The Hôtel de Lauzan, at 29 Faubourg Saint-Honoré, was built in 1719 for the Duchesse de Rohan-Montbazon, with very large formal gardens running all the way down to the avenue Gabriel. Perhaps it was no coincidence that its new occupant had chosen this address. It was on the avenue Gabriel that she had spent her happiest years with Arthur Capel, before the appearance of Diana Wyndham.
Gabrielle had taken the magnificent ground-floor rooms of the Hôtel de Lauzan while the owner, Comte Pillet-Will, remained on the floor above. When she declared that “the interior of a home is the natural projection of a soul,” and that “Balzac was right to attach as much importance to it as he did to clothing,” she effectively gave both her creed and a statement of intent. Her immediate response to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré was to enjoy its grandeur. The main rooms had last been altered in the previous century, and she hated the greenish, gilded paneled walls she was not permitted to change. It is said that she asked the Serts to redecorate and furnish her new home.
We know that Gabrielle was impressed by José Maria’s taste, but in the context of her future houses, including her apartment at rue Cambon and the house she would later build for herself, this is not convincing. The Serts may well have made suggestions, but by this stage in Gabrielle’s life, it is difficult to imagine that she hadn’t arrived at a pretty confident style of her own. All style was in a general state of flux in the early twenties, and for her interiors Gabrielle gravitated, like a number of those in her circle, toward a type of modern baroque. This open-ended style accommodated quite different personalities, who loosely mixed old and new with juxtapositions sometimes intentionally startling. The result was that one looked at things with more care.
In several rooms, Gabrielle covered the gilded walls with mirror glass from floor to ceiling, and then added Louis XIV furniture, combined with an underlying oriental theme. This took the form of numerous Coromandel folding screens, which became a signature element of Gabrielle’s interiors, and which she first lived with in Arthur’s apartment. In one of the salons, she had a huge Regency sofa covered in orange velvet and set in front of one of these enormous Chinese figured screens. On the side tables were lamps made of large crystal balls set one upon the other, with lampshades made of parchment. (These same elegant lamps are now in Gabrielle’s apartment in the rue Cambon, as are a number of the Coromandel screens.) A small library, with natural, pale woodwork, had fine old carpets, with furniture and curtains, all in beige. This color may sound unappealing, but Gabrielle made it work with such success it was to become one of her trademarks.
A fine classical marble torso was reflected in a mantelpiece mirror, both bought on that recent trip to Italy with the Serts, and now also in the rue Cambon. In Gabrielle’s bedroom were floor-to-ceiling mirror panels covering one wall, while her bed was spread with a dark fur coverlet enclosed by cream silk curtains falling from a wooden baldachin. Coromandel screens stood behind another velvet-covered sofa, and a huge crystal chandelier hung above a small silver table. Hanging on the mirror wall panels was an enormous Venetian mirror decorated all around the edge with crystal flowers. This astounding piece of craftsmanship, today in Gabrielle’s apartment, was bought from the sale of the recently bankrupt and legendarily stylish narcissist the marchesa Luisa Casati. That Gabrielle would keep several of these outstanding pieces of furniture confirms one’s sense that the grammar of her decorative style was already well established.
Gabrielle loved gold, and the colors beige and black. Like Misia, she also loved crystal. However, as for Misia’s own taste, Gabrielle later described her apartment before her marriage to Sert as “all that pile of objects.” Misia’s very busy interior had at first led Gabrielle and Arthur to the conclusion that Misia must be an antique dealer. And Arthur had unashamedly asked, “Is it all for sale?” Gabrielle loathed what she called “the doctrine of clutter.” Speaking of Misia’s, she said, “It wends its way along walls, piles up underneath tables, proliferates on the stairs, the cupboards no longer shut.”1 Nevertheless, Paul Morand, a man of most particular and snobbish tastes, described Misia’s apartment’s “crystal, its lacquer, its general air of exquisite rococo,” without criticism. No doubt Gabrielle did owe something to Misia and Sert’s aesthetic, but she now practiced a doctrine of luxury, size and space whose elements were her own.
