Coco Chanel (44 page)

And as work had become her habit, it was the only antidote Gabrielle knew of that calmed her many woes. In work she approached a state of something akin to peace. Thus, when she returned to Paris, that was what she did.

Cocteau now asked her to design the costumes for a new play he was about to write,
Oedipus Rex,
and Jean Renoir asked her to do the same for his forthcoming film
The Rules of the Game.
It was Gabrielle who had recently introduced her sometime young lover Luchino Visconti to her friend Jean, the painter Renoir's son. She explained to Renoir that the young Italian count wanted to work in films. Despite Visconti's painful shyness, he and Renoir got on, and Visconti went to watch the great director at his work. A year later, Renoir was sufficiently impressed that he included him in his film crew. Sometime later still, Visconti was generous enough to give Gabrielle the credit for being the instrument that helped him find his true path.

When Gabrielle returned to Paris that autumn, she had not only returned to work, she had returned to do battle. She was setting about overcoming a professional obstacle, growing steadily over the last couple of years, but which she had so far refused to countenance. For the first time in more than fifteen years, she had a serious competitor: her name was Elsa Schiaparelli. There were other competitors—Mainbocher, Marcel Rochas—but it was “that Italian woman,” as Gabrielle called her, who was beginning to attract as much attention as Gabrielle had been accustomed to since the First World War.

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Schiaparelli was a talented, eccentric Italian aristocrat who had begun by making sweaters and skirts. These were a great success. While also making clothes lauded for their understated elegance, Schiaparelli was soon to become better known for her witty and outrageous designs. From the mid-to late thirties, these were often done in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. (In this period, Dalí was also to work with Gabrielle, Cocteau and Balanchine on various stage projects.) As a mark of Schiaparelli's success, her work graced the cover of British
Vogue
for Christmas 1935. The young British photographic star Cecil Beaton took pictures of the much-admired Indian princess Karam of Kapurthala wearing Schiaparelli evening saris, and shot a series of her clothes with surrealistic backdrops. Schiaparelli was flamboyant where Gabrielle was understated, and produced a series of pieces in a color she called “bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, a shocking color, pure and undiluted.” This “shocking color” was the famous pink.

Anita Loos, of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
fame, Mae West and Daisy Fellowes were some of Schiaparelli's best-known early clients. Having triumphed by establishing herself on the magnificent place Vendôme, just around the corner from Gabrielle at rue Cambon, Schiaparelli would say, “Chanel launched sailor sweaters, the short skirt, I took her sweater, changed the lines, and there, Chanel is finished!” Gabrielle believed the idea implicit in Schiaparelli's most daring clothes—that the world is amusing, absurd and futile—would not last. But with Schiaparelli's “fish-shaped buttons, monkey hats, fox-head gloves and skunk coats,” her outrageous, surreal nonsense was a perfect reflection of the times. Bettina Ballard perceptively observed that

Pre–First World War, shock tactics had already become part of the raison d'être of artistic modernism. For the postwar Dadaists and surrealists, to shock was virtually orthodoxy.

Schiaparelli not only surrounded herself with artists, just as Gabrielle had, she also persuaded them to work with her on her creations. (Gabrielle believed that art came before artisanship and, when working with artists, put herself very much in second place.) Schiaparelli was forever pushing her artists to experiment, the more suggestively and outrageously, the better. Bettina Ballard quoted the great couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga commenting wryly that Schiaparelli “was the only real artist in the couture,” which didn't mean that he thought that art and dressmaking were good companions.
²
These, of course, were Gabrielle's sentiments exactly. Balenciaga was one of the only colleagues for whom she had real respect.

Gabrielle was on the defensive, but her understanding of fashion was profound. And she now declared that novelty was not necessarily modern. She went further, saying that superficial seasonal changes were not what she offered. What she offered was “style,” and that wasn't the same as fashion. When Gabrielle objected to Schiaparelli's work, she was accused of going against that very avant-garde couture she had led since before the First World War. She retorted that her own modernity derived from placing herself in the classic tradition and understanding something more fundamental about her times. At her best, Gabrielle had created a style that was almost “beyond fashion.” In creating clothes for a century whose art had lost much of its elitist character, her underlying theme had been inspired by a powerful aesthetic: superrefinement without elitism. Angered at feeling misunderstood, she lashed out with the brilliant comment that Schiaparelli's “futurism” was an optical illusion that had “nothing to say of the future.” Looking carefully at what Gabrielle meant, it is correct that surrealism is an “optical illusion,” and this was not what Gabrielle believed dressing, or style, was about.

During the thirties, women's bodies had gradually reemerged, and the angular tyranny of la garçonne—the flat-chested, Eton-cropped figure of the twenties—was banished. Clothes remained slim line, but had rediscovered the curves of women's bodies and now followed the line of the bust, the waist and the hips. Smooth, sultry fabrics such as satin were much in vogue, and cutting cloth on the bias, so as to accentuate the curves of the body, became popular. The bodice was often slightly bloused and waists were emphasized with tight belts, while below the fitted hips, skirts were very feminine and billowed out and flowed. Bias-cut clothes were the invention of Madeleine Vionnet, a couturier admired by Gabrielle for her simplified “architectural” styles. She disliked anything distorting the curves of a woman's body, and her clothes were sought after for accentuating the natural female form. Influenced by Greek sculpture, the apparent simplicity of Vionnet's styles belied their lengthy process of creation: cutting and draping fabric designs onto miniature dolls before re-creating them on life-sized models.

