Coco Chanel (14 page)

In all the commentary on Gabrielle the designer, one is told that it was her astounding simplicity that was so radical. However, while bearing in mind that our own perception of past fashion must differ from that of its contemporaries, looking through a cross section of old magazines, Gabrielle's hats do
not
stand out as entirely radical. In the elite magazines, one comes across a handful of other designers who were
also
throwing out the complexity and grandiosity of much contemporary fashion in favor of simplicity. Gabrielle was not alone in thinking “the women I saw at the races wore enormous loaves on their heads; constructions made of feathers and improved with fruits and plumes.”
⁶
The difference was that her designs were more conspicuous because they reflected her own unconventional lifestyle. The other designers were not the live-in mistress of one of the most up-to-date young men in Paris. Gabrielle would say, “In the grandstands they were talking about my amazing, unusual hats, so neat and so austere, which were somehow a foretaste of things to come.”
⁷

Meanwhile, she had stiff competition in quality from the big names in Parisian millinery. The atelier system involved apprentices slowly working their way up under the severe and demanding
premières
. These years of training equipped the best milliners with great craftsmanship, subtlety of design and an inside knowledge of the trade, none of which Gabrielle possessed. The ambitious young woman Gabrielle had filched from the Maison Lewis, Lucienne Rabaté, grew impatient with Gabrielle's refusal to take her advice (to make sure, for example, that a woman and her husband's mistress never met at the Chanel atelier). Instead, Gabrielle squandered attention on a famous courtesan, the kind of undesirable whom Lucienne disdained. Society clients were the prize. Perhaps Gabrielle wasn't so unaware of the nuances, and simply chose to ignore them. She was defiantly comfortable with the courtesans; she admired them, spoke the same language. At least they “worked” for their living and were not out to make her feel socially inadequate.

Lucienne eventually left the Chanel atelier, a story to be repeated many times with Gabrielle's employees. No matter how much more knowledgeable than Gabrielle they might be, they accepted her way or they left. Gabrielle's own unorthodox instincts were, however, to serve her very well. But her intense dislike of selling, or of ingratiating herself with her clients—“The more people came to call on me the more I hid away . . . And I didn't know how to sell; I've never known how to sell. When a customer insisted on seeing me, I went and hid in a cupboard”
⁸
—led to her sister Antoinette's assuming most of this role.

Combining disingenuousness and the capacity for searing truth, Gabrielle was always a bag of contradictions, including the possession of extraordinary confidence and driving fear. Knowing, for example, that if a client found a hat too expensive, she might well reduce it, she kept herself in the background. Her most significant intuition here was the courtesanlike understanding that being enigmatic only made one more fascinating, and she coined the axiom: “A customer seen is a customer surely lost.” Despite the numerous mistakes and the slowness of it all, Gabrielle's determination and growing sense of priorities were assuring her reputation.

There were also lighter moments. When the salon was empty of clients, for example, she and Antoinette could often be heard singing their hearts out in risqué numbers from the
café-concerts
. Business and its lighter moments weren't, however, the only things then on Gabrielle's mind. For the first time, she was truly in love. Not only did she love, she was loved in return, and experienced a rare sense of well-being.

Her lover, meanwhile, was, like her, possessed of tremendous energy; he was forever on the move. After the launch of Deauville's polo club by his friend Armand de Gramont, other grounds had sprung up in a small number of country estates and elite summer resorts and, with his friends, Arthur played them all. Thus, in January 1911,
The New York Times
announced he would play at Cannes, while another newspaper reported his arrival with his polo ponies on the Côte d'Azur. In May, he was taking part in a tournament at Compiègne, and in August he was back competing at Deauville. At Dieppe, and then Châteauroux, in August, Arthur and Etienne Balsan coursed their greyhounds, and then played more polo. The personification of the modern man, Arthur was either in a state of distraction or doing something at breakneck speed.

