Coco Chanel (9 page)

A photograph shows her sitting astride her horse in her new riding gear: a short-sleeved, mannish shirt, a knitted tie and those rather shocking men's jodhpurs. Nudging again at tradition, Gabrielle has also substituted the woman's riding hat—either a top hat or a bowler—for one both less formal and more feminine-looking, wide brimmed and made of soft felt. With her slight figure and broad young face, in this outfit she could almost have been mistaken for a boy.

If Gabrielle's part in the evolution of women's dress was not always as outrageous as others have suggested, while riding astride her horse was in the vanguard, and most shocking was her wearing
men's
riding trousers, and not
only
when she was hunting. And Gabrielle was famously to take this idea further. Rather than confining her blurring of male-female sartorial boundaries to horse riding, it was to become one of her great trademarks; with a hint of that frisson given by cross-dressing, femininity and seductiveness were heightened by borrowings from a man's wardrobe.

 

Etienne Balsan was neither a man of politics nor a man of letters. He was a most gifted and dedicated sportsman whose favorite reading was the racing and the gossip columns in the daily papers. Most important of all the equine pursuits at Royallieu was the racing timetable. From Royallieu, it was possible to visit a racetrack most days of the week, and Gabrielle did so with Etienne and his friends. Mondays at Saint-Cloud, Tuesdays at Enghien, Wednesdays at Tremblay, on through the end of the week to Sunday at Longchamp, the most elegant of racecourses, in the Parisian park of the Bois de Boulogne.

Spectating at the races had become an immensely popular pastime across the social spectrum. One writer went so far as to say that in France, sport
was
the turf. As an activity with great social prestige, racing had quickly become a stage on which to vaunt one's social position. This, of course, included the competitive spectacle of fashion. Indeed, many of those who regularly attended the races were far more interested in the promenade of fashion and society than the racing itself. A microcosm of Parisian society, racetrack meetings attracted enormous crowds, and by the early 1900s, the Longchamp racecourse was one of the most fashionable public venues in France. A huge draw for other forms of entertainment, race days were rich pickings for prostitutes of all kinds.

While a respectable woman was obliged to be escorted in public, the demimondaine usually arrived unaccompanied and was consequently forbidden access to the enclosure. Yet as the most seductive celebrities of the day, these women were also major attractions. The Second Empire had flourished, and with it the demimonde had flowered, and the grandest of its denizens met with society women, with whom they now frequently shared the same couturier. “At first glance they were the same women dressed by the same dressmakers, the only distinction being that the
demi-monde
seemed a little more
chic.
”
¹⁴

By contrast with the worldly image of these exotic fin de siècle creatures, Gabrielle always appeared unadorned, modest and neat; without exception, her dress was very simple. At the racecourse, intent on watching one of Etienne's horses in training, she might wear a loose, mannish coat over a tailored jacket, collar and tie, with an undecorated straw boater. She made a practical, sporty look appear most desirable.

A good many American women appear to have adopted tailored outfits for practical activities as far back as the 1880s. This fashion was well ahead of France. As late as 1901, the influential French magazine
Les Modes
was still describing the female suit as “a revolutionary development,” adding the caution that “gentlemen have not fully appreciated the tailored costume. They have found it too closely resembling their own.”
¹⁵

Gabrielle would say in the future that she had been unaware of being watched and gossiped about as Etienne Balsan's mistress at the races. She also said, “I looked like nothing. Nothing was right on me . . . Dresses didn't fit me and I didn't give a damn.”
¹⁶
Gabrielle didn't wear the traditionally exaggerated female getups for the races, and instead stuck to her simple tailored outfits. Again, it wasn't that wearing a tailored outfit was unheard of, but it was seen as unconventional for a woman to wear it to the races.

Despite her belief that if she didn't dress like a kept woman, she wouldn't be seen as one, Gabrielle was, nonetheless, a mistress. As for her looks, opinion was divided. While some didn't find her particularly attractive, others were in thrall to her unconventional beauty. She was told she “looked noble” and that she possessed an “authentic exoticism.”
¹⁷
Gabrielle was never very adept at the simpering demeanor of many contemporary women; with hindsight, her manner was an intimation of the future.