Into the magnificent setting of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré she transported Joseph Leclerc, now chamberlain of a bevy of servants looking after his mistress and her steady stream of visitors. By day, Gabrielle perfected and sold the clothes that were making her so quintessentially modern, and by night, she was establishing herself as a sought-after Parisian figure. Preferring, on the whole, the company of artists, it was in this period that she became close to Jean Cocteau. If Cocteau’s following, or “school,” is hard to define, while both loved and reviled, he had, nonetheless, positioned himself as a spokesman for modernist art. His famous personal charm and dazzling conversation were evanescent but almost impossible to replicate, and even Cocteau haters thought “his life was his masterpiece” and that “his talk was the best part of him.” For his detractors, he was full of gimmickry, artifice and vacuity. He, meanwhile, said, “A poet owes it to himself to be a very serious man, and yet, out of politeness, to appear the opposite.”2 For more than fifty years, Gabrielle would oscillate between love and dislike of Cocteau.
After the recent war, artists had continued arguing back and forth: what should their subject now be, and how should it be presented? A savage, nihilistic atmosphere, emerging from the brutalities of the war, meant that many artistic and cultural values were now unceremoniously hurled out, until the artists arrived at the anarchy of Dada. One of its founders, Gabrielle’s friend Tristan Tzara, said that Dada meant nothing and this was the point: nothing. Dada was to be “an inventory of the ruins of art and society left by the void of war.” While Gabrielle was in one sense party to these sentiments, she was also more interested in asking herself what she could do to move with her chaotic times. And at the center of events, she made her own definitive contribution. She lived an unusually progressive and unbourgeois life, her independence and sexually liberated attitudes reflected in Gabrielle’s short hair and ruthlessly simple clothes.
At the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, she threw herself into what became the most expansively sociable period of her life, and one of her first undertakings was to have a fine piano brought in and placed in an otherwise empty room. Seldom relinquishing the luxury of friendship with a former lover, Gabrielle was by this stage once again on close terms with Stravinsky. And Stravinsky now came to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré along with society and artists. These included Diaghilev, his lovers, Ballets Russes dancers, Misia and José Maria Sert, Erik Satie, and a series of other performers and composers, including Les Six, who in turn included Georges Auric, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc. The musicians played and partied with Gabrielle’s society and artist friends, including the likes of Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Juan Gris and Francis Picabia, long into the night.
On the upper floor, meanwhile, Comte Pillet-Will found the clamor of their contemporary music unendurable, and he and his tenant came to an amicable accommodation. She would pay handsomely for the rest of his vast residence, and the count would take himself elsewhere.
Jean Cocteau’s offering for that year, 1921, was Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, a parody of a Parisian wedding, again with the anarchic high spirits of his ballet Parade. Olga Picasso had insisted that she and her husband take a villa outside Paris for the first months of their baby son’s life. Picasso was now invited to join Misia’s box as Gabrielle’s escort for the ballet’s premiere. Picasso was always in two minds about Cocteau, whom he infuriated by teasing him. But he and Gabrielle enjoyed Cocteau’s verbal sparkle, his spiteful tongue and his urgent and shamelessly insincere need of the friendship of the haut monde. Had Picasso and Gabrielle seen Cocteau’s diary, they would have reveled in his remark about “the actresses without theater that are society women.”3
By this point, Gabrielle had known Picasso for some time. Indeed, she was one of the small group of guests at his wedding in 1918, when Olga wore a Chanel dress and Cocteau had written, “Olga in white satin, tricot and ulle — very Biarritz.”4 When Picasso became claustrophobic in his villa and came into town in search of his friends, he wouldn’t stay alone at night in his and Olga’s apartment. He was apparently terrified by the prospect of loneliness. So Gabrielle had one of her light, airy rooms at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré made permanently available to him. She saw a good deal of Picasso at this time and was, in her own words,
… seized by a passion for [him]. He was wicked. He fascinated me the way a hawk would; he filled me with a fear. I could feel it when he came in: something would curl up in me; he’d arrived. I couldn’t see him yet, but already I knew he was in the room. And then I saw him. He had a way of looking at me… I trembled. 5
Misia had observed this attraction between her two friends, and did her best to foil any real intimacy developing between them. But any control she might previously have exerted over Gabrielle had evaporated when Gabrielle wrote the check for Diaghilev’s presentation of Rite of Spring. Characteristically, Gabrielle was not particularly concerned by the idea of Picasso’s wife in the background, and saw Picasso at his apartment on the rue de la Boétie. Developing her “passion,” they spent the odd night — perhaps more — together at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. But with Picasso always quick to demand sexual and emotional subservience from his women, and Gabrielle being in many ways just as intense and formidable a character as he was, this affair could have been only a brief one.
