October 6, 2023 |
Who is the mother of modernity? Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel could claim that crown. Whether it’s little black dresses or quilted handbags, her design legacy still feels relevant today and is laid out in a stunning new exhibition at the V&A.
With more than 200 looks, covering her seven decades of design, Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto explores Chanel’s long career, charting the birth of her house in 1910 (she began as a milliner before branching into fashion) and chronicling her many startling innovations. The exhibition does address her controversial wartime experiences, when her relationship with a Gestapo agent enabled her to carry on living comfortably at the Ritz in Paris, but the main focus is on her relentless commitment to design codes. The designer died in 1971, aged 87, two weeks before she was due to present her couture collection; a suit from that last offering acts as a full stop to the exhibition.
Chanel had worked on the collection up to the last minute. She’d been in the studio and then out to dinner the night she died. Her last defiant words to her maid – “You see, this is how you die” – are probably apocryphal. According to V&A curator Oriole Cullen, she’d asked her maid to open the window of her suite at the Ritz because she couldn’t breathe, took her usual night-time sedative and died in her sleep. Her style lives on, revived and revised, first by Karl Lagerfeld (who designed for the house from 1983 until his death in 2019) and now by Virginie Viard, but as the V&A exhibition shows, the modernity of her original design language rings as true in the 2020s as it did in the 1920s.
The exhibition is based on a blockbuster 2021 show of the same name which ran at the Palais Galleria in Paris and explored Chanel’s timeless design codes. Cullen has expanded on it with 122 pieces from the V&A’s own collection. She’s also delved deeply into Chanel’s extensive British connections, uncovering little-known facts. “She had her own factory in Huddersfield in the 1930s. You don’t think of Chanel in Huddersfield, but she was going up there and looking at fabrics,” explains Cullen. The factory was run by her English-educated nephew, André Palasse, who moved to the Yorkshire town with his family. Chanel also used lace from Nottingham, Manchester velvets and wool and cotton from Carlisle. “It reminds you what a brilliant manufacturing base the UK had at that time,” says Cullen. “Chanel is all about the quality. It was not about flashiness. It was about the person who’s wearing it, knowing that it’s the best.”
Chanel was a trendsetter who defied received ideas. The original influencer/entrepreneur (move over, Kim K), she starred in her own advertising campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s, spinning her lavish lifestyle and personal styling quirks into lucrative branches of her empire. She popularised suntans in the 1920s (and sold tanning oil), transformed the fortunes of costume jewellery and created the first It bag, the quilted 2.55, in February 1955 (hence the name).
“She had a really good idea of the zeitgeist. She might not have been the very first person to create garments in jersey, for example, but she sees the moment and she pushes things,” says Cullen. When the privations of WWI brought the Belle Epoque era of decorative extravagance to a close, Chanel was ready. “People were open to change. She comes swooping in with a proposition and presents it in such an irresistible way,” says Cullen. “She springs forward from this with very minimal, streamlined, precise garments.”
Many of the pieces in the show are so remarkably timeless that they could slip seamlessly into the modern wardrobe. “It’s not that they have come around again, it’s the fact that they never really went out [of fashion],” says Cullen of Chanel’s early designs, especially the little black dresses. After WWI many young people were in mourning and wore black, but it was Chanel, in 1926, who turned it into a fashion statement, says Cullen. “She created an LBD: the perfect black dress. Made from jersey, it was very simple and understated and could take you from morning into the night.” American Vogue dubbed it “the frock that all the world will wear” and it was nicknamed the Model T after Henry Ford’s era-defining cars. Chanel’s LBD was much copied, but unlike other designers of the day she welcomed dissemination. In contrast, her rival Madeleine Vionnet was so obsessed with intellectual property she put her fingerprint on her label. “Chanel believed that the more people trying to emulate and aspire to her clothing the better, because they would buy the perfume,” says Cullen.
