that was the theory. In practice, the poor couldn't afford them.

If the better off had always had their dressmakers, many of the rest had bought much of their clothing from the wardrobe dealers selling castoffs in markets around the town. Although this trade would continue, by the 1850s, it had also become possible to buy a variety of inexpensive new ready-to-wear clothing. While the invention and development of the sewing machine spurred on this democratization, it was the
grands magasins
that first introduced off-the-peg clothes to a bourgeois clientele in upmarket settings. In these Aladdin's caves, Parisians learned to indulge themselves as never before and acquired the habit of mass consumption. The launch of mail-order catalogues extended further the
grands magasins'
influence, and thousands of women, such as Gabrielle's aunt Louise, living far away from Paris, longed to visit these great cathedrals to the new religion of commerce.

Many disliked the new city of inexhaustible pleasures, and writers, such as Emile Zola, set out to record the particular conjunction of sexual and financial transaction seen as emblematic of Haussmann's newly corrupt Paris. Fashionable women of all sorts now rubbed shoulders in the
grands magasins
, and one observer wrote, “One does not know, nowadays, if it's honest women who are dressed like whores, or whores who are dressed like honest women.”
⁵
Commerce became impersonal, and many of the small boutiques, relying on relatively local suppliers and serving regular customers, were overtaken by the department stores, which often bought from international sources and sold to people whom they had never met before.

Unlike old Paris, however, the new inner city did actually function. Despite the criticisms and the failure of “all classes to mix,” from the sanitation system to the department stores and the cafés, restaurants and theaters found on the
grands boulevards
, central Paris was indeed the epitome of modernity. Even those who disliked it were forced to admit that its thrusting energy and creative life gave the city a savage new, kind of magnificence.

While the nineteenth century had witnessed the confident emergence of the bourgeois, at first considered philistines in all matters of taste, their rise had left them a powerful force across society. The industrialization of France, the parallel exodus from the country and the growth in population had meant that huge numbers of lives had changed more rapidly than their parents could ever have dreamed possible. As the bourgeois caste had grown, so its members were keen for guidance, and the proliferation of magazines for their women had grown proportionally.

In September 1909, that same year in which Gabrielle began living with Arthur Capel, a fashionable young actress, Lucienne Roger, was featured wearing one of Gabrielle's hats on the cover of one of these magazines,
Comœ-dia Illustré
. Inside the magazine were two more of Gabrielle's hats, bearing the commentary:

Comœdia Illustré
was the recently launched weekly supplement to the French daily
Comœdia.
Run by Maurice de Brunhoff, scion of one of the most influential publishing families in France,
Comœdia Illustré
was devoted to coverage of the arts, and catered to an eclectic band of sophisticates whose social mix would have been virtually impossible a few decades earlier. Brunhoff set his sights on the personalities and professionals who were representative of the social changes sweeping through large sections of French society. The financiers, industrialists, socialites, artists, writers, actors and demimondaines read such a magazine because it made them feel they were keeping abreast of the increasingly fragmenting artistic world and the radical changes emerging in all matters of style and taste.

Comœdia Illustré
acted as cultural guide for its elite readership. Besides fashion, it presented photographs (very few magazines yet did this), illustrations, exhibition reviews and new elite music as well as popular entertainment. And the magazine's largely youthful readership also identified with its undertone of rebellion. When Gabrielle had used her powers of persuasion on this, one of the city's most stylish magazines, her liaison with one of the most high-profile young men in Paris would not have gone unnoticed. With Lucienne Roger wearing Gabrielle's hat on
Comœdia
's cover, Gabrielle had carried off a brilliant piece of self-promotion.

Maurice de Brunhoff 's gamble on the newcomer paid off; the response to Gabrielle's hats was good. As a result, for the next month's issue, October 1909, Gabrielle herself modeled two of her designs. Whether large, or small and close to the head, her hats were very simple, with no more than a single flourish. They were described as having “a style and harmony of lines that are unique to her,” and in November, Gabrielle once again got herself coverage, taking up a full page of the magazine. The December issue had another actress modeling another of Gabrielle Chanel's hats, and throughout the following year, coverage of her work continued, with comments such as: “This design and those which surround it are of a rare distinction, and they honor Gabrielle Chanel, whose chosen and numerous clientele appreciates the assured and delicate taste more every day.”

The actresses and demimondaines of Gabrielle's acquaintance were regularly prevailed upon to help in her promotion. Thus, in January 1911, her friend the actress Jeanne Dirys appeared on a
Comœdia Illustré
cover in an illustration done by the precocious young artist Paul Iribe. By May that year, the same magazine is telling us that Gabrielle Chanel's distinguished work is now just as much sought after by beautiful women in town as in the theater.

As so often in the past, under the influence of actresses and the demimonde
,
society women were beginning to take note. In early 1912, Gabrielle's work was described as “original,” and she herself was hailed as “this clear-sighted artist.” Meanwhile, Gabrielle Dorziat, Royallieu habitué and high-profile actress, modeled Gabrielle's hats for
Les Modes
, another influential magazine
.
Dorziat wore Gabrielle's daringly simple hats in an adaptation of Maupassant's
Bel Ami
; the press loved the actress,
and
her hats. Before the year was out,
Comœdia Illustré
declared that “this young artist . . . [Gabrielle] is taking a dominant place in fashion at the moment.” Not only were her hats lauded for their “unfailing stylishness and good taste,” they were used to complement outfits by fashionable couturiers.