Coco Chanel Read online

  Leaving Dallas with Neiman Marcus hatbox in hand as Stanley Marcus bids her “adieu,” 1957

  With Stanley Marcus of Neiman Marcus department stores on a visit to Dallas, 1957

  At work (left); a fitting with the model Paule Rizzo, 1950s (right)

  A needed adjustment, 1950s

  With a negative reception in Europe, Chanel focused her sights on America. Life magazine helped her gain traction in the States with a four-page spread published in 1954 titled “The Name behind the Most Famous Perfume in the World.” The magazine ignored the rumors surrounding Chanel during the war years and loudly applauded her latest designs. To everyone’s surprise (and Ballard’s vindication), Chanel’s new collection was an uncompromising hit and her workshop was flooded with orders, not only from America but also from Europe. Chanel’s designs remained timeless, as well as practical, rising to the demands of the modem woman. Celebrities, royals, the fashion elite, everyone recognized this incontrovertible truth no matter their opinions of her past. The proof was self- evident. Chanel’s design acumen was a force to be reckoned with.

  Surrounded by the models Ghislaine Arsac, Marie-Hélène Arnaud, Suzy Parker, Odile de Cröy, Paule Rizzo, Mimi d’Arcangues, Gisèle Rosenthal and Paule de Mérindol in 1959

  Reviewing her handiwork as a model poses, 1958

  To celebrate her rise from the ashes of retirement and tainted reputation, Chanel reintroduced her classic handbag in 1955. She named the quilted, gold- chain-wrapped strapped bag 2.55 after the month she created it, February 1955. It is doubtful that the appearance of two fives, Chanel’s lucky number, is merely coincidence.

  In 1957, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Texas-headquartered Neiman Marcus luxury department store, Chanel received an award from its president, Stanley Marcus, proclaiming her “the most influential designer of the twentieth century.” Chanel flew to Dallas, Texas, for the award ceremony After a three-week stay she jetted to New York City to be interviewed by New Yorker magazine. It’s no wonder that after the aloofness and criticism of the Europeans (justified or not), Chanel was thrilled to be in the welcoming, relaxed, and accepting United States.

  When Chanel returned to Paris in 1954 to reopen her couture salon, she sold her beloved villa, La Pausa, on the French Riviera to an American couple from Texas, Emery Reves and his wife, Wendy. After living in the villa for almost 30 years, Reves’ widow donated much of the furniture and artwork in the villa to the Dallas Museum of Art, where five rooms of La Pausa have been recreated and are on display.

  For years, Chanel followed a sacred routine. As she left the Ritz, where she slept night after night, for the five-minute walk to 31 rue Cambon, the hotel called ahead to say she was on her way. The call signaled a liberal spraying of her signature scent, Chanel N°5, along the staircase that rose to her rue Cambon apartment. The moment Chanel entered her boutique an assistant gracefully draped a pair of scissors attached to a long white ribbon around the designer’s neck. No doubt Chanel chose a white ribbon to blend easily with the multiple strands of white pearls she always wore around her neck; every special occasion had been justification for yet another strand, happily bestowed on her by the Duke of Westminster throughout their seven years together.

  With a Chanel model, 1962

  Throughout her life, Chanel strove for perfection, known to alter one suit in the minutest ways up to 35 times in a sitting. As she aged, Chanel focused on her true love: innovative, but practical fashion. She worked until she could work no longer. Death claimed her suddenly. Working feverishly on a Saturday to complete her new collection, she was forced to relax the following day because it was Sunday. After a leisurely lunch with her dear friend Claude Delay at the Ritz, they went for a drive through the streets of Paris, observing the crowds from a safely removed distance. When she returned after dark to the Ritz, she lay down on the bed fully clothed, too exhausted to ask her maid Celine for help to undress. It wasn’t long before Chanel called out to Celine that she was having difficulty breathing. Celine went to her mistress after opening a window and attempted to help Chanel inject herself in the hip with her nightly dose of morphine, taken for many years to help her sleep. In the morning, Chanel’s soul was gone.

  At the age of 87, Chanel was buried wearing one of her white suits, her casket dressed in white flowers—amellias, gardenias, orchids, and azaleas—and a single wreath of red roses. The funeral service was at L’Eglise de la Madeleine, a church not far from rue Cambon. She was buried in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the banks of Lac Leman. Chanel’s funeral was attended by her models, dressed like little soldiers in their leader’s designs. The other prominent couturiers—almain, Balenciaga, Courrèges—also paid their respects to the indomitable Coco. So many of Chanel’s partners in crime had preceded her in death, but Salvadore Dalí, with whom she was rumored to have had an affair, was there to say one last and heartfelt good-bye.

