Coco Chanel Read online

  Limited by her Paris lease to the sale of hats only, in 1919 she moved a few doors down the street to 31 rue Cambon, where the flagship Chanel store is still located today. As a means of advertising her boutique, Chanel adorned her sister Antoinette and dear friend and aunt, Adrienne, with her clothes and they strode the streets of Paris. Potential customers were as curious about the new designer as the new designs. The story goes that a woman admitted openly to Chanel that she had come to the store purely to see her, the eccentric creature behind the latest Parisian fashion trends.

  Chanel struggled daily with anxiety attacks. She suffered from fainting spells and a mild form of agoraphobia or claustrophobia, so much so that she stopped going to mass. The anxiety that plagued her was likely a combination of past trauma and uncertainty about the future, especially her relationship with Capel. But her work gave her a sense of stability that always tended to right her ship. She would eventually discover that Capel had deposited bank securities to guarantee her business, meaning that what she was earning was not paying off her debt to him as she had been led to believe. This realization was the last straw for Chanel, who from that point on vowed to make a fortune and secure her financial independence once and for all. Chanel asserted later that Capel told her he had funded her business to give her a plaything, but alas it gave her freedom.

  Out on the town...in pants

  Wearing her new lounging pajamas, 1931

  At the outbreak of World War I, Chanel’s business was flourishing. Capel, having joined the British army, urged Chanel to leave Paris for Deauville, the small seaside resort in the north of France where she had opened a boutique. Capel rented a villa there, allegedly for his ponies, but it also afforded Chanel a place to live. Deauville was the perfect spot for Chanel to find success. The majority of the town’s inhabitants were wealthy, elite members of Parisian society escaping the confines of the city, the perfect target market for Chanel’s designs. Furthermore, the relaxed, yet simultaneously chic, style that epitomized her clothing was infinitely more suited to the resort lifestyle than the heavier fabrics and excessive material that dominated Belle Époque fashions.

  In Monte Carlo, 1931, with the dancer Serge Lifar of the Ballet Russes

  Chanel (right) with the actress Ina Claire on the set of the movie The Greeks Had a Word for Them for which Chanel designed the costumes, 1931

  Inevitable wartime restrictions made traditional fabrics very hard to come by. For many dressmakers this presented an insurmountable problem, but not for Chanel. Her business acuity and knack for making the ordinary extraordinary allowed her to see the possibilities of a fabric once only used for men’s underwear—jersey. Jersey was a natural for Chanel who used its fluidity to flatter the female form and to give casual clothes needed comfort and give. Thanks to her continued success, even in the midst of a devastating world war, Chanel opened a third shop in 1915 in Biarritz, a luxurious resort town in southwestern France on the Bay of Biscay.

  Biarritz’s reputation as the “in” spot was cemented when in the mid-19th century the wife of Napoleon III, Empress Eugenie, built a vacation palace there. Fifty years later a casino was added to the mix of pleasures the town offers visitors. To this day, Biarritz still attracts the rich and famous, but no longer boasts a Chanel boutique; it was closed in 1939 along with the Deauville boutique at the start of World War II. The vacationers in Biarritz, just as in Deauville, snatched up Chanel’s jersey jackets, skirts, and striped boat-neck shirts, reminiscent of those sailors wore. In the throes of war, the simplicity of Chanel’s fashions became increasingly appropriate.

  Hoisted on the shoulders of the dancer Serge Lifar, Chanel is draped in the pearls bestowed upon her regularly by her lover, the Duke of Westminster; trimmed in her jewelried cuffs designed by Fulco Santostefano della Cerda, the Duke of Verdura, who was in her employ; and cork sandals made by a Venice bootmaker at her behest

  Wearing one of the earliest Chanel suits, 1932

  Capel may truly have loved Chanel, but he did not view her as marriage material. He married the British socialite, Diana Wyndham, the daughter of a lord, in 1918. His engagement and marriage did not deter him from his affair with Chanel, but her dreams of one day marrying him were permanently crushed. In December 1919 Capel was killed in a car accident. The loss devastated Chanel. He had been traveling from Paris to Cannes with his mechanic when one of the car’s tires exploded and he lost control of the car, injuring the mechanic and killing Capel.

