The Great Fashion Designers (8 page)

Her business strategy was, by contrast, thoroughly practical, exploring every opportunity that presented itself. Shops were created for home decor, menswear, furs and lingerie—a true retail empire. Thinking ahead, Lanvin invested in a company-owned dye factory in Nanterre as early as 1923, responding to the demand for her colours. Silver was often combined with black, or with an array of colours that included soft pinks, greens and blues. Above all, there was the Lanvin blue, a pretty lavender blue. These colours were researched intensively: Lanvin blue was most likely inspired by the blues in Fra Angelico frescoes, and other colours reflected her favourite artists, such as Édouard Vuillard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Odilon Redon (all of whom she collected). Lanvin was an avid collector throughout her life, assembling a remarkable array of paintings, sculptures, fabrics, exotic clothes and libraries, all catalogued and recorded with the meticulous precision that was her hallmark. Much of her collection was auctioned in Paris in September 2006, highlighting the diversity and richness of her interests, particularly her fascination with Japonism. Novelist Elizabeth Barille writes: ‘She was like a bee, tasting everything in order to make her exceptionally delicious honey.'

The outbreak of the Second World War also marked the declining years of Lanvin herself, by then in her seventies. The continuity sustained at the house of Lanvin is one of its greatest achievements. After her death in 1946, the company was run by family members for several decades, going through a number of different owners (including L'Oréal) before turning private in 2001 under investment group Harmonie, headed by a Taiwanese media businesswoman. The appointment of the sensitive, intuitive designer Alber Elbaz, who has acknowledged the inspiration he has garnered from the Lanvin archive and works at a Jeanne Lanvin black lacquer Art Deco desk, marked a new phase in the history of the house, continuing a remarkable history well into the twenty-first century.

Further reading:
Jeanne Lanvin's career is magnificently illustrated and documented in Dean L. Merceron's
Lanvin
(2007). An introduction by Harold Koda analyses in detail why Lanvin has been overlooked by fashion historians. Elizabeth Barille's
Lanvin
(1997) is a concise introduction to her work.

The most celebrated fashion designer in history, Gabrielle (‘Coco') Chanel continues to be treated with reverence nearly forty years after her death. No designer can match her for influence on the modern women's wardrobe. No designer, with the exception of Karl Lagerfeld, inheritor of her mantle at the house of Chanel, has thrived for so long. Her Parisian fashion house was launched as early as 1915, reached remarkable heights in the 1920s and 1930s and blossomed once again in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mademoiselle, as she was always called by her employees, took concepts from sportswear and men's clothing and turned them into practical, effortlessly elegant clothes for women, launching her revolution at a time when women's fashion was so overwrought that many wealthy women could not dress themselves without assistance. Her early contemporaries recognised her achievements through gritted teeth. For Paul Poiret, Chanel's clothes were ‘miserabilisme de luxe'. While he explored bright colours and great swathes of fabric, Chanel pared down her design message time and time again. Call it functional chic; she was synonymous with the concept that ‘less is more'. She did not sketch, preferring to work directly on a model's body, with sessions often lasting many hours with no break. Photographer Cecil Beaton, lunching with her in the twilight of her career in 1965, recalls the way she moulded the napkins in the restaurant. He was captivated by this small woman with hard black eyes who spoke in a torrent of words. Publisher and journalist John Fairchild watched Chanel at the age of eighty cut an armhole on a live model, drawing blood.

To her artist connections, she was often extravagantly generous. In the atelier and with her employees, she was tough, demanding and ruthless—qualities that won her few friends and made her increasingly isolated in later life. Money, and the making of money, certainly transfixed her, giving her the independence she cherished so much. ‘She possessed the wily foxiness of a country horse trader,' her lawyer Robert Chaillet said.

But there was something more to Chanel. She had an exceptional ability to scent change in the air, an attribute common to the handful of designers who were influential throughout their careers. ‘Fashion is something in the air,' she said. ‘You feel it coming, you smell it.'

