Coco Chanel (36 page)

Diaghilev, a formidable despot, was whimsical, sarcastic and vindictive. Practicing outrageous favoritism, he was also endowed with extraordinary artistic flair. The company might sometimes have grown tetchy at his despotism, but they understood it, and wouldn't have continued working for him if they hadn't recognized his great talent. Typically working close to catastrophe meant that it was never quite certain until the last moments whether a Diaghilev production would actually take its bow in front of a first-night audience. And
Le Train Bleu
was no exception.

At the dress rehearsal, almost everything was wrong. In Gabrielle's case, this meant half the costumes. Serge Lifar would later say, “They were not costumes conceived for dancing.” Gabrielle simply hadn't appreciated the necessity of adapting her clothes to encompass the choreography. Unable to try them before the dress rehearsal, the dancers discovered it was impossible to move in them properly. The female lead, Lydia Sokolova, wore Gabrielle's bright pink knitted swimsuit, but it was loosely fitted and made it difficult for her partner to get a hold on her in the various throws and catches. (Sokolova—real name Hilda Munnings—became the first English member of the Ballets Russes in 1913, dancing the demanding female lead in the 1920 revival of
The Rite of Spring.
) Sokolova's fake-pearl stud earrings—to become one of the fashion accessories of the twenties—were so heavy that, apparently, she could barely hear the music. And the head-hugging bathing cap Gabrielle had her wear soon became a must for any fashionable swimmer.

Diaghilev would also ask Gabrielle to step in on a number of productions to update the dancers' costumes. This included bringing right up to date the fashionable hostess in Diaghilev and Poulenc's
Les biches
(1924) and redesigning the three muses' costumes for
Apollon musagète
(1929). These were beautifully simple tricot tunics, with neckties from the House of Charvet winding around the dancers' bodies. In these productions, for the most part, Gabrielle was uninterested in personal glory and became just as involved as the rest of the company in contributing to their success.

The problems with
Le Train Bleu
's dress rehearsal appeared insurmountable to Diaghilev, and he had fled up to the last row of the balcony, asking what on earth they could put on that evening instead. However, all the dancers and the stagehands, and Diaghilev, Nijinska, Cocteau, Gabrielle and the dressers, stayed on in the theater that afternoon and effectively remade the ballet. Among the radical changes, Gabrielle pulled apart and redesigned half of her modish beach clothes. These were then resewn by the dressers in a very few hours. Somehow, everything was done, the curtain went up and on that evening of June 13, 1924,
Le Train Bleu
was judged as “distinctly new and modern,” and a great success.

With
le tout
Paris and a good number of artists in the audience, Cocteau and Diaghilev had brought off a mix of theater, dance, music, pantomime and satire. It fell way outside any classical definition of ballet, whose traditional siting had been in the unreal worlds of myth or fairy tale. It wasn't simply that these two agents provocateurs, Diaghilev and Cocteau, had freed ballet and produced a spectacle based on “the powerful charm of the pavement.” As in
Parade,
they had once again created a new and entirely modern kind of theatrical performance. They had made another firm step in the development of modernist art, based above all on aspects of contemporary life. In this context, it was entirely appropriate that the couturier Coco Chanel, who was synonymous with modernity, should be the person who designed the ballet's costumes.

Integral to Diaghilev's obsession with every aspect of his company's performances was his fierce perfectionism about his dancers' costumes. As a result, during the twenties, Gabrielle and Misia Sert became his extra “eyes.” Acting in a sense as superintendents of taste, they had the last word on the “correctness” of colors, lengths, decoration and the general design of the costumes. And following Gabrielle's first mistakes, most important, they asked the question, did the costumes “work” in movement?

Between 1922 and 1937, Gabrielle designed the costumes for several more Cocteau productions, including
Orpheus, Oedipus Rex
and
The Knights of the Round Table
. She was also invited to make the costumes for several films, such as Jean Renoir's famed
La Règle du jeu
(
The Rules of the Game
) in 1939. Renoir's biting satire of French upper-class society, evoking the country's disjointedness in the lead-up to the Second World War, is regarded by many as one of the greatest films ever made. Gabrielle could present herself as opinionated in the extreme, yet she spoke very little of the work she carried out for the theater and films. Over the years, interviewers would ask about some of the remarkable performances for which she had made the costumes, an activity so different from her accustomed working life. But Gabrielle remained frustratingly unforthcoming, hardly referring to the illustrious company present at opening nights or to her involvement in these important works of art. When asked later about the first night of
Le Train Bleu,
for example, she wanted only to recall the artists. By implication, when it came to art, for Gabrielle, high society didn't matter.

21

For Gabrielle there was an absolute distinction between the skills and technique of the artisan, as opposed to the workings of an artist. While she herself was always staunchly opposed to calling herself an artist, one also remembers she was a woman of paradox.

As the twentieth century wore on and the distinction between artist and craftsman became ever more blurred, Gabrielle found this mistaken and pretentious, insisting ever more vehemently that she was only an artisan, a dressmaker and not an artist. She declared that fashion should be discussed “without poetry, without literature. A dress is neither a tragedy, nor a painting ; it is a charming and ephemeral creation, not an everlasting work of art.”
¹
She insisted that while couture may have an awareness of art, it is only a technique, a business. Whatever the success of their creations, Gabrielle believed that did not “justify couturiers persuading themselves or thinking of themselves—or dressing or posing—as artists.”
²

She drew a clear distinction between craft and art. And while, paradoxically, Gabrielle had a good deal of the artist in her, she singled out the couturier's instinct for their times:

She would add that “fashion roams around the streets, unaware that it exists, up to the moment that I, in my own way, may have expressed it. Fashion, like landscape, is a state of mind, by which I mean my own.”
⁴

If one is searching for what made Gabrielle stand out from her contemporaries, the source of her originality won't be found by looking for any one particular thing. It lay in a combination of elements, at the heart of which was Gabrielle's profound instinct for her own period. Her powers of observation, her intuitiveness, her inherited shrewdness as the trader's daughter—these gave her an unusually alert sense of “what was in the air.” In combination with her intelligence, these qualities made her a remarkable adept at interpreting and presenting their own epoch to her contemporaries.