  Chanel heard the news a few days after the accident from her old friend, Leon de Laborde, whom she had met at Royallieu years earlier. Chanel quickly packed a bag and drove with Laborde to Cannes where Capel’s funeral was to be held. Chanel sat up the entire night, refusing the bed that Capel’s sister offered her, never shedding a tear. The next day, rather than attend the funeral, she went to the scene of the accident. The charred skeleton of the car had not yet been removed from the road and the wreckage was there for the shattered Chanel to relive Capel’s last moments; his body had been burned beyond recognition. Her emotions finally overwhelmed her as she collapsed to the ground and wept. Capel was completely lost to her in an emotional and physical sense, yet his soul remained tethered to her through the business he had helped her establish.

  In testament to how much Chanel meant to him, Capel left her £40,000 from his estate, not that much less than the £70,000 he left his wife. A bit of a comeuppance to Chanel, however, was that he left an equal amount to an Italian countess, presumably another of his lovers, whose husband had been killed during the war. As was typical of Chanel, she used the money wisely and invested in her growing fashion house by expanding her Paris shop. This is perhaps the exact purpose that Capel had in mind for her inheritance.

  With Fulco di Verdura at the Bal des Vaises hosted by Baron Nicolas “Niki” de Gunzburg and Prince and Princess Jean- Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge in July 1934; the theme of the evening was the Imperial Court of Vienna, Austria, in 1860.

  Chanel had enough money left over to buy a villa in Garches, a largely residential community on the western outskirts of Paris. She named the villa Bel Respiro, or “deep breath” in Italian, precisely what Chanel hoped her secluded villa would allow her to take. In mourning for her beloved Capel, she ordered that all the window shades be painted black so that when they were closed the house would look as if it had shut its eyes. In a sweeping gesture of mourning, she had turned her previous bedroom black, from the walls to the bed linens, following Capel’s death. The paint was hardly dry when she regretted the decision.

  By this time, Chanel was setting style, not merely adding to the conversation. The fashion magazine Vogue featured her sports suits in 1916, the year her first couture collection debuted. Her contribution was not just in clothing and millinery, but in her personal style as well, and could be no more cutting edge than when she sheared off her long, thick hair. The public adored her new schoolboy bob and it rapidly became the rage along with the red-hot jazz of roaring-twenties Paris. True or false, Chanel’s tale of how she came to cut her hair just adds to her allure as a mysterious muse in the world of fashion. She claimed that an explosion of a gas burner in her apartment resulted not only in her radical haircut, but also inspired her “little black dress” that quickly became a classic wardrobe staple for women of all ages, then and now. As she was dressing for an evening at the opera, she found she could not get the water warm enough to wash her face. She was dressed in a simply cut white dress. As she tried to adjust the pilot light, suddenly it exploded and covered her once-pristine dress with soot, turning it black. Her hair was also singed, so she grabbed a nearby pair of scissors and lopped it off into a bob. After Boy Capel died so suddenly and harshly, Chanel’s “little black dress” probably took on new meaning for her as yet another symbol of mourning for her lost lover.

  The next object of Chanel’s affections was not a man, but a woman. The exact nature of the relationship was never known, perhaps more a love built on mutual admiration and infatuat
ion, although the gossips speculate that it was in fact a romantic love. The woman who Chanel doted on was Misia Sert, one of the most well-known women in Paris at the time.

  A portrait by Man Ray, c. 1935

  Misia was bom in St. Petersburg in 1872. Her father was a sculptor, Cyprian Godebski, who was originally from Poland. Misia’s mother, Sophie, the daughter of the virtuoso Belgian cellist Adrien-François Servais, died giving birth to her, setting off a series of events uncannily similar to Chanel’s own childhood. Godebski had no real interest in his child, sending her to a convent in the heart of Paris at the age of 10. She only occasionally visited her father and stepmother in their mansion in Paris’ Polish district. When Misia was 15 years old her stepmother died and she was made to kiss her corpse just as Chanel claims she was made to kiss her mother’s corpse.

