Coco Chanel (38 page)

Perhaps the most legendary of Gabrielle's designs was the one known as the little black dress. It was described as “little” because it was discreet. Quite how it came about is unclear, but Gabrielle's own version of events was told later. One evening in 1920 she was at the theater. Looking at the women all around her in their flashy, gaudy colors, she said she was driven to say to her companion, “These colors are impossible. These women, I'm bloody well going to dress them in black! So I imposed black . . . Black wipes out everything else around it. I used to tolerate colors, but I treated them as monochrome masses. The French don't have a sense of blocks of color.”
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Forestalling the criticism of these ideas, Gabrielle said that it was wrong to think that dressing women in black removed all originality from them. Rather, she believed that dressing alike apparently helped reveal women's individuality. While wearing black earlier herself, in her 1926 collections Gabrielle introduced a number of utterly simple day dresses, all in black. A color traditionally used for uniforms of various kinds, or during periods of mourning, black was on the whole considered unseemly if worn by women on other occasions. But Gabrielle had already made long and beautiful black evening dresses at least as early as 1917.

Now she reinterpreted and restyled the color in the most elegantly spare shapes. She was the first to show black dresses to be worn at any time of day or night, and later said, “Before me no one would have dared to dress in black.” For daytime, the dresses were in wool or Moroccan crepe; for evening, they were in luxurious materials, such as silk crepe, satin and velvet. While their basic structure remained deceptively simple, they were counterbalanced by decoration, such as jeweled and rhinestone-decorated belts or white collars, cuffs and much jewelry. Sometimes Gabrielle used the striking flourish of a white camellia—made from various materials—pinned against a black dress. (Eventually, she loved to have them pinned in the hair.)

While Gabrielle's black designs were to become universally adopted, the initial response to their elegant economy of line was not unanimously positive. American
Vogue,
however, correctly predicted that the little black dress would become “a sort of uniform for all modern women of taste.” Its very “simplicity” would overcome the fear women had hitherto labored under, of being seen in the same dress as another woman, reflecting an essential element of Gabrielle's whole outlook: a woman in a black dress draws attention as much to herself as to her dress. American
Vogue
had immediately grasped Gabrielle's message and, in the editorial, made the famous comment that these dresses were like the black, mass-produced Ford motor cars. By implication, they would become standard wear for the masses. A detail of that season was Gabrielle's addition of cloche hats. They may at first have been criticized by the likes of her friend Sem—“They are nothing but plain tea strainers in soft felt, into which women plunge their heads . . . everything disappears, swallowed up by that elastic pocket”—but these “tea strainers' quickly became the rage.

Gabrielle would say that women had previously thought “of every color, except the absence of color.” And though declaring that “nothing is more difficult to make than a little black dress,” and that the tricks of the exotic are much easier, she was the first in her day to fully recognize that black and white have what she described as an “absolute beauty . . . dress women in white or black at a ball: they are the only ones you see.”
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While Gabrielle has a reputation for having resented the upper classes, from the twenties onward she began to employ them. In the future she would say, “I have employed society people, not to indulge my vanity, or to humiliate them (I would take other forms of revenge should I be seeking that), but . . . because they were useful to me.”
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She maintained that through the rich seam of contacts available to families with any lineage, she was kept abreast of things without having to be present at every social event. From observation and hard personal experience, Gabrielle had become tougher and did indeed have little respect for a good many of those with great privilege. And, to be sure, her aristocratic employees were useful to her, as emissaries and ambassadors for Chanel. Tapping into the prevalence for snobbery, especially among her clients, Gabrielle was well aware that the presence of the old European aristocracy as her employees added to the air of exclusiveness in her salons. This would have been virtually impossible before the war, when a couturier was not “received” in society. But times had changed and many were obliged to work who had previously hardly known the meaning of the word.

In tough mode, Gabrielle said, “When I took smart friends on a trip, I always paid, because society people become amusing and delightful when they are certain they won't have to pay for their pleasure. I purchased, in short, their good humor.” At the same time, she said she found them “irresistibly dishonest” and in her idiosyncratic way, had a genuine sympathy for their impoverished gentility. Gabrielle's bravado act often omitted the fact that she not only helped a number of those with distinguished lineages, but also found them sympathetic.

Although Gabrielle was born a peasant, her own nature was in many ways a patrician one, and she identified with certain traits associated with the upper classes: “Yes, society people amuse me more than the others. They have wit, tact, a charming disloyalty, a well-bred nonchalance, and an arrogance that is very specific, very caustic, always on the alert; they know how to arrive at the right time and to leave when necessary.”
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(Whatever ambivalence Gabrielle might have felt about this section of society was far outweighed by her deep antipathy to the bourgeoisie. She regarded their traditional small-mindedness as loathsome.)

The many aristocratic Russian émigrés as well as eastern Europeans and the odd upper-class French and Anglo-Saxon employed by Gabrielle were people virtually unemployable elsewhere, and the Chanel salons became a refuge for a good number of them. Here, if the well born were prepared to turn their hand to commerce, they could also maintain their dignity. In Gabrielle's own way, she esteemed them, in particular, the Russians. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein recalled the sad story of a grand Russian woman fallen on hard times; part of her family had been shot by the Bolsheviks. She desperately needed work, and Gabrielle employed her.
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An old retainer at Gabrielle's nephew's château remembered Gabrielle taking in a bankrupt elderly Russian countess: “Mademoiselle had told us to . . . put back in the old lady's little box the cents she had saved with great effort, and which she would give to us as tips. We had been ordered to let the countess believe that we kept the money in order not to hurt her feelings.”
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Now that some of the most distinguished and trendsetting European and American women were Gabrielle's clients, the socially prominent, utterly fashionable and supremely self-important writer Princess Marthe Bibesco was regularly to be seen wearing Chanel couture. She even had Gabrielle design a wardrobe especially for her airplane travel. Gabrielle may have “worked” for Marthe Bibesco, but her own renown was now such that Bibesco gave a thinly veiled portrait of Gabrielle—albeit ironic and patronizing—in one of her fashionable novels. The couturier became Tote, an autocrat of fashion who