Her life story is as remarkable as her talents as a designer. She was born Gabrielle Chasnel, the illegitimate daughter of market traders, in a poor-house hospice in Saumur in 1883. Her mother died when she was only twelve, so the young Gabrielle spent much of her childhood in an orphanage near Brive-la-Gaillarde. At the age of eighteen she was accepted as a charity student at a convent boarding school in Moulins and attracted attention for her striking looks, particularly her elegant long neck and deep black eyes. Local trader Henri Desboutin hired her as a shop assistant in his lingerie and hosiery shop. Chanel sang for a while at a local music hall, La Rotonde, where she gained the name Coco, after a lost dog in a popular song of the time. She was boosted in her early career by the support of a succession of wealthy and well-connected lovers; these connections also permitted her to rise far beyond the social status usually associated with
dressmakers or couturiers. Her first lover, Etienne Balsan, owned an estate in Royallieu, where she lived for several years: he subsidised her first solo business selling hats from his apartment on boulevard Malesherbes. There then followed a passionate liaison with Captain Arthur Capel, known as Boy, an English playboy and polo player. He financed her first project in the rue Cambon, the Paris street that has become synonymous with her name. A small hat shop opened in 1910, followed by a boutique in the seaside resort of Deauville in 1913, selling knit separates and dresses. Biographers agree that Boy was the big love of her life; his death in a car crash in 1919 was a devastating blow.

Her rise to fame was rapid and based on applying her own pared-down personal style to her business. That style was founded on knits and flannels, materials generally considered only appropriate for sports clothing. In later life, she liked to say her fortune was built on an old jersey jumper borrowed from Boy that she had customised by snipping through the front to create a cardigan. She borrowed ideas heavily from men's clothing, ransacking her lovers' wardrobes for inspiration, dressing her adolescent-boy physique in clothes that had been endlessly reworked to achieve the perfect fit. In her personal life, men brought her both great happiness and sadness. But in her professional life, there was no contest: magazine editor Alexander Liberman believed she learned all her sense of elegance from men.

By 1915, she had opened a fashion house in Biarritz, subsidised by Boy. A year later, she produced her first full collection, unveiled in Biarritz to immediate and widespread acclaim. It included her take on a men's sweater, with the neckline cut lower and a ribbon through the buttonholes, paired with a pleated skirt. Also included was a khaki jersey skirt suit with a jacket shape like a male army jacket. It should be remembered that this was wartime, when practical dressing was de rigueur. A year after the First World War ended, Chanel officially registered as a couturière and set up at 31 rue Cambon, where the house of Chanel is still located today. Together with Jean Patou, whose contribution has been underestimated, she brought simplicity and practicality to fashion in the 1920s. She blew away the ostentation of belle époque fashion, producing accessible clothes that continued to borrow heavily from the working man's wardrobe. The youthful energy and vigour of Chanel's clothes chimed with the open-air sports-obsessed mood of the times.

In the early 1920s, she was the arch exponent of the garçonne or flapper look, the boyish style that dominated the decade. Her women wore sweaters, short pleated skirts with dropped waistlines and cloche hats. Boni de Castellane, a Parisian dandy, said: ‘Women no longer exist. All that's left are the boys created by Chanel.' The little black dress, a reaction to Paul Poiret's orientalist colours and derived from the chemise dress, was a signature piece. Previously, black was for mourning clothes only; Chanel made it chic. Black and white, for her, created a ‘perfect harmony'. In 1926, American
Vogue
made a celebrated comparison with the Ford motor car: ‘Here is Ford signed Chanel—the frock that all the world will wear.' After the shock of Boy's death in 1919, Chanel dallied briefly with the Grand Duke Dmitri of Russia, picking up a penchant for all things Russian, including oversized pieces of jewellery, that fed into her collections. Perhaps more important was her friendship (and on-off romance) with Misia Sert, a well-connected society hostess with a fiery temperament to match Chanel's own mercurial personality and friends scattered throughout the art world, such as Cocteau, Picasso, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. The quick-witted Chanel adapted quickly to this milieu and the two women enjoyed a long-lasting love-hate friendship.

