Coco Chanel (59 page)

 

Assisted by her atelier and her mannequins, Gabrielle had returned from Switzerland with the intention of overcoming her opponents: those who reviled her war record and those who believed her work was now part of history. And during the course of 1954, what had at first appeared a disaster was set to become Gabrielle's triumph. In November 1954,
Elle
put Suzy Parker on its cover in a seductive red Chanel suit and a pillbox hat, all trimmed around in fur.

As Gabrielle's success became undeniable, she was asked why she had returned. She replied, “I was bored. It took me fifteen years to realize it. Today, I prefer disaster to nothingness.” Laying bare the drive that almost became her curse, in the years without work, Gabrielle had been lost, up against her demons and her loneliness. But by 1957, she was sailing triumphantly for America.

This was supposedly to accept what was then America's greatest fashion accolade, the Neiman Marcus Fashion Oscar, in Dallas. However, while Dior had been awarded the Oscar before her, and Gabrielle had refused to follow in his footsteps, she allowed herself to be enticed to America because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Neiman Marcus stores. As ever, alert to a publicity opportunity, she agreed to an interview with
The New Yorker.
Gabrielle informed the reporter that, in 1954, her reaction to her initially poor reception—everywhere except America—had been defiance: “I thought, I will show them! In America, there was great enthusiasm. In France I had to fight. But I did not mind. I love very much to battle. Now, in France they are trying to adapt my ideas. So much the better!”

Succumbing to Gabrielle's wiles, the reporter wrote:

Not long after this, Bettina Ballard wrote of her disappointment that many women no longer appeared to think for themselves, that “their very conformity in wearing what the stores or magazines tell them to, proves their lack of personal interest. They don't mind spending money; it is the time and the boredom of shopping they resent. If anyone will take the burden off their shoulders they are happy.” Ballard cites the then new notion of personal dressers, describing it as like “eating pre-digested breakfast food. Imagine a Daisy Fellowes or any of the pre-war ladies of fashion allowing anyone to choose a handkerchief for them! Fortunately for those who work in fashion, women now ask for nothing better than to be led, bullied, dictated to, and given as little freedom of choice as possible.”
¹⁰
Ballard appealed to them, saying that they were the ultimate critics, they shouldn't always listen to the “experts' and should think for themselves. She went on to say:

Meanwhile, Gabrielle continued beguiling the
New Yorker
reporter with her undimmed allure. Flicking the ash off the last drags of her cigarette, she said:

Having first said she was “too tired, too bored,” Gabrielle agreed to attend a dinner given for her by the famously suave and yet eccentric
Vogue
editor Diana Vreeland, whom she had known since the thirties. Gabrielle would only attend on condition that the evening would be intimate and she wouldn't feel obliged to speak. Accompanied by someone Vreeland described as a “very charming Frenchman,” once there, Gabrielle spoke without ceasing. Halfway through the evening, she asked if “Helena” could join them. When Helena Rubinstein arrived, she and Chanel withdrew to Vreeland's husband's study. After some time, their hostess went in to see if they were all right:

While saying that Gabrielle had “an utterly malicious tongue,” Vreeland also had great admiration for her, and added, “But that was Coco—she said a lot of things. So many things are said . . . and in the end it makes no difference. Coco was never a kind woman . . . but she was the most interesting person
I've
ever met.”
¹⁴
Vreeland mixed with some of the most interesting people of her day.

Gabrielle had told the
New Yorker
reporter, “I am not young, but I feel young. The day I feel old, I will go to bed and stay there.
J'aime la vie!
I feel that to live is a wonderful thing.” And over the coming seasons, this youthful septuagenarian made strapless evening dresses of embroidered organdy and quantities of others in satins, chiffons, brocades, velvets, lamés and some of the most avant-garde, man-made fabrics, plain and printed Then there was the lace Gabrielle used to such effect for effortlessly chic and alluring below-the-knee cocktail dresses, or a longer, black-lace, boned, strapless sheath, with a trumpet-shaped skirt over stiffened, black-net petticoats.

As the fifties wore on, and her success continued, in each collection there were always the variations on the suit: these were soon selling more than seven thousand a year. More than twenty years later, Diana Vreeland would say, “These post-war suits of Chanel were designed God knows
when
, but the tailoring, the line, the shoulders, the underarms, the
jupe—
never too short . . . is even today the right thing to wear.”
¹⁵

And a new generation of the best-dressed women in the world was wearing Chanel Nº 5, once more the most popular perfume in the world. Not only Gabrielle's old friend Marlene Dietrich and other luminaries, such as Diana Vreeland, but also younger celebrities wanted to become her clients. These included the actresses Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman. In the sixties, Gabrielle would attract to 31 rue Cambon yet more young women from the stage and screen: Anouk Aimée, Gina Lollobrigida, Delphine Seyrig, Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve. And while Gabrielle was particularly attached to Schneider and Moreau, she saw Elizabeth Taylor and her then husband Richard Burton on their visits to France. When Gabrielle was asked whether she didn't think Elizabeth Taylor wore her Chanel suits rather too tightly buttoned—over that famously ample bosom—she replied, “There is one . . . who can do anything, that is Elizabeth Taylor . . . She is a real star.”