She had chosen to leave behind her previous servitude by becoming a kept woman, but her intelligence was too keen and her energies too restless for her to find the passiveness of this existence rewarding for very long. And after a time, the entertainments at Royallieu would come to bore her too. If, by any chance, Gabrielle articulated her dilemma to herself, for the moment she could find no answer. Living with the trappings of luxury and the apparent freedom that many women from her background would have fought for, she recognized that, really, she had simply swapped one kind of bondage for another. Yet while her ambivalence about her position is sometimes revealed in photographs of her at this time, in others her expression displays by turns her confidence, her wit and an unusual ability to appraise herself and her audience. What the photographs show, too, is the odd glimpse of her diffidence and vulnerability, and also of her most elusive and feminine allure.

In one such photograph Gabrielle walks along the promenade at Nice. Dressed almost head to toe in black, she sports a muff, a huge-brimmed hat, white shirt and tie. A beautiful young woman, she is attended by three highly eligible young men—Comte Léon de Laborde, Miguel de Yturbe and Etienne Balsan. All wealthy horsemen, they are charming cynics who speak the language of a sophisticated, knowing elite. Gabrielle was learning and, at Nice, she was also luxuriating in the only power then available to her, a sexual one emanating from the possession of great character and unusual beauty. And her eyes tell us that she knows it.

At the races, we see Léon de Laborde holding Gabrielle's chin in a gesture both intimate and proprietary. Another photograph shows Gabrielle, Léon and Etienne at the Royallieu stables. Léon has his arm around Gabrielle's waist and stands between her and her lover. Here and in other photos, one could be forgiven for assuming that Léon, not Etienne, was her lover. (Almost certainly, at some point, he was.)

If a rich man played the game, when he grew tired of his mistress from a lower class, on separating from her he would make her a parting settlement so as to tide her over until she could find another “protector.” With no lover, a mistress was out of “work.” A small number of men gave an indefinite settlement. When the time came for Gabrielle to be rejected by Etienne, if she was lucky, she would pass on to one of his friends or acquaintances. But as her looks faded, unless she had cleverly squirreled away a tidy sum, her future would be one of increasing poverty.

Preoccupied with her sense of powerlessness, by 1908, Gabrielle's ambition to get to Paris was forming into a plan. She wondered aloud to Etienne what would happen to her. He teased her about being bourgeois and asked her whether she wasn't all right there at Royallieu. Etienne worked hard, but his mistress had little with which to occupy herself and soon mentioned her future once again. Etienne gave the same response; and so it went on for several months.

Etienne's wealth meant that he could enter or reject society as he chose. While on the one hand benefiting from the privilege his wealth afforded him, on the other he was irritated by the social codes of his class, its obsession with security, family, property and honor handed down from father to son. Instead, Etienne focused on a particular kind of earthy impermanence. He loved risk: the transience of a horse race, the playing of juvenile games and pranks, a brief, intense affair or a sophisticated gamble begun one day and finished on the next. Gabrielle appears to have stirred in him something different.

No doubt spurred on by her talk about her future, Etienne was apparently moved to ask his shop-assistant mistress to marry him. In years to come, Gabrielle would say that Etienne's elder brother, Jacques, came twice to Royallieu and asked her to do so. (Etienne may have sought his brother's assistance here.) When Gabrielle protested, telling Jacques that she didn't love his brother, he replied that it wasn't important; she should marry Etienne anyway. With Etienne and Jacques' parents dead, perhaps Gabrielle's status as a kept woman with no background mattered less to the Balsan brothers. Gabrielle recalled Jacques' anger at her refusal, and that he told her she would end up with nothing. When she replied that she wanted to work, he retorted angrily that as she didn't know anything about anything, what on earth did she think she was going to do?