  Like Chanel, Misia tried to alter her birth certificate. But unlike Chanel, Misia’s life stories, despite often sounding too fantastic to be true, are all verifiably accurate. Misia married a Polish lawyer when she was 21 years old, divorcing four years later. She then engaged in a series of fast and furious romances, eventually marrying Alfred Edwards, a wealthy newspaper magnate. Edwards proved to be exceptionally jealous. Misia recounted how, during a trip to Madrid, Spain, he locked her in the hotel room all day long.

  Eventually, Edwards lost interest in Misia, shifting his affections to a bisexual prostitute-turned-actress, Genevieve Lantelme, whom he married a year after his and Misia’s divorce was finalized. Lantelme died two years later from falling off-or being pushed, it was never clear- Edwards’ yacht into the Seine. Three years later, Edwards was dead. In the meantime, Misia met José-Maria Sert. Sert was a prominent artist. His frescoes and Rococo- esque murals adorn the ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City as well as the walls of Rockefeller Center. The couple quickly became very prominent in the Paris social scene although they did not marry until 1920, a dozen years after their first introduction.

  Chanel and Misia met in 1917 at a dinner party hosted by a mutual acquaintance, Cecile Sorel. Sorel, a glamorous French stage actress, was a frequent client of Chanel. Misia, enthralled by Chanel’s quiet, mysterious aura across the dining table, requested that she be seated beside her after the meal. They exchanged pleasantries until Chanel rose to leave. Misia complimented her on her red velvet, fur-trimmed evening coat. Chanel promptly draped it over Misia’s shoulders, insisting it was now hers. Misia refused the generous gift, but Chanel’s gesture bewitched her.

  Framed by her coromandel screens in a photograph by Boris Lipnitzki, 1937

  The next morning Misia unexpectedly dropped by Chanel’s boutique, and Chanel invited Misia and Jose to dinner at her apartment that evening. It was the beginning of a very close friendship, so close that Chanel felt throughout her life that Misia was her only true female friend. Even so, she came to believe that Misia’s strong attachment to her coincided with the death of Capel. According to Justine Picardie in her book Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life (HarperCollins, 2010), Chanel remarked about Misia that “I have seen her appear at the moment of my greatest grieving; other people’s grief lures her, just as fragrances lure the bee.”

  Competitiveness characterized the women’s interactions although the bitterness seemed to come more from Chanel than Misia; in some ways theirs was a love/hate relationship. Friction between the two lurched into view when Chanel accompanied Misia and Jose on their honeymoon to Italy in 1920. Misia, a pianist, was a great patron of the arts. Sergei Diaghilev, the director of the Ballets Russes, was a fast friend. In Venice, the two were overheard by Chanel discussing how best to raise the necessaiy funds to revive the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps.

  Their closeness must have struck a jealous nerve with Chanel, for as soon as they were back in Paris, Chanel approached Diaghilev with an offer to fund the production, but only if he would not breath a word of it to anyone. She must have hoped to create a bond between them that would threaten the pre-existing bond with Misia. The ruse apparently worked. The ensuing collaboration between Chanel and Diaghilev marked her official entrance into the Parisian art scene. Two years later, in 1922, Jean Cocteau asked Chanel to design the costumes for his stage adaptation of the Greek tragedy Antigone ; Picasso was commissioned to design the sets. In 1924, the trio once again collaborated on the Ballet Russes production of Le Train Blue, or The Blue Train.

  Coco Chanel, by Cecil Beaton, 1937, from the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Sotheby’s London

  Portrait by Horst P. Horst, 1937

  Diaghilev was not the only one of Misia’s acquaintances Chanel would choose to befriend; Pierre Reverdy would be her next conquest. Reverdy was an impoverished poet living in the Bohemian section of Paris known as Montmartre when Misia first encountered him and his work. He lived with his wife, Henriette-a seamstress-and worked primarily as a writer, self-publishing poems that his wife would bind together for him. He also edited a short-lived yet influential publication, Nord-Sud, with Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, the latter of which was responsible for introducing Pablo Picasso to Georges Braque.