In 1921, when Vogue commented that “the couturiers are still embroidering their way to success,” Dmitri Pavlovich’s sister, Grand Duchess Marie Pavlovna, took advantage of the trend. Marie Pavlovna was short of funds — like all the Russian émigrés — and on the spur of the moment suggested to Gabrielle that she could make the embroidery for her clothes at a better price. Gabrielle was surprised at the suggestion but agreed that Marie should try. Despite Marie’s personal hardship and losses, her attempts at adapting to her fate were impressive. Describing the Russian nobility’s plight, she said they had been “torn out of our brilliant setting… still dressed in our fantastic costumes. We had to take them off… make ourselves other, everyday clothes, and above all learn how to wear them.”
In only three months, Marie Pavlovna had set up what became a highly successful wholesale workshop, Kitmir, with Russian women machine-embroidering clothes for couture houses and, in particular, the House of Chanel. Marie designed many of the embroideries herself, basing them on her memories from art school, a number of Russian motifs and new research.
It has been customary to say that Gabrielle began embroidering her clothing under the influence of her Russian lover, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. This is quite wrong. Gabrielle had come under the influence of the Russians — Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes and Stravinsky — before her affair with Dmitri; she had been decorating her clothes with embroidery since at least 1917. In addition, from contemporary descriptions, we see that it wasn’t only Gabrielle who used embroidery to decorate her clothing; so were some of her fellow couturiers.
While Marie Pavlovna marveled at seeing her embroideries worn by Gabrielle’s clients, sadly, there are very few examples of them still around. What is left to us from Marie, however, is one of the very best descriptions of Gabrielle at work. As Marie evokes the scene, we see how Gabrielle’s method of creating, first described by Marie-Louise Delay, in Biarritz, has remained quite unchanged. Gabrielle’s cutting, pinning and sculpting of a material on a real woman’s body would become famous — much later, in an age of male couturiers, designing by making drawings alone — for its singularity. In fact, this had been the traditional dressmakers’ accustomed method of working.
After Gabrielle had draped her mannequin with a fabric, in order to see its fall and movement, she would then work in another material, such as a fine calico, until she was satisfied with her design on the girl’s body. From this first model, called a toile, the real material would be cut out by the premières and made into the final garment. In Marie Pavlovna’s description, we see how a real and beautiful female body was and would always remain an essential part of Gabrielle’s inspiration. The girl’s shape and coloring were all part of the inspiration for her transformation of a piece of material into something that could be worn. (She insisted that her mannequins be very slim, and almost all were dark haired, like her.) Marie Pavlovna described her fascination with the way her embroidered materials were transformed into clothes:
For several years to come I watched Chanel’s creative genius… She never designed anything on paper and would make a dress either according to an idea already in her head or as she proceeded. I can still see her sitting on her stool… with a log fire burning… she would be dressed in a… dark skirt and a sweater, with the sleeves pushed up above her elbows…
The models would be called in one by one from the landing outside… sometimes for hours in various stages of undress… A girl would walk into the room and up to Mlle Chanel, who sat… with a pair of scissors in her hand.
“Bonjour Mademoiselle.”
“Bonjour Jeanne.”
This was the only moment when Chanel would look up at the model’s face… As the girl approached, Chanel, with her head slightly bent to one side, would take in the first impression. Then the fitting began… The fitter standing beside her handed her the pins. No one spoke except Chanel, who kept up a steady monologue. Sometimes she would be giving instructions, or explaining some detail. Sometimes she would criticize and undo the work… already done. The old fitter listened to all, in silence, her face impenetrable… Chanel, intent on her work… talked on without taking notice of anybody.
