Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel

In her, the elements of contention were more diverse than in most people The conflicts were waged with more exuberance and desperation, but also more éclat, revealing the striking contradictions, but also the promises, of her experience. Her burning goal as a young woman was to esaape penury and humiliation. Her work was her escape, her triumph, and she never let go of it. She made things that possessed plainness, intelligence, and austerity, and carried a whiff of purity, of the "aunts'" lye soap and homespun sheets, and the confident flair of Boy Capel on the polo grounds.

As her friend Colette said of her, "It is in the secret of her work that we must find this thougntful conqueror." [pp. 336-337]

By early 1916, the combined staff of Paris, Deauville, and Biarritz totaled three hundred. [p. 82.]

She chose everything herself --lace, accessories, colors," Deray would recall . . . . [p. 80]

And so different from the prewar fashion. Harper's Bazaar in far-off America was the first magazine to publish a picture of a Chanel creation. The dress had neither collar nor bodice, but was worn with a deep V-cut in front under a masculine-styled waiastcoat. The garment had no puffing in the sleeves, no Poiret "Kimono" effect, and it was worn with a large hat decorated not with ribbon but with a twist of fur. . . . [p. 80]

The Coromandel screen still adorn the Chanel offices on West 57th Street, but the woman who had fallen in love with the screens in 1910 was someone who had influence before she had money, someone who more than once broke the rules and stopped the parade, someone who insistently challenged her own success and other people's assumptions. Historians of fashion divide designers into the purists, the entertainers, the extravagants, and the realists. If Shiaparelli is classified as an entertainer, Vionnet as an architect, and Saint Laurent among the extravagant, Channel belongs, with Patou and Madame Grès, amonhg the designers who insisted on a purity of style. However, there was nothing dogmatic about her purism. She refused the arrogance of wealth and taught the rich to blend the real with the fake. From the time she rode bareback on Etienne Balson's thoroughbreds in Compiègne forest, she knew that nothing ages a woman more than what makes her look rich, what is florid, puckered up. From beyond the grave, her name is enough to define a pair of shoes, a hat, a pocketbook, a suit, a perfume. It conveys prestige, quality, taste, and unmistakable style. It is a sign of excellence, of fulfilled sensibilities for women who want to be in fashion without screaming fashion.

Her life is darker than her legend. The modern career woman who has adopted her style as well-bred and safe is almost a caricature of Chanel the woman who lived free and unconstrained, and loved a man too ambitious to marry her. She was an orphan who feared rejection and fled poverty. As a child and as an old woman, she talked to the dead in cemeteries and had to be tied to her bed so she wouldn't run away in her sleep. She reached the top and suggested the Broadway version of her life should begin with her father bent over her crib, and her grandmother predicting exactly what she got--riches, fame, and solitude.

She was someone who resolved to invent herself. She owed her first success to her wits and pretty face and to successive lovers with culture, influence, and money. After the death of Boy Capel, love eluded her. Despite rapturous encounters, love too often turned into dust. "Cut off my head, and I look like a thirteen-year old," she said. Coco Chanel was a woman with a scathing tongue, who was always that fierce little thirteen year-old of sudden fury, sly grins, and a desperate need to be loved.

Some twenty years after her death, the timeless appeal of Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel reigns supreme. The Chanel look is everywhere, canonized and copied with more fervor than ever before. Fashionable without being foreward, the Chanel suit achieved new currency and appropriateness, a look that was rich, refined and, above all, dressed. Women's clothing based on gentlemanly elements, suits with jackets that fit like sweaters, masses of bogus jewelry replacing the demure real stuff, little black dresses, crisp white shirts, gold buttons, pleated skirts, navy jackets, quilted bags, and the black-tipped sling-back shoes are staples in the wardrobes of professional women.

In eclipse at those times when fashion favored eccentricity and exaggeration and in demand during periods of self-doubt and quests for certainties, Chanel's fashion is once more called eternally modern. Coco Chanel, who died on a Sunday--the only day, her friends said, that could kill her [Gabrielle was lucid to the very end. Her last words were, "You see, this is how you die." [p. 320]]--was a force and a legend in her time. She ruled for long periods over almost six decades. Posthumously, her reign is stretching to cover the century. . . .