Gabrielle's great gift lay in paying ruthless attention to the texture of the moment. If fashion can be said to illuminate or articulate that, then that was Gabrielle. Acting as a barometer, she gave her world what it wanted, just before it recognized the need. Her work was always just that one step ahead because she intuited her times better than most of those around her.

For Gabrielle, the genius of the couturier lay in that quality that kept her so vibrantly alive. This was the ability to anticipate: “More than a great statesman the great couturier is a man who has the future in his mind . . . Fashion is not an art, it is a job. If art makes use of fashion, then that is sufficient praise.” And then she justifies the necessity to follow fashion, the necessity to follow one's own times: “It's best to follow fashion, even if it is ugly. To detach oneself from it is immediately to become a comical character, which is terrifying. No one is powerful enough to be more powerful than fashion.”
⁵

These intelligent pronouncements, some of the best ever made about fashion, also reveal much about Gabrielle's motivation. They arose from a certain modesty about her own work, and a deep respect for what she believed was the work of the real artist. At the same time, she was never in awe of the great artists of her day. Associating happily with them, she was correct in her belief that in some important sense, she was their peer.

 

Gabrielle's sense of invention now led her to develop a rich new seam of creativity. In 1924, she set up her own jewelry workshops, and Comte Etienne de Beaumont—who for some time had had jewelry made to his design by the best artisans, as presents for friends—became her manager. Gabrielle also asked François Hugo, already the director of her jersey factory at Asnières, to make her some jewelry designs. As there was already an extensive demand for replica jewelry, Gabrielle could turn to a wide range of highly skilled artisans, such as Madame Gripoix and her husband, famous costume jewelers, originally for Poiret. Gabrielle's inspiration was diverse. For all her austerity of design, she loved the exotic, and was also fascinated by Renaissance and Byzantine designs. During the twenties, she added many strings of fake pearls—and great colored stones in the form of necklaces, brooches and pendants—to her understated clothes. And in the late twenties, she even sparked a fashion for asymmetrical earrings: one black and one white pearl. (One of the ways she signaled that her jewelry was imitation was by the unnatural size of some of her stones.)

Carmel Snow, who would become the highly influential editor of
Harper's Bazaar,
wrote of her sister Christine's return from Paris in that decade. When she showed the female members of the family her Parisian wardrobe, her mother was appalled at the Chanel dress made of jersey and decorated with some dubious fur:

But Gabrielle also wore this imitation jewelry. Indeed, she famously made a habit of mixing it with her own fabulous jewels, many of them received as gifts from her lovers. Imitation jewelry had been made for the less well off for thousands of years. But where these jewels had traditionally copied the “real thing,” Gabrielle's oversized jewelry was different in that it was ostentatiously fake. And her prestige was such that her clients followed her; women who usually owned valuable collections of precious real jewels wanted Gabrielle's imitations. She believed that

In order to look right, it had to be imitation. Typical of Gabrielle's capacity for paradox, she believed that too much money killed luxury. She also had many of her priceless gems dismantled and reordered to her own designs. Later, the renowned jeweler Robert Goossens would say, “I took apart a lot of Mademoiselle's jewels. I don't know if they were Grand Duke Dmitri's or the Duke of Westminster's, but I remember a ruby necklace . . . from Cartier, out of which I made earrings. Mademoiselle would give them away as presents . . . They were unique pieces.”
⁸

During the daytime, Gabrielle often wore a mass of jewelry, while in the evening she might wear none at all. She had a more sophisticated understanding of luxury than many of the wealthy, and said, “Jewelry should be looked on innocently, naively, rather as one enjoys the sight of an apple tree in blossom by the side of the road as one speeds by in a motor car. This is how ordinary people perceive it; for them jewelry denotes social standing.”
⁹
So it does for many of the rich. While Gabrielle was at pains to turn the snobbery of jewelry on its head, she was also ahead of her time in challenging the idea of what is “real.”

 

Gabrielle worked extremely hard, turning out her two large collections every year, and the orders only grew. In 1924, when she had something like three thousand workers, her perfume, Chanel N° 5, had been selling steadily from her salons in Paris, Deauville and Biarritz. Exactly how much demand there was for more perfume is unclear, but Gabrielle wanted to sell more. She was now advised by an acquaintance of some years, Théophile Bader, the owner of the largest Paris department store, Galeries Lafayette. He said he wouldn't sell Gabrielle's perfume until she had a much larger quantity than Ernest Beaux was presently making down in Grasse. Bader said he knew just the people Gabrielle should meet. These were two young brothers, Pierre and Paul Wertheimer. Intelligent, hardheaded businessmen, the Wertheimers owned Bourjois perfumeries, the largest cosmetics and fragrance company in France, and were intent upon building on their father's considerable success. Apparently, the Wertheimers and Gabrielle met at the Longchamp racetrack, and there they struck a deal.