  This period following World War I marked a very important time in the evolution of all things artistic, with many writers and artists living in close quarters in the City of Light, dedicating themselves to their dreams and ideas, influencing each other, converging to create something new and exciting the world had never seen. This is the culture that Misia and Chanel rubbed elbows with daily and that Misia, in particular, dedicated herself to supporting through her salons.

  When Misia discovered Reverdy, she did not hesitate to usher him into her world, inviting him to dinner parties and introducing him to her friends. As did so many budding artists of the time, Reverdy owed much of his future success to Misia, just as Chanel owed her success to Capel, Balsan, and their acquaintances. Not long after Capel’s death, Misia introduced Chanel to Reverdy, perhaps in an effort to get Chanel’s mind off of her lover’s tragic fate or as a means to shift Reverdy’s affections from her to Chanel. Reverdy-despite having a wife-had fallen head over heels for Misia; his love would remain unrequited.

  Once Reverdy met Chanel, he did indeed focus his affections on her and soon was dependent on her patronage. While she devoted herself to reading his prose and poetry, he created a collection of her original aphorisms, or quotes. The idea to record her sayings was partially inspired by Francois de La Rochefoucauld’s 17th- century publication Maximes. A few examples of Chanel’s “maxims” edited by Reverdy include:

  “If you were bom without wings, do nothing to prevent their growing.”

  “Luxury is a necessity that begins where necessity ends.”

  “True generosity means accepting ingratitude.”

  “To disguise oneself is charming; to have oneself disguised is sad.”

  Chanel reclining on the luxurious suede divan in her apartment over the Chanel boutique at 31 rue Cambon, 1937

  In 1921 Chanel hit yet another important milestone with the creation of what has become one of, if not the most, universally well-known, classic perfumes—Chanel N°5. Chanel was introduced to the prominent French parfumier Ernest Beaux, from Grasse, a coastal town in southern France considered to be the world capital of perfume, by her then-lover, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. Beaux was well known to Russian royalty as their parfumier of choice. With the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution, Beaux relocated to the south of France. There he established a laboratory where he attempted to replicate a scent he had first encountered in the northern wilds of Russia, so far north the sun never set on certain days of the year. The scent recalled the crystal clear arctic water of the streams, lakes, and rivers that sparkled in the ever- present sunlight and produced the freshest of nature’s multitude of fragrances.

  Beaux’s quest captivated Chanel, no doubt not only for its grand aspirations, but also as a potential moneymaking opportunity. Beaux selected 10 variations of the scent, N°1-5 and N°20-24, from which she chose N°5. They decided to keep N°5 as the name be
cause Chanel was presenting her new collection on the fifth day of the fifth month of the year, May 5. She firmly believed that the number five was her lucky number, this belief having its genesis in her years at the abbey in Aubazine. An anecdote about N°5 that illustrates Chanel’s indomitable flair for marketing her creations goes like this: Leaving Beaux’s laboratory having settled on the final scent, they dined with friends at a very fashionable restaurant. Sitting at the table, Chanel clandestinely sprayed passing female patrons with the new N°5. Later, pre-production, she continuously sprayed her boutiques in Paris, Deauville, and Biarritz and would hand out sample vials to customers in a rather ahead-of- her-time marketing campaign.

  Hunting with Winston Churchill, who is believed to have played a major role in her exile to Switzerland after World War II when she was suspected of being a Nazi collaborator

  Gloria Swanson wearing a Chanel design created for the 1931 movie Tonight or Never

  The origin of the perfume bottle’s iconic design is swathed in mystery. Some say Chanel designed the bottle with its square, faceted comers after a favorite decanter of Boy Capel or one of his toiletry bottles, whereas others claim its shape is reminiscent of the outline of the Place Vendôme visible from her suite at the Ritz hotel. The bottle design on store shelves today remains unchanged from its debut in 1924, although the glass stopper has experienced several iterations. The rectangular design of the glass stopper as seen from above is believed to have taken its shape from a wall mirror in Chanel’s rue Cambon apartment. The original bottle design was curved and very delicate, so delicate that it could not withstand the trials of shipping necessary for wide distribution, hence the adoption of a second, sturdier design.