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She made up things. Gabrielle Chanel --Coco to a few intimates and hundred million women --came from nothing. She reinvented her childhood, describing nasty aunts who pulled her ears and humiliated her. After she became rich, she paid off her brothers to pretend they didnt' exist. She was the illegitmate daughter of itinerant market traders. Her mother died when she was twelve

By the time Gabrielle was eleven, the life on the road, poverty, and constant pregnancies--another son named Augustin for Jeanne's uncle in Corpière died in infancy--had ruined Jeanne's {Chanel's mother's] health. She was in Brive-la Gaillarde, a market town halfway between Clermont-Ferrand and Bordeaux, when she fainted from shortness of breath and high fever. She was not well enough to leave the freezing room she was left in. One winter morning in February 1895, she was found dead. Her husband was "traveling." She was thirty-two. [p. 9]

The poor woman who was my mother was on her way to join him. I won't tell this somber story because it's terribly boring, but my mother suddenly felt faint. . . . "[p. 6] Her father disappeared, and she was brought up a charity ward in a nuns' orphange . . . . [pp. 3-4]

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At seventy, Gabrielle was a spare, taut figure, hung with jewels. Her broad, shrewd face was marked by her wide mouth, furrowed chin, angular jaw, and determinedly penciled eyebrows. Except for the enormous glasses that sometimes hid her widely spaced eyes, she looked much as she had in 1939 when she closed the House of Chanel. Her powerful, broad-knuckled hands, her strong fingers without nail polish still revealed her common sense and stubornness. Her voice had grown deeper but she still spoke a continous monologue in her familiar muted tone [p. 281] . . . . She sensed the time was right. . . . . She believed in the overwhelming appeal of her classic line, refined again and again but never fundamentally changed. She believed in an unmistakable look that was flattering, easy to wear, and timeless. A dress should not be a disguise. If a fashion wasn't taken up and worn by everybody, it was not a fashion, but an eccentricity, a fancy dress. [p. 282] . . . She wanted to be at the front of the revolution. The new fabrics and the new system of mass production that ready-to-wear represented quickened the entire fashion tempo, and made for courants d'air, for wind currents that not only carried the message out from the designers' studios, but whipped influences back from an increasingly fashion-conscious mass market. Coco had always believed that any fashion that wasn't adapted by a majority of women was a flop. To see herself copied in the street was the greatest compliment. . . . She wrestled with each costume. With the wall-to-wall mirrors as her sole reference, she pulled apart and pinned together again, shortening, lengthening, denuding, touching up, all to pare down to the function and logic of the body. . . . She didn't "create," she like to repeat. "Couture isn't an art, its a business." The 130-model collection . . . . was set for February 5, 1954.

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Charm, Chanel believed, is a gift, a form of grace; and clothes are a disguise intended to project an image of ourselves, to show ourselves in precisely the way we want to be seen. Our choice of clothes allows others to understand many facets of our character, psyche, beliefs, and attitudes toward life. It is within a given code of conventions that individuals are daring and innovative. Their best ideas have a tendency to be adopted by others and to end up becoming the next set of conventions. . . . [p. 330-331]

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Fashion is reduced to a question of hem lengths," she began, "Haute coutoure is finished because it's in the hands of men who don't like women and can only think of riddiculing women."

"After forty, women used to exchange youth for poise and allure, an evolution that left them undamaged. Nowadays, they compete with young girls using weapons that are absurd. . . ."

". . . . Boredom is practically institutionalized. Before the war nobody had ever heard of Freudian fixations or depression syndromes. What can I tell you? We were romantic. Maybe it's silly but to fall in love is a lot more fun."

"The only fashion that had meaning was the fashion "that goes down in the street." A fashion that stayed in drawing rooms had no more relevance than the offerings at a costume ball." [p. 310-311]