Bettina Ballard wrote:

In 1959,
Vogue
wrote:

This acclaim, from one of the most influential fashion magazines in the world, was also a precise rendering of Gabrielle's mantra: that clothes, rather than dominating a woman, should be the background to her personality. Gabrielle's comment that “the eccentricity should be in the woman not the dress” had been central to the most austere version of this philosophy, the now-legendary “little black dress.” And while Gabrielle herself was sufficiently characterful that she had always outshone her clothes, they also acted as her “shield.” Her assistant, Lilou Marquand, would say, “Maybe that was Mademoiselle's genius: her clothes were a protection. In my suit, I was certain to look my best. No more worrying about one's appearance, image, and line: I could think of something else. Living in Chanel gave a safety which, for Mademoiselle, was worth all the holidays in the world.”
¹⁸

Although Gabrielle vehemently denied the criticism sometimes now leveled, that her collections didn't change, her suit, in particular, was endlessly refined and had become unfailingly recognizable as “a Chanel.” While this description irritated Gabrielle, she did indeed repeat a formula with different materials, and surrounded the changes with the details—the buttons, the braids, the linings. But this was the point: wearing a Chanel suit, one had no need to worry about one's appearance. It has been said many times before that these suits were a kind of uniform. But as with a uniform, where everyone apparently looks the same, as Gabrielle said of her “black Ford” dresses, in such clothing, the individuality of the wearer is brought out rather than submerged.

By the late fifties, Gabrielle had created all her signature elements: the little black dresses; the smart trousers; the costume jewelry; the slingback shoes with contrasting toe caps; the pert hats; the delicate lace evening dresses; the comfortable yet elegant jersey dresses; the suits of bouclé or the Prince of Wales check with their distinctive Chanel buttons, all with chains to ensure the jackets sat well, the linings often matching the accompanying blouse; the 1955 quilted leather or jersey bags with those gilt chain shoulder straps and now the big bows gathering up Gabrielle's models' short bouffant hair. And no matter what may have been said about how often these elements appeared, they were also thought worth emulating by other designers, and by women across the world.

After Gabrielle's long hiatus, despite her seventy-one years, in 1954, her thirst for work seemed as unquenchable as ever. And as had been her custom, she drove her models and her staff as much as she drove herself almost to distraction. If those who worked for her were not strong enough, or didn't have enough respect for her, they left. It would be said that Gabrielle ruled by intimidation: “As to really contradicting her . . . only her friend Maggie [van Zuylen] . . . dared to throw a glass of beer in her face; for the rest, her employees were too afraid of her.”
¹⁹
Gabrielle's small court—that kind that typically grows up around a couturier—of course had its sycophants, but all those who worked for her did not fear her. Like her friends, several had made the decision to accept her for what she was.

 

When the French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes wrote his essays on the language of fashion,
²⁰
he nailed Gabrielle as a classic rather than an innovator. While also declaring her a rebel, he described her recent declaration of war on the other designers: “It is said Chanel keeps fashion from falling into barbarism and endows it with all the classical virtues: reason, naturalness, permanency, and a taste for pleasing rather than a taste for shocking.” Barthes described Gabrielle's unwillingness to take part in the annual fashion “vendetta,” where what has gone before is now dead. However, while his critique of Gabrielle is a good one, in the past she had been an innovator, and “reason, permanency, [and] a taste for pleasing rather than shocking” are
not
the attributes of a rebel.

By 1964, with the advent of a new designer, Gabrielle did indeed feel that barbarism was walking the streets. André Courrèges was a former cutter at Balenciaga and had created a sensation with his “modernist” clothes. Breaking with tradition, both in his styles and his use of fabric, such as plastic, he called his 1964 collection Space Age and had his mannequins dancing “the jerk” as they moved down the runway. In 1965, Courrèges, along with Mary Quant in Britain, would claim to be the inventor of the miniskirt. Soon Gabrielle's favorite bête noire
,
Courrèges, refused to accept her criticisms and said, “I am the Matra, the Ferrari, Chanel is the Rolls-Royce: functional but static.” Courrèges's challenge to Gabrielle's notion of dress was genuinely original. And she sensed that his style was closer to the new spirit of the age than her own was.