  COCO CHANEL: HER PERFUMES

  The drawing above, by the artist Sem, was the original advertisement for Chanel N°5 perfume. The ad on the opposite page first ran in 1937. Chanel represented her own scent, posed leaning on the mantle of the fireplace in her apartment at the Ritz hotel in Paris. The text reads: “Madame Gabrielle Chanel is above all an artist in living. Her dresses, her perfumes, are created with a faultless instinct for drama. Her Perfume N°5 is like the soft music that underlies the playing of a love scene. It kindles the imagination; indelibly fixes the scene in the memories of the players.” The other Chanel perfumes at the time were Glamour de Chanel, Gardenia de Chanel, and Cuir de Russe (Russian Leather). Today’s collection includes Chanel’s namesake fragrance Coco and its variations-Coco Mademoiselle and Coco Noir-Chance, N°19 (her birthdate), Allure, and Cristalle.

  COCO CHANEL: HER CLOTHES

  Chanel is almost completely single-handedly responsible for the way women dress today. The number of firsts that she racked up is unprecedented. It all began with a simple decoration aptly placed on a straw boater, then unconstructed sweaters of wool jersey, the chemise dress, ankle-baring skirts topped by belted coats, and wide sailor-collared blouses with large pockets intended to be used. During World War I she trimmed her coats in fur, using beaver and rabbit which were much easier to come by than finer furs (and were also more affordable) and introduced lounging pajamas, cardigans, and twinsets. She matched coat linings with blouses. After the war, in tribute to her current love interest, Russian Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Chanel embroidered peasant blouses, using sophisticated fabrics such as black crepe de chine. Sporting wide- bottomed trousers and cork-soled sandals on the Lido in Venice, she began yet another trend. She used square necklines when other fashion houses were not, and draped her models in strand after strand of faux pearls, reminiscent of her pearls, gifts from the Duke of Westminster. It was Chanel who first strove to design costume jewelry that looked real (vrais bijoux en toc). During her lengthy relationship with the Duke of Westminster, she brought tweed into her collection. She dropped waistlines, raised hemlines further, and fashioned the first “little black dress,” a straight-lined little number in the garçonne, or “little boy,” style. In 1929, inspired by soldiers’ satchels, Chanel added straps to handbags so women could carry them easily on their shoulders. After her return to the fashion industry in 1954, Chanel updated her classic strapped bag, naming it 2.55 in honor of its creation in February 1955, and reintroduced two-tone pumps. Chanel shirked the mini-skirt, relying instead on the classic suits and accessories she believed best flattered the female form. Vogue magazine quotes the grand couturier as calling short skirts “the most absurd weapon woman has ever employed to seduce men.”

  Prêt-á-porter (ready-to-wear) casual jersey dresses, 1917

  Chanel’s “ little black dress ” first introduced in 1926 as seen in a fashion magazine of the era (left) and in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, dating from 1924-25 (right)

  In 1924, Chanel designed costumes for the Ballet Russes production The Blue
Train. The costumes are now housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The two shown above were created from knitted wool and wool, respectively.

  A black cocktail dress, c. 1957, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the classic 2.55 quilted flap bag named after the date it was created, February 1955. Chanel introduced its predecessor in 1929, but updated the design to celebrate her comeback in the fashion industry a year earlier. A sketch for one design of many of the Chanel suit from the 1950s-60s.

  COCO CHANEL: HER QUOTES

  “As long as you know men are like children, you know everything!”

  “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.”

  “A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.”

  “Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.”

  “A women who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.”

  “Fashion fades, only style remains the same.”

  “Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.”

  “Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.”

  “Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.”

  “Elegance does not consist in putting on a new dress.”

  A portrait by Boris Lipnitski, 1936

  “Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.”

  “Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”

  “I am against fashion that doesn’t last. I cannot accept that you throw your clothes away just because it is spring.”

  “It is always better to be slightly underdressed.”

  “There have been several Duchesses of Westminster but there is only one Chanel!”

  “Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.”

  “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.”

  “Elegance comes from being as beautiful inside as outside.”

  “Nothing is more beautiful than freedom of the body.”