She often ran counter to conventional thinking, but bumper fragrance and beauty revenues gave her the freedom to follow her instincts. Her biggest challenge came in the post-war period. Chanel was forced to close her couture house in 1939 at the outbreak of the war and didn’t open it again until 1954. “It is quite remarkable to have the kind of energy and desire to go back into fashion, because she’s 71 years old and has lived quite a life at that stage,” notes Cullen. She received a mixed reception on her runway return. Dior’s New Look collection had changed tastes and unleashed a desire for hourglass shapes, decorative drama and fantastical femininity. Chanel’s practical elegance went against to that, but she persisted, finding a ready audience for her look in America, where women’s tastes were sportier and more practical, and where licensed ready-to-wear versions of her boxy suits were a huge hit.
She wore little else but tweed suits and spent the latter half of her career perfecting her personal uniform. By the mid-1960s, the Chanel look had triumphed. “When you look through national magazines, you see Chanel-style suits in every form by many different designers, again and again and again. It had become a thing because it’s something that takes you everywhere,” says Cullen. The exhibition illustrates how Chanel, just like her successors Lagerfeld and Viard, bent her design codes to the times. Cullen describes the designer as someone who stayed active socially, right to the end, and who took note of what she saw out and about. “She’s proposing a kind of uniform, but actually, she is very aware of what’s going on in contemporary fashion,” says Cullen. In the 1950s and 1960s, her cabine (group) of models and nouvelle vague actresses kept her abreast of trends and attitudes. In the 1950s she deviated from her straight-up-and-down silhouette for the prevailing hourglass shapes and the exhibition features a multicoloured lamé cocktail suit from the ’60s as Chanel’s take on the psychedelic era.
However, she made her biggest breakthroughs by being radical. It’s worth dwelling on her most famous fragrance, Chanel No. 5, because it illustrates how revolutionary and contrary her approach was. It was created in 1921, but unlike most fragrances at the time, it was complex. The aldehydes used to make it allowed for a more mercurial scent which combined several notes and didn’t smell of anything identifiable, such as a rose. Its radical, rectangular bottle also looked like nothing else and came (like so many things in the Chanel design canon) from her interest in menswear – she had admired the simple men’s glass toiletry bottles used by her wealthy British lover Arthur “Boy” Capel. No. 5 was originally created as a gift for her best clients, but she saw its potential and quickly commercialised it. “In the 1920s, you’re seeing adverts in British regional newspapers for chemists, shops selling Chanel No 5. It became so popular in such a short time: a universal name for French chic,” says Cullen. “It’s just so modern and relevant. When you look at that bottle today, it’s never dated, which is incredible.” The exhibition features the only surviving original bottle, which had square shoulders. From 1928 onwards they were faceted because it made the bottle less fragile. The double-C logo (possibly inspired by stained-glass windows of the orphanage where Chanel grew up) first appeared on packaging for the brand’s perfume and cosmetics in 1925. It migrated onto buttons in Chanel’s lifetime but it wasn’t until Lagerfeld’s era that the double Cs were unleashed across everything from bags to clothes and, of course, jewellery. Here Chanel played a major role in changing tastes. Costume jewellery had been sneered at by previous generations, but she popularised it, selling ropes of fake pearls, bold crosses and Maltese cuffs, persuading wealthy women to pile it on. “It’s playful and fun because she’s mixing everything. It’s a real jolt against these very simple clothes,” says Cullen. The irony, of course, was that Chanel herself wore real jewels of exceptional quality, gifted by wealthy lovers like the Duke of Westminster or bought by herself (her huge personal wealth afforded her that freedom, which was unusual for women at the time). What happened to her vast and important collection of jewels after she died remains a mystery. “It disappeared,” says Cullen.
It’s just another Chanel enigma. Forthright in her tastes and everything she put out into the world, she was a notoriously elusive person. “It was her life’s work to obscure her background. And that was fair enough, because she would have been judged on it,” says Cullen of the designer who started life with nothing. She was born into a poor family in Saumur, western France, in 1883 and was only 11 when her mother, a hospital laundry worker, died of tuberculosis.
Her father, a travelling salesman, left her and her two sisters in the Catholic convent orphanage of Aubazine (sending her two brothers to work as farm labourers). None of them went to school. After leaving the convent, Chanel had to make her own way in the world, reinventing herself several times to escape her past, survive and prosper.