After the hunting, the galas and the balls, he even managed to find time to expand his fortune. Apparently, Gabrielle didn't feel neglected by her lover's tremendous pace; to a degree, it matched her own. She admired in him “the mindset of a businessman . . . not hampered either by precedent or hierarchy,” and she loved his “eccentricity.” Yet in the whirl of Arthur's life, how much of it included his mistress? A man in the vanguard of his times, he was, for example, a staunch believer in the emancipation of women. No doubt bearing Gabrielle in mind, in a political treatise he was soon to write he would say:

However, with the customary tension between belief and practice, Arthur's actions weren't always quite consistent with his sentiments. It was common knowledge that he lived with his mistress, but where a liberal upper-class hostess might now welcome a bohemian artist, writer or musician into her salon, it was a rare one who yet dared do the same for a tradeswoman. But if attendance with one's mistress was out of bounds in the salons of the haut monde
,
obliging contemporary double standards enabled navigation around such prohibitions. In the theater, in fashionable restaurants and bars, it wasn't only acceptable, it increased one's cachet to be seen out with one's mistress. And at private suppers where fellow diners were not all entirely “respectable,” Gabrielle felt at ease. These people, too, lived at the edge of society.

And yet, largely untrammeled by the constraints of family, Gabrielle had also been left rudderless by her dysfunctional upbringing. With the exception of Adrienne and Antoinette, she saw very little of her family. This was the great significance of her statement that Arthur was her brother, her father, her entire family. Meanwhile, Gabrielle's failure to become a singer in the
café-concerts
in Vichy had left her hankering after something other than hats, and her tremendous energy and rich inner life hadn't yet found an adequate outlet for expression. While Arthur was often away and understood Gabrielle's need for occupation, he now encouraged her in an activity that, although unrelated to her work, did have a bearing on her perception of herself as a modern woman.

Back in the 1870s, France had taken up “physical culture,” and following Britain, sport for men was promoted as patriotic and a healthy and moral outlet for the newly urban masses. Upper-class women, who had enjoyed croquet, archery and horse riding for some time, were now joined by their bourgeois sisters, who also took to the streets in outdoor clothing developed by the English companies Burberry and Aquascutum. Country walks became a favorite feminine pastime. A small fraction of women also took up physical culture and other forms of exercise such as calisthenics, and in the early years of the twentieth century, the idea of exercise as a form of self-expression was developing.

In 1913, the American dancer Isadora Duncan was scandalizing Europe. Her uninhibitedly sensual emphasis upon the expression of emotion and physical improvisation was revolutionary, and deeply shocked many of her contemporaries who were still convinced that the body was a shameful thing. Duncan believed intensely in the idea that we are mind
and
body; her body was not external to her, it
was
her. She rejected formal dancing, including ballet, with its strict rules of posture and formation, because they were “ugly and against nature.” Her following was huge. Whatever Isadora Duncan's pretentiousness and however justified her critics, this woman had responded to the emotional and physical alienation emerging as a side effect of life in the first machine age. She touched many of those who flocked to see her in revealing the very unmachinelike possibility of an unself-conscious relationship with one's body. When the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was completed in 1913, Duncan's reputation was such that her likeness was carved by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle over the entrance, while inside the theater, Duncan appeared in Maurice Denis's murals of the nine muses.

Gabrielle was in search of a means to express something in herself as yet undefined, and now believed that she, too, wanted to be a dancer. Contriving an invitation with a friend to a private performance at Duncan's house, she was game enough to be unimpressed and would remain caustic in her criticism of the great muse. Rejecting such a distinguished teacher, she found instead Elise Toulemon (stage name Caryathis), an early devotee of the dance methods of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze.