Work indeed became Gabrielle's new conviction; it was her only possibility of escape from her position as a demimondaine
.
She would later recall how, as a mere twelve-year-old, she had realized that “without money you are nothing, that with money you can do anything . . . I would say to myself over and over, money is the key to freedom.”
¹⁸
She told Etienne that although she was good on a horse, she wouldn't be permitted to earn her living as a female jockey, so she would like to open a hat shop. One can imagine Etienne's surprise. He knew she was unusual, but employment was not expected of a mistress.

He was probably only vaguely aware that for some time, female visitors to Royallieu had asked Gabrielle where she found her hats. Almost beyond our comprehension today, it is worth remembering that at that time, virtually everyone, however old or young, rich or poor, wore a hat. (In many early photographs, where we see men, women and children too poor to wear shoes, they are, nonetheless, almost without exception, wearing a hat.) And women's headgear was a highly significant aspect of dress. The fashionable woman's hat was a dramatic edifice intended to cause a stir, to be noticed for its beauty and its grandeur.

One of the few places Gabrielle had visited on her rare trips to Paris was the palatial department store Galeries Lafayette. Here, instead of leaving with a haul of the seductive luxuries on offer in this temple to the new consumer, Gabrielle bought a number of basic hat forms made of straw or felt. Back at Royallieu, she decorated them, minimally, often with little more than a ribbon around the crown, to which she might simply add a large hat pin.

As in all previous periods, the definition of elegance and fashion was still the beautiful and the refined. Beauty was associated in large part with adornment. And adornment, whether in the form of costly jewels, silks, satins, laces, furs or hugely complicated hats, was associated with luxury and wealth. (The poor quite simply couldn't afford these things or, therefore, fashion.) The frisson provoked by Gabrielle's hats thus lay in their great simplicity and
lack
of adornment. Being shocking wasn't then something associated with high fashion, but Gabrielle wasn't entirely alone. Some high fashion was beginning to practice the same thought, put forward by a few radical contemporary artists. To shock was the idea, and this those unconventional female visitors to Royallieu were now keen to emulate.

6

Every autumn, Etienne was invited to the château at Pau, an old town in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where he and his friends rode, hunted and played polo. Years later, Gabrielle recalled the “green pastures, the mountain streams rushing to the plains, the grass-covered jumps and the hunters in their red coats,” in what she described as “the best fox-hunting land in Europe.”
¹
She remembered the horses, saddled up and impatient to be off; could still hear their clattering hooves on the cobblestones. That season at Pau, in 1908, was an intoxicating interlude for Gabrielle. It was here, she said, that she met Arthur Capel, a wealthy polo-playing Englishman, a playboy to outdo all the others.

Arthur Capel and Etienne were already acquainted, but this was apparently the first time Arthur and Gabrielle had met. The Englishman was a noted horseman. His manner was seductively nonchalant; he spoke fluent French and possessed an engaging wit. This didn't, though, entirely mask his sense of purpose. In Arthur Capel's eyes there was a hint of something steely, reflecting the difference Gabrielle would recognize between this man and Etienne's other friends. Instead of spending his inheritance, Arthur chose to work for his living. His dark good looks were enhanced by an air of inscrutability, and women found him irresistible. Gabrielle, too, was fascinated. Arthur was soon visiting Etienne's château.

Gabrielle's conversations with Etienne about setting up a hat shop had so far come to naught. Living with one's mistress was unconventional enough for an upper-class man in 1908, but for her to work was verging on the scandalous ; it would signal that he didn't have the finances to support her. Gabrielle remonstrated with herself that she must do something, asking herself, “Otherwise what will become of you?” She said later, “The proud know only one supreme good: freedom!”
²

Her efforts at persuasion at last bore fruit. Unwilling as Etienne was to finance a shop, why didn't she try out her idea from the
garçonnière
(bachelor apartment) he shared with his brother? Ironically, many an ex
-
demimondaine before her had followed Gabrielle's chosen occupation, and she now quietly launched herself as a milliner at her lover's Parisian apartment at 160 boulevard Malesherbes.