January 9, 2012 |
In her lifetime, everyone had an opinion on Chanel, a woman impossible to ignore and, only too frequently, difficult to like. For Edna Woolman Chase, editor-in-chief of American, British, French and German Vogue in the 1920s and 1930s, she was a nightmare, always complaining when her clothes were featured on the same page as those of her arch rival Patou, but Chase certainly admired her and, despite their quarrels, often gave her the benefit of the doubt. As she wrote in her autobiography Always in Vogue, ‘”Chanel had the spirit of a Til Eulenspiegel. In coping with her one could never be sure whether her mischief-making was deliberate or unconscious… ”
Jean Cocteau loved her look, referring to the “marvellous little head of a black swan”, but he predated Diana Vreeland’s comment that “Chanel invented the 20th century for women” with his remark in the 1930s that, “There is nothing of her era she has missed.” And as early as 1931 she was nominated for Vanity Fair’s Hall of Fame “because she was the first to apply the principles of modernism to dressmaking”. Lauded but not necessarily loved might be the overall verdict.
Clearly a force in her own time, the spirit of Chanel not only suffused fashion throughout her life, her name has remained more potent than any other, alongside that of Dior, with the general public.
What did she have that other couturiers lacked? Was she a great creator? How much does the phenomenal success of her label reflect an instinct for making women want to buy? As she once told her models, whilst rehearsing them for a show and urging them to walk proudly, “Confidence is contagious, and I want my customers to catch if from you.” And, it is assumed, thereafter purchase the clothes…
This, in my opinion, was the basis of Chanel’s approach – a shopkeeper’s approach. She understood the uncertainties and secret fears of women, because she had suffered them herself. She knew how to sell the balm they all longed to have, the one that gave that confidence they all so desired. The confidence that the sort of men who attracted Chanel assumed as a birthright, God-given.
She hated them for it, yet she also loved them for it – up to a point. Her tussle with men began when she was very young. Her mother was made pregnant by a peasant who was unfaithful to her, fathered many bastards, lived beyond his meagre means and, when her mother died at the age of 33, worn down by drudgery, abandoned his daughter, who was put into a convent.
It isn’t necessary to be a child psychologist to see how this betrayal affected Chanel and bred her lifelong distrust of men. I believe that, even as a child, she realised that the world was created by men, for men. And she liked that no less than she liked the belief that the role of women – written by men – was to accept. And her spirit rebelled. Her whole history was one of not accepting – and least of all the traditional man-woman relationship. She learned very early that the mistress was almost always lusted after longer and more determinedly than the wife and that she could therefore make demands – for money, clothes, a grand lifestyle – and have them answered in a way by no means assured for a wife.
The jury will always be out on the most interesting thing about Chanel, which is the true nature of her sexuality. After all, that close observer Cecil Beaton, who knew her well, said that her personality was “a mingling of the masculine and the intensely feminine”. Did she love or did she hate men? Was she bisexual? Or was she a lesbian? Certainly, her relationship with Misia Sert, her closest female friend, was very intimate and those who observed her in the cabine with her models saw a softer, even flirtatious side to her character, especially as she grew older and fawned on favourites such as Suzy Parker, the 1950s American model, who wore Chanel with more understanding than even Romy Schneider, another great favourite of the couturier, who admired Schneider’s strong character and talent, once remarking of her looks, “she is famous before she has even started”.
Chanel loved the idea of fame because it brought her a sense of security. Her need for love and approbation, a legacy of her father’s betrayal, showed itself early, when she earned her living – and her nickname, Coco – as a singer. Unlike, say, Balenciaga, who required only the understanding of the few creators he admired, Chanel always wanted to be the king of the castle. And it almost seems, looking back now, that the more praise it gave her, the more dismissive she was of the fashion world.
She never acknowledged Vionnet because, I suspect, she realised that she was the real revolutionary and inventor of the 20th century for women. She dismissed Schiaparelli with the put-down “that Italian woman who is making clothes” (the emphasis very much on the verb). She despised the romanticism of Dior and his New Look, dismissing it as a homosexual fantasy, and only had praise for Balenciaga, whom she accepted because he understood the craft of clothes and always included in a collection a dress cut, sewn and entirely made by him – by hand.
But she was exceedingly boastful, a classic symptom of insecurity. When she created Chanel No 5, she declared it “a perfume unlike any other ever made”, but when you remove the boast, she was right. It had nothing in common with the heavy exotic fragrances popular in 1920 when No 5 was first launched. And from its inception it has remained one of the world’s great perfumes – often with a certain amount of help from mademoiselle. When sales were slack at the end of the Second World War and she was under investigation for collaborating with the Nazis occupying Paris and enjoying an open relationship with a German officer 13 years her junior (her defiant justification being, “a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover”), she got the American authorities on her side by announcing that her scents were free to GIs. And which one sold the best? Chanel No 5, the name they could all pronounce without fear of embarrassment.
But Chanel’s life was not showered with roses. She had monumental battles because she needed to prove her worth, dispel her depressions and feel the power of being the dominator. She had, after all, as an illegitimate, orphanage child quite a lot to prove. And she did it by emancipating herself long before the emancipation of women became a cause and changed the flow of history.
And yet, it must always be recognised that, before her commercial success came, for all her determination to be emancipated, Coco Chanel lived quite blatantly on the money provided by her lovers, such as “Boy” Capel, who paid for her first shop in Rue Cambon, and the Duke of Westminster, who put up with her foul temper and determination to pick quarrels. Both introduced her to a world from which she made not only her fortune and her name but also her uniqueness. Chanel invented herself and, in old age, boasted, “I was unlike anyone else, either physically or mentally.” And she was almost certainly correct.
As the apparently endless flow of books about Chanel – none of which add anything new to her story – is joined by romantic films, Chanel the label remains one of the most potent in the world. And credit must be given to Coco Chanel. Although her design skills were not of the best, the realisations that women must be modernised, that how we dress affects how we think, that simplicity is modernity, were hers alone. And her indomitable will imposed them on the fashion world of her time and they are still in force today. We have only to ask where the thinking of modern designers such as Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein and Jil Sander and their followers was born to realise that, if not the power of the century, Coco Chanel and her concepts opened up a design road still being followed today.
by Colin McDowell