In about 1905, while attempting to improve his music students' abilities, Jaques-Dalcroze had created a system of musical education. Naming his “harmonious bodily movement as a form of artistic expression” eurythmics, his intention had neither been an end in itself nor a form of dance. However, the timing was propitious and his ideas had spread quickly across Europe. Suggesting as they did nonballetic dance techniques, the principles of eurythmics would soon be used to develop radically new dance forms. At the same time, by 1912, eurythmics as a form of dance-exercise had become something of a Parisian fashion.

The health-giving aspects of sport, and Isadora Duncan's and Jaques-Dalcroze's philosophies of self-expression, encouraged a small number of young women to take up these ideas as a form of self-development as well as a means of maintaining lithe and exercised bodies. Such attitudes were seen by most contemporaries as distastefully antifeminine, and the young women were regarded as more or less outrageous. They themselves saw their exercising as a kind of emancipation. Reacting against the flaccidness of middle-aged women, made taut by nothing more taxing than a corset, Gabrielle diverted herself with the unconventional idea that physical perfection could be gained only via exercise.

Her dance teacher Elise was most definitely unconventional. Having escaped from a background as impoverished and defective as Gabrielle's, Elise ended up in Montmartre, where her flamboyance had given her a wild reputation. Later, she would make a tempestuous marriage to the troubled homosexual writer Marcel Jouhandeau, but for now, she was one of the dancers at the Théâtre des Arts. In the period when Gabrielle met her—about 1912–13—while Elise's talents as a dancer and choreographer were becoming recognized, to make ends meet she also gave classes in expressive dance. Her extrovert sensuality would be captured in the Russian artist-designer Léon Bakst's poster for the composer Erik Satie's “ballet”
La belle excentrique. La belle excentrique
, Elise, danced her invention in a provocatively scanty outfit designed by a very young poet-artist, Jean Cocteau. Renowned for her wit, her untamed and extravagant personality and her numerous affairs, at the time she and Gabrielle met, Elise was in the midst of a tumultuous relationship with Charles Dullin, the avant-garde actor-producer.

Day after day, Gabrielle climbed up to Elise's studio in Montmartre and then strove to convince her teacher that she
could
become a dancer. Once again, however, she was to be disappointed; after several months, Elise told her that she just wasn't right for the stage. For all her noted grace, was it that some part of Gabrielle remained self-conscious, inhibiting her ability to abandon herself completely? Whatever the reasons for her failure, she was by now devoted to her expressive dance lessons (and her eccentric teacher), and continued with the classes. Convinced by the idea that a beautiful body was a slim and exercised one, for the rest of her life Gabrielle would work to keep hers that way. If she couldn't become a dancer, at least she would have a dancer's body.

9

In 1913, some doubted whether France was still the cultural arbiter to the world, arguing that it had become more fascinated by foreign culture than by its own. While French artists and composers such as Renoir, Braque, Matisse, Ravel, Debussy and Fauré were being seen and heard, it was the innovation of the foreigners—Picasso, Chagall, Apollinaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Arthur Rubinstein, Rachmaninov and the Ballets Russes—that was attracting more animated attention. The foreigners seemed more thrusting in their search for liberation from past aesthetic and moral ideals, from authority and bourgeois conformity. They had traveled, physically and mentally, from the margins to Paris, which they saw as the place where revolution was fermented. The Polish-Italian Frenchman Guillaume Apollinaire understood that an essential element of the modern mentality was exile, the “battle on the frontiers.” The French painter Jacques-Emile Blanche wrote that the French capital had become the central station of Europe, and that “in Paris uncertainty rules.”
¹

 

One May evening in 1913, following much anticipation, the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev presented a new ballet at the avant-garde Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
.
This work embodied the rejection of everything in art and life that its creators regarded as outmoded, and was to become one of the seminal works of the modern era. In the audience on that historic occasion was Gabrielle Chanel, invited by her dance teacher Elise Toulemon. (Eurythmics had become so influential that Diaghilev and his dancer-choreographer, the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky, had visited its founder, Jaques-Dalcroze, to ask for help with the dance movements for their ballet.)