March 26, 2013 |
The Chanel jacket, the one that owes something to a cardigan, can be sassy. Especially if you wear it with jeans. But that means taking the jacket out of history. Which is hard, because the Chanel jacket, the one that looks something like a cardigan, is a key item in design history and the Chanel design signature. It is weighted with reverence. But it does look good with jeans.
Historically, Chanel wore the jacket and sold the jacket as part of a suit, with a knee-length skirt. But Chanel have arranged an exhibition that looks just at the jacket: images of 109 people – photographed by Karl Lagerfeld, and styled by Carine Roitfeld – people such as Alice Dellal, various Gainsbourgs, Tilda Swinton, wearing the Chanel jacket (in black), including Alexander Wang, just to show the jacket looks beautiful on a pretty, slender man, too. More than 100 images that take the jacket out of history, even if it comes from the past and reaches back into time.
The first Chanel jacket, the first suiting-type jacket, can be traced back to around 1913 and 1916. Although this is the Chanel jacket in embryonic form. The more iconic Chanel jacket, the one without the collar, but with the short sleeves and those distinctive little pockets, first surfaces in the 1930s. There is a very beautiful photograph of Chanel by François Kollar from 1938 in which she is working at her desk, wearing a sailor-type hat and one of those short, dark jackets.
Much of the modern jacket, many of its signatures, are present in 1938. The jacket is dark. The cuffs and collars are white. There is a hint of the military or uniform, as if the jacket had mutated from a Hussar’s riding coat, and this is emphasised by the Maltese cross pinned to the front of the jacket and made to look like a medal.
In fact, the real Chanel signature is here. Not the obvious things to say, such as “feminine”, “classic”, “tailored”, “comfortable”. But the one that always simmers below the surface. The “mannishness” of it all. The reference to suiting is male. And the uniform and military? Masculine.
And she is at work. Chanel did like to work. When she was the lover of the Duke of Westminster, in the 1930s, when he was possibly the richest man in Europe, it was boring for the Duke, noted Chanel when she left his world of yachts and Scottish fishing parties (Chanel caught salmon) to zip back to Paris and fit models for her February and August shows.
There are many pictures of Chanel in her distinctive jackets and suits. Sometimes they are dark (navy or black). Often they are white. And worn with signature details: the darker trimming around the pockets, the heavy ropes of pearls, her little straw boater hats. Those hats cover another masculine element: her hair was always short. “In 1917,” she recalled. “I slashed my thick hair.”
The Chanel jacket allows a woman to work. The arms can move freely in the jacket. The sleeves are always short, which made space for Chanel’s heavy, cuff-like jewellery and also give the impression of sleeves rolled up for work. Chanel was positive about work. “It is immoral,” she said, “to play at earning one’s living.”
The early jackets were full of masculine references. The pockets were larger, like those on male suiting. The fabrics were sourced from male sportswear and leisurewear, influenced, quite likely, by the clothes of her lovers and protectors, rich powerful men with a taste for tweed and riding. Salvador Dali realised this aspect of Gabrielle. “Chanel always dressed,” he said, “like the strong independent male she had dreamed of being.”
She came from the Paris of 1890, 1900 and 1910. A city of ultra luxury and whores. An unimaginable number of women worked as prostitutes or kept women in this city. Tens of thousands of them. All of this encoded in paintings, such as Manet’s Olympia – the city as a gilded cage, a trap for the woman. The story of Chanel, if you read the books (or watch the great film with Audrey Tautou), is that she came from nothing, a near-orphan seamstress from the provinces, and that her wealthy lovers, Etienne Balsan and Boy Capel, gave her the money to set up her business. “I was able,” Chanel told Dali, “to open up a high-fashion shop because two gentlemen were outbidding each other for my hot little body.”
Chanel did not invent women’s suiting. The honour goes to John Redfern, with various Edwardian hunting and fishing numbers back in the 1890s. But his jackets are very long. And they are nothing as beautiful as Chanel’s classic, collarless little jackets.
The classic, short Chanel jacket carries the weight of memory and of history. It is hard not to touch a Chanel jacket and almost feel you are transgressing. You know this jacket from photographs of Gabrielle Chanel, Jeanne Moreau, Jacqueline Kennedy and Romy Schneider. From photographs and illustrations by Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Cecil Beaton.