Gabrielle was a master of the developing art of advertising, and she capitalized on an updated form of self-promotion initiated by the sharper couturiers before the war. The great courtesans and actresses, then the leaders of fashion, had sported both their charms and the couturiers' new clothes at the races, that most prominent of social platforms. But with the demise of the great courtesans, society women were now fashion's foremost promoters.

Once again bearing in mind the inordinate vanity of most of her clients, Gabrielle presented a dress here, another one there, to a financially reduced young woman of good family. This publicity was multiplied when Gabrielle invited some of these same young women to act as her mannequins. At one time or another, a number of Gabrielle's friends—for example, Misia Sert—were also to be found on the list of employees at the rue Cambon. Among her other duties, Misia was a saleswoman—Gabrielle had often witnessed her formidable efforts as agent on her husband's behalf. Misia was also sometimes a Chanel model, her name good for publicity.

While Cocteau's con man friend Maurice Sachs would never work in Gabrielle's salon, she gave him ample funds to assemble her a library at the Hôtel de Lauzan. Sachs misused the large monthly sum she paid him, took a hotel suite, a secretary, a chauffeur, and launched himself on a spree of dissipation. At the same time, he bought less than first-class examples of all that Gabrielle should read. For someone as astute as Gabrielle was, she had allowed herself, untypically, to be duped by this charming and insinuating young parasite.

 

Europe appeared as if it was moving toward ever more frenzied escape, and the voices of protest were drowned out by those intent on experiencing, at all costs, every possible personal “adventure.” In the vanguard, Paris had the first black jazz musicians; it was in Paris that the blues first became the rage; impromptu parties and clubs were the vogue, and revelers energetically flung themselves into narcotic euphoria and the ecstasy of vigorous dancing until they could barely stand up. And at the heart of Paris was the shimmering Coco Chanel. Georges Auric, of Les Six, recalled that “of course she led a luxurious life, the kind it is difficult to imagine today. There was nothing but the best with her. She received a great deal and lavishly, and went out much, too. She liked to surround herself with brilliant people.”
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Maurice Sachs described her as “holding court and open table and dispensing privileges and pensions”—“the pensions of the Grande Mademoiselle,” the publisher Bernard Grasset called them. Sachs would write that “the pulse of the world was beating perceptibly in Paris,” and add that Gabrielle was close to its center.

Yet while Gabrielle now lived on a grand scale, she was about to meet someone who lived on one almost unimaginably more so.

22

In the summer of 1924, Gabrielle had been holidaying in southern France with Dmitri Pavlovich, her impoverished on-off lover of the past three years. (Like several others, the painter Marie Laurencin was convinced that she had secretly married him.) Meanwhile, the Duke of Westminster, known as Bend'Or, possibly the richest man in England, had recently separated from his wife.

Gabrielle's social prestige was now unquestioned. She was assiduously promoted in both the fashion press and the society pages; she was interviewed and photographed for
Harper's Bazaar
by the all-powerful society photographer Baron Aldolphe de Meyer. Meyer had married Olga Caracciolo, reputedly the illegitimate daughter of King Edward VII. Despite Meyer's Jewish heritage, his wife's connections and his own artistry and social finesse had enabled him to move into society. In London, he and Olga hosted one of the city's most powerful salons. (The Meyers' union, a long and happy one, was a
mariage blanc;
each of them preferred partners of their own sex. One of Olga's most famous affairs was with the music patroness Winnaretta Singer.) Meyer's article on Gabrielle was titled “Mlle Chanel tells Baron de Meyer her Opinions on Good Taste.”

Meanwhile, the American magazine
Women's Wear Daily
reported that “the Prince of Wales terminated a delightfully informal visit to Paris by lunching quietly with some friends . . . at the Ritz . . . In his party was Mrs. Vera Bate, who is . . . well known in English hunting circles. She was wearing one of Chanel's attractive [knitted] coats in a length that came half-way to the knee.” It was possibly Vera Bate's great friend Comte Léon de Laborde, Gabrielle's admirer from Royallieu days, who introduced Vera Bate and Gabrielle. (The English woman's origins were mysterious. It was rumored she was the illegitimate daughter of the German Duke of Teck, who had renounced his German titles during the war and been given an English one, Earl of Athlone.)

Vera Bate's connection to royalty apparently explained her easy familiarity with members of the set around the raffish Prince of Wales. Vera was repeatedly described as having a “great appetite for life,” which she coupled with a keen sense of dress. She also appears to have been regularly short of cash. Thus, in a newly discovered list of employees at Chanel at rue Cambon, we find that Vera Bate had been employed by Gabrielle in the “advertising department” since 1921; her social contacts made her invaluable for Chanel public relations. Her hasty marriage to Frederick Bate, at the end of the war, had resulted in a baby girl and a divorce not long afterward. Whatever Vera's true background, she moved in some of the most fashionable circles in England. Wearing clothes as well as she did, she was given the run of Gabrielle's salon. Dressed only in Chanel, she was an important ambassador for Gabrielle with the British. Among Vera's friends she included Winston Churchill, and Churchill's great friend the Duke of Westminster.