She trained as a seamstress, having learnt to sew at the orphanage, and worked as a cabaret singer before launching her own millinery boutique, Chanel Modes, in 1910 in Paris, with financial help from Capel (it’s believed they met when she repaired his military uniform).
Coco Chanel started life with nothing but died, several reinventions later, in a suite at the Ritz. An outsider, who became fashion’s patrician grande dame, she defined modern style, one code at a time.
TWO-TONE SHOES
Chanel designed her two-tone slingback shoes in 1957 with couture shoemaker Raymond Massaro. They were created to go with any outfit. The beige, chosen to match Chanel’s own skin tone, created an optical illusion of longer legs, while the black tips made the feet look tiny and dainty. Like with many Chanel codes, they’ve morphed to suit the mood of the times, taking on any shape from boot to ballerina.
THE CAMELLIA
Virginie Viard devoted her entire AW23 collection to the camellia, splashing its graphic motif over everything from bags, shoes and tights to suits, hair accessories and jewellery. The camellia appears as early as 1915, when Chanel is photographed on the beach with a large fabric flower at her waist. The winter flower was her favourite for the chicest of reasons: it has no scent and would therefore not interfere with her perfume.
THE LBD
Chanel introduced the little black dress in 1926, transforming a colour reserved for mourning into a high fashion statement. Her original jersey design was much copied, which Chanel didn’t discourage because it furthered the fame of her brand. It was dubbed the Model-T (after Henry Ford’s era-defining black car) because you could wear it anywhere, day or night. The LBD remains a mainstay of the modern wardrobe.
CHANEL NO. 5
Launched in 1921, with its complex smell and striking square-shouldered bottle, inspired by “Boy” Capel’s glass toiletry bottles, No. 5 revolutionised the fragrance industry and became the most popular perfume in the world. It brought Chanel (and her business partners the Wertheimer family) fabulous wealth.
THE 2.55
Named for the date it was launched – February 1955 – the 2.55 felt new. Handbags were popular, but most were top- handled and stiff. The 2.55, with its soft quilted exterior, lock, could be worn hands-free. In 2008, Chanel pivoted from 24-carat gold hardware to gold-toned hardware and it remains, to this day, a bestseller and mainstay of every collection.
TWEED
After spending time in Scotland with her lover the Duke of Westminster, Chanel fell in love with the practical Scottish fabric, taking it from the Highlands into the realm of women’s couture. She used it for outerwear and accessories and then created one of the most enduring of house symbols with it: the tweed suit.
CC LOGO
The iconic double-C logo first appeared on fragrance and cosmetics packaging in the 1920s. Its design origin is unknown, although some speculate that it could have been inspired by Catherine de’ Medici’s interlocking C cipher (she ruled France from 1547 to 1559) or the stained-glass windows of the convent at Aubazine where Chanel grew up. Her own use of the logo was relatively restrained. It wasn’t until Lagerfeld’s era that double Cs were unleashed across everything from bags to clothes and, of course, jewellery.
THE CHANEL SUIT
Chanel first introduced her lapel-less cardigan jacket in 1925, with the aim of creating something comfortable, practical and stylish. In the post-war period, she perfected the design, fitting the skirt comfortably on thehips, weighting the jacket with chain and adding useful pockets and grosgrain trim. It became her personal uniform. Today it comes in a myriad of iterations from timeless to of the moment.
COSTUME JEWELLERY
Previously looked down upon, Chanel popularised it, selling ropes of fake pearls, bold crosses and Maltese cuffs, persuading wealthy women to pile it on. She often mixed real and fake pieces together. Her approach to jewellery was playful, fun and worked in contrast to the simplicity of her clothes.
‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’, Sep 16-Feb 25, 2024. V&A, London SW7 (vam.ac.uk). Taken from issue 71 of 10 Magazine – FASHION, ICON, DEVOTEE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
CHANEL: SPEAKING IN CODE
Photographer CLARA CASAS-DAZIELL
Fashion Editor SOPHIA NEOPHITOU
Text CLAUDIA CROFT