Gabrielle began using big bows at the neck, and shoulder pads (Schiaparelli is supposed to have introduced them) to exaggerate the smallness of the waist. The hemline had dropped significantly to approximately six inches above the ground, while full-length evening dresses were once again the mode. As an escape from the challenging financial climate of the period, evening wear became more luxurious and sometimes exaggeratedly feminine. Pale satins were the rage throughout the thirties, and Gabrielle succumbed, too, making her own versions of the fashionable white, cream and peachy pinks.

At this time, her suits were made of gently fitting tweeds with contrasting open-necked white shirts, showing cuffs or crisp frills around the neck. Gabrielle's signature look for the time became these same white collars and cuffs as the contrast on a black dress. Black and white had become the underlying theme of many of her day clothes, with hints of green, red, brown, purple and mustard. From the midthirties, she used the new patterned elasticized fabric Lastex, afterward called latex, an up-to-date version of her favorite, jersey.

Schiaparelli was now making jackets with tightly pulled-in waists and stiffly jutting peplums set over narrow skirts of pin-thin pleats. Gabrielle had come to be regarded by some as the designer for unassertive, self-conscious women whose elegant reserve made them fear, above all else, the epithet “bad taste.” Schiaparelli's increasingly avant-garde designs were for the woman who saw herself as daring, and who was acquiring a new kind of notice with the designer's intentional “bad taste.” This group of Schiaparelli devotees were self-assured exhibitionists who loved the attention caused by their red eyelashes, black gloves with red fingernails, pancake hats and blue satin leggings, revealed under the lifted hem of a black evening dress.

The magazines and newspapers luxuriated in the rivalry of these two very different designers, and
Vogue
reported that the new mode “is neither streamlined nor sentimental, it is casual, bold and chunky.” In 1934,
Time
put Schiaparelli on its cover and made a definitive statement, saying that Chanel was no longer the leader in fashion. Instead, Schiaparelli was one of “a handful of houses now at or near the peak of their power as arbiters of the ultramodern haute couture . . . Madder and more original than most of her contemporaries, Mme Schiaparelli is the one to whom the word ‘genius' is applied most often.” Schiaparelli's surrealist clothes were challenging the notion of good taste, giving exotic and outrageous flights of fancy an allure previously confined to fancy dress for a costume ball. There was no doubt: Schiaparelli had made surrealism the utmost in chic.

Schiaparelli and young Dalí's evening dress had a skirt printed with a life-sized lobster, complemented by a bodice bearing a scattering of “parsley.” It was received with a fanfare of publicity when Beaton photographed it being worn by the Prince of Wales's lover, Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Dalí's one regret was that he was forbidden to splatter the dress with real mayonnaise. The young Balenciaga, whose austere clothes were yet feminine and ultramodern, and are to some the ultimate in twentieth-century elegance, would make an astonishingly acute observation: “You see, Coco had very little taste, but it was good. Schiap, on the other hand, had lots of it, but it was bad.”

 

In the spring of 1936, France went to the polls. To the dismay of the Right, there was a huge turnout, and a left-wing coalition was now in charge of France. Many believed that the new Popular Front would be the party that would finally push through long-overdue reforms. Those to the right with privilege were fearful that the country was teetering on the brink of communism, while the Left luxuriated in the May Day celebrations. Léon Blum, the socialist leader of the coalition, was openly taunted in the Chamber of Deputies for his Jewishness by the right-wing deputy Xavier Vallat. He said, “For the first time this old Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew. I dare say out loud what the country is thinking, deep inside: it is preferable . . . to be led by a man whose origins belong to his soil . . . than by a cunning Talmudist.” This reflection of growing anti-Semitism was confirmed in one of the dailies' headlines: “France under the Jew.”

Meanwhile, concerned at the possibility that the longed-for improvement in their rights—paid holiday, family support, unemployment insurance—might not happen, the workers came out on strike in the largest working-class demonstration France had ever seen, and before the new prime minister had even taken office. Airplane-factory workers came out, car-factory workers came out and, after a while, a virtually unheard-of thing happened: the textile workers went on strike, too. The country was in turmoil. To Gabrielle's amazement, this contagion even spread to her own workers. One morning, she found that her way was barred to the rue Cambon salon by a group of her saleswomen, who were smiling at the cameras. Gabrielle's fury made no difference. They refused to let her in, and she was forced to beat a retreat over the road to the Ritz.

Her lawyer, René de Chambrun, was called, and advised an irate Gabrielle to stay calm and be moderate. He persuaded her to meet her workers. But when Gabrielle again crossed rue Cambon over to Chanel from the back of the Ritz, she was once more turned back. Chambrun advised her to wait and see. Eventually, the new premier, Léon Blum, sat down with a workers' delegation, with whom he spent the night drafting an agreement. This was to gain for French workers a set of rights they had never known before.

The strike continued for several days longer, but by the end of it, Gabrielle's workers, too, had gained the right to wage increases, the right to belong to a union, a forty-hour week, and an annual two-week paid holiday. Germany and Britain had both already achieved the principle of collective bargaining, but it was only with these, the Matignon agreements, that France had done the same. Gabrielle was outraged and instantly sacked three hundred of her workers, but René de Chambrun and her financial directors advised her that if she didn't relent, and quickly, she would be unable to present her forthcoming autumn collection. Years later, Gabrielle still railed against what she saw as domination by a workforce who should have been grateful to her for employing them. To all intents and purposes, Gabrielle's stance was that of the classic conservative from a modest background. She had worked tremendously hard to achieve, so why shouldn't her workers?