Her love life continued to flourish, culminating in an intense relationship with the Duke of Westminster, known to his friends as Bendor, the richest man in Britain. She admired his British tweeds, which she turned into coats for her customers, trimmed with fur for a luxurious and softer look. She even created flared trousers inspired by the sailors' bell-bottoms on Bendor's yacht. Meanwhile, he widened her social circle to include dignitaries on both sides of the channel, most notably Winston Churchill. All the riches of the world were now hers to enjoy; nothing and no one was beyond her orbit. The orphan girl had come a long way. But the Duke chose to marry elsewhere in 1930, leaving Chanel alone again. Her solution was to plough herself into her work. During the 1930s, the house of Chanel achieved new
heights, with a team of some 4,000 employees and production of up to 28,000 dresses a year. A brief flirtation with Hollywood aside, Chanel was based in Paris, where she slept at her suite in the Ritz hotel and received guests in her apartment in the rue Cambon. A fierce rivalry with Elsa Schiaparelli, both personal and professional, gave a competitive edge to her work. Yet another lover, the illustrator and designer Paul Iribe, held out hope of marriage once again. However, after four years together, he died of a heart attack in 1935, collapsing right before her at their holiday home in Roquebrune in the south of France.

The advent of war with Germany in 1939 created hardship for all the Paris couturiers. Chanel's business solution was to close the couture house but to keep open the boutique, selling only her celebrated Chanel No. 5 scent and accessories. Her personal solution—finding a German lover, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who was both a diplomat and a spy—proved an unmitigated disaster. When the war ended, Chanel was arrested, accused of treachery and forced into exile in Switzerland. For years, with her personal reputation in tatters, she mooched around Lausanne with occasional visits to Paris. Not until 1954, at the age of 70, did she astonish the Paris fashion world by announcing her comeback.

Dwindling sales of Chanel No.5 prompted the Wertheimers, the family that owned the rights to the scent, to make an extraordinary offer to Chanel. She would sell the house of Chanel to them, while they in return would pay all her bills for the rest of her life. With the deal sewn up, Chanel set about recapturing the magic of her pre-war house. The first show, staged on 5 February 1954 and attended by an adolescent Karl Lagerfeld, was not an instant success. The collection was like a ‘time warp', recalled one junior American
Vogue
editor. But Bettina Ballard, then editor of French
Vogue
, felt differently. Her eye was caught by a navy blue wool-jersey suit that, she felt, summed up Chanel's style. The jacket had square shoulders and was lightly padded with patch pockets and sleeves that unbuttoned to reveal white cuffs. The Chanel suit remains one of the great creations of modern fashion. The armhole was crucial, always small and high, constantly reshaped by Chanel herself to create a close fit. This emphasised the slenderness and fragility of the wearer's shoulders and neck. Another internal detail, a gold chain sewn into the hems of the jacket, ensured that the jacket hung straight and did not ride up. The essential accessories included a hat, flesh-coloured stockings and two-toned sling-back shoes. As for jewellery, Chanel did not stint, from her trademark strings of pearls to her enjoyment in mixing both fake and real, which appears particularly modern from a twenty-first century perspective.

Within three collections, Chanel had made a spectacular comeback. The girl who came from nowhere now made the suit that every young high-society woman chose to wear. The suit was copied relentlessly in America and Europe, bringing Chanel style to a generation of women who could not afford couture prices. In her later years, Chanel became a French icon. She surrounded herself with her cabinet of young models and a close-knit circle of trusted friends and servants. Many of the celebrated Chanel maxims emerged from the 1960s, such as: ‘A woman's education consists of two lessons: never to leave the house without stockings, never to go out without a hat.'