There is something breathless about an item that crosses over from the world of image to reality. Which is why women who own maybe just one Chanel jacket, love it – they love it to death – it is a sacred, magical item. It holds so many references.
The jacket also has a heroic story. Yes it was a design from the 1930s, but it really comes into its own after the 1950s. This is when Chanel, now a woman of 70, famously returns to fashion after the Second World War. She is competing with the New Look, which, despite its fame, Chanel is said to have thought quite ghastly. I don’t think she liked its great flourishes and flounces. And the fashion press, certainly in France, were not all that keen on her great return in the 1950s. The little suits and jackets, they said, looked rather 1920s, like the things she was doing decades ago.
But you must look at the 1950s pictures of her favourite model, Marie-Hélène Arnaud, slouching against a balcony, sipping on a cigarette, encased in a close-fitting Chanel suit, glittering with insouciance, those crisp white cuffs (worn with cuff links, another masculine touch) – she looks fabulous, a little sensual but more than anything, business-like, as if she is just about to take her place in a Mad Men boardroom. In the pictures Arnaud is “looking out” – she is not a decorative item, she is not a sex object, she is not there to be looked at.
French Vogue in 1954 completely got it. “The suit,” they wrote, “which represents everything Chanel has believed in all her life.” What did Chanel believe in or like? Money. Love. Luxury. Masculine power. Action. Work. Style. These qualities are embedded in the suit. It’s like the picture of Dorian Gray. The suit is occult. Her soul is in the pattern. And throughout the 1950s and 1960s the Chanel suit was the mainstay for business on Seventh Avenue – she ruled. She totally ruled. And she was in her seventies. This is inspiring and amazing.
Technically, the jacket has some key signatures. The black and navy jackets were worn with white, schoolgirl blouses that produced immaculate collar and cuffs. The buttons are heavy and carry Chanel’s personal symbols: the lion (she was a Leo), stars (from mosaics in the convent where she was a child), and the two Cs – one for Chanel, the other Capel, her love. A thin gold chain is stitched into the hem so the jacket is weighted and hangs close to the body. There is a lot of close work – overstitching, hand-finished seams and that “unfinished” fringe effect as ribbon and braid edge the pockets, hems, cuffs and lapels.
Sometimes that “unfinished” fringe is just a touch vaginal, perhaps a Freudian moment, but this aside, the jacket is not sexual or pornographic. It does not expose or reveal. And when it was sold as part of a suit, with a knee-length skirt with a nice walking pleat, the combined effect did not accentuate female curves, bust or buttocks. Beaton read this as a tang of androgyny. “Women began to look more and more like young men,” he noted of her 1954 comeback collection.
For a great fashion theorist such as Valerie Steele, the Chanel jacket and suit has “everything to do with the symbolic power” of menswear. In the hands of Chanel’s heir, Lagerfeld, the suit changes. He separates the jacket from the suit and does what Chanel never quite got around to doing: he takes the jacket out of the fixed, eternal world of style and into the wild, ever-changing now of fashion. Which is very Lagerfeld – he has always said he prefers fashion to nostalgia.
Certainly, Chanel’s “little black dress” is better known than the “little black jacket”. There seems to be a creative offensive at Chanel, to awaken a new level of interest in the jacket. Lagerfeld’s book and exhibition of these 100-odd images of various women wearing the jacket do everything that has never been done to the jacket – the jacket is made or worn tighter, made to look sexual, sadomasochistic, dangerous, dark, ripped, punk, egotistical, manly (and worn by men) and worn by numberless fashionable superstars, including Swinton, Jane Birkin, Kanye West, Olivier Theyskens, Uma Thurman, Dakota Fanning, Dellal et al. And it does look good with jeans. It does look away from the suit and knee-length, kick-pleat dress. Lagerfeld’s instincts are strong; the little black jacket may have more wear in it than the little black dress.
Only Anna Wintour pays devotional homage. Unlike all the other images and subjects in The Little Black Jacket: Chanel’s Classic Revisited, she is photographed from behind, showing the back of the jacket – offering silence and darkness. It’s a nice, sombre tribute, but elsewhere, in the other 99 or so pictures, Lagerfeld and Roitfeld have placed the little black jacket right at the heart and centre of things.
www.thelittleblackjacket.chanel.com
Text Tony Marcus