  “Look for the woman in the dress. If there is no woman, there is no dress.”

  COCO CHANEL: HER APARTMENT

  Chanel never slept in her apartment over her boutique, preferring instead to sleep at the Ritz, a short walk away. She filled her rue Cambon apartment with all the things she loved: coromandel screens, vermeille cigarette boxes given to her by the Duke of Westminster, tailored furniture, crystal balls, books, repeated motifs of shafts of wheat, lions to celebrate her birth sign of Leo, and her lucky number five, found even in the gilded arms of a chandeleir.

  Chanel covered her deep sofa in beige suede, an unusual fabric choice for the era. As always, she anticipated the future of design, be it in clothing or in interiors

  Chanel’s apartment remains as it was on the day she died in 1971, an avowal of her elegant taste, her love of luxury- with the exception of two items. The silk slipper chair on which she was reclining when photographed by Horst in 1937 (right) was purchased at auction and added to the apartment’s furnishings as well as a small chair that Chanel sat in to do her fittings. The energy of Chanel that reverberates in her apartment is only intensified by these two very personal furnishings.

  Chanel standing in the salon of her 31 rue Cambon apartment; a modern facsimile of the gilt sheaf-of- wheat table base that appears to her immediate left in the photograph is shown at right with a glass top. Chanel in her inimitable way had topped it with a laquered black tray with inlaid design.

  COCO CHANEL: HER CLIENTS

  Immediately popular with the artistocratic and wealthy set, Chanel’s fashions have always adorned high- profile clients who very effectively marketed her clothes, hats, and accessories for her—simply through the act of wearing them. In the 1920s, her clients expanded to the dancers of the Ballet Russes and the actors in her friend Jean Cocteau’s plays, and in the 1930s to movie stars after a short-lived stint in Hollywood under a $1 million contract to Samuel Goldwyn’s United Artists studio. Both Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich became big fans of Chanel.

  After her return from exile in Switzerland in 1954, Chanel was asked to costume several actresses in French films, among them Ingrid Bergman, Jeanne Moreau, and Delphine Seyrig. Grace Kelly, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Romy Schneider, Barbra Streisand, and Jackie Kennedy were just a few of the highly photographed women who wore Chanel’s designs for the world to see. And Marilyn Monroe quipped that the only thing she wore to bed was a few drops of Chanel N°5. Since Chanel’s death in 1971, the fashion empire the designer, innovator, and style-setter built and rebuilt continues to thrive, dressing the likes of Princess Diana, Madonna, and Jerry Hall.

  Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, in a tweed suit by Chanel

  Marilyn Monroe applying Chanel N°5, 1954

  Elizabeth Taylor, accompanied by her husband Eddie Fisher, wears Chanel, 1961.

  Chanel outfitted Jeanne Moreau for Roger Vadim’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses; Moreau is wearing a Chanel suit on a visit with the designer in her rue Cambon apartment, 1959.

  It is now believed that the iconic pink suit Jackie Kennedy wore on November 22, 1963, in Dallas was a Chanel knock-off made in New York City’s Garment District.

  COCO CHANEL: HER RIVAL

  Paul Poiret, who introduced the kimono coat in the early 1900s, paved the way for the unstructured, uncorseted clothes championed by Chanel and her main rival in the years between the two world wars, the Italian-born Elsa Schiaperelli. Schiaperelli’s designs were hugely influenced by Surrealist artists, such as Salvador Dalí and Alberto Giacometti, who were her friends. Just like Poiret, for whom World War I marked the end of a thriving business, World War II began the decline of Schiaperelli’s fashion house. Schiaperelli was unable to adjust to the post-war design aesthetic and closed her business in 1954, the same year Chanel reappeared in Paris to reclaim her reputation.

  A model posing in a Schiaparelli suit outside the designer’s Place Vendôme shop, 1947, Schiaperelli wearing an evening dress of her own design, 1929 (immediate right), and in a moment of repose

  Isabella Alston was born in Los Angeles. A citizen of the United States and Switzerland, she considers both Europe and America home. Isabella is a free-lance writer and artist. She lives on the coast of North Carolina with her husband, a U.S. Marine, and their dog, Archer.

  Kathryn Dixon was born and raised in South Carolina. She has lived in New York City, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Geneva, and beautifully bucolic Charlottesville, Virginia, although Charlotte, North Carolina, is currently home. Travel is a favorite pasttime that she indulges in the company of her loving and generous husband.

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