I had seen people occupying great offices… had listened to orders being given by those whose birth or position gave them the right to command. I had never yet met with a person whose every word was obeyed and whose authority had been established by her own self, out of nothing.6
At about five o’clock, coffee was brought in, sometimes with sandwiches. If the day’s work was complete, Gabrielle stood up, stretched, and the models, condemned to wait outside, were finally permitted to leave. If the pressure was on, Gabrielle gulped down her coffee then took up her work once more. One or two “obsequious executives and an occasional friend sat around on the carpet” while Gabrielle held forth indefatigably. “Discussing everything and everybody with immense assurance, she dispensed strong opinions on people and events; these opinions could just as quickly be reversed. Forging on, her power of persuasion was amazing.”
Maurice Sachs, an ambitious young con man who sometimes acted as Cocteau’s secretary got himself small writing commissions and, later in the decade, became an astute chronicler of his times. In his portrait of Gabrielle, he said that she “created a feminine personage that Paris had not known before.” He was surprised at “how small she was. She was very slim; the line of thick black hair was low, her eyebrows met over the nose and when she laughed her eyes [were] hard and sparkling.” Commenting that she “almost always’ wore simple black clothes, he said:
She put her hands in her pockets [then still an unusual thing for a woman to do] and began to speak. The flow of her words was extraordinarily fast, rushing forward, but she laid out clearly what she had in mind. She had none of the circumlocution, and fabricated asides that so often make a woman halt at incidental subjects and never reach the target of their conversation. Her train of thought was utterly clear… She had great practical sense; she liked to manage, to organize, to put in order and to be in charge.7
Gabrielle had a redeeming contradictory trait, and one particularly rare in people who are controlling. An old employee would say that “she hated things which were planned. She didn’t have this notion of organization like we do.” And Jean Cocteau once said, “She has, by a kind of miracle, worked in fashion according to rules that would seem to have value only for artists.”8
At the same time, Sachs believed that in giving her orders with such certainty and authority, Gabrielle “was a general: one of those young generals of the Empire in whom the spirit of conquest dominates.” Gabrielle shared another trait with military men: “a shyness which overcame her as soon as she left the battlefield.”9
As each of the biannual collections approached, the atmosphere at Chanel heightened and Gabrielle grew more nervous. As for many an artist working under pressure, these tense conditions were what often provoked her most successful pieces. Marie Pavlovna was repeatedly amazed at how the chaos in the days prior to a show was miraculously transformed into a collection just in the nick of time. On the eve of a show at rue Cambon, Gabrielle had a “dress rehearsal” for herself and her personnel in the salon below her studio. Anything considered unfit was “banished altogether” or else sent back, somehow to be redone before the morrow. Marie was intrigued by the “language of the dresses,” how their different characteristics and appeal were so familiar to Gabrielle, and how it was this unified set of relationships she was most concerned with at this final stage. “Not one single detail escaped her notice. She was so concentrated upon the study that… she forgot even to talk.”
And all the while a “religious and respectful silence hung over the salon, around which the saleswomen sat in a row along the walls,” nodding, and no more than lifting their eyebrows by way of approval. Gabrielle’s fashion shows were becoming extremely popular, and each season the rue Cambon entrance was besieged by a crowd of indignant buyers. Only those with invitations were admitted. The largest important foreign houses, above all those from the United States, were invited first, and only then did smaller and native firms receive an invitation. This very exclusiveness, of course, made them clamor still more for admittance. In future years, the detachment of police posted to guard the front door of Chanel at rue Cambon was an imposing sight.
When Marie Pavlovna’s embroideries were first shown — probably in the spring of 1922—she joined Gabrielle and a group of her friends in what were the most uncomfortable yet most privileged “seats… on the upper steps of the staircase, from where we could see what was going on.” (The mirror-paneled walls of this staircase were part of a modernist refurbishment Gabrielle would have installed at some point during the early twenties.) Until the end of her life, this ritual spot was where she placed herself to survey her collection below.
This now-famous staircase has remained intact. The salon below, while updated, is decorated in the same color scheme to this day: carpeted in beige with white walls and the distinctive black cast-iron banisters. Gabrielle commented once, “I spent my life on stairs.” The mirrored staircase was the spine of her house; everything that happened at rue Cambon could be observed from it. But Gabrielle was also making oblique reference to that other staircase, central to her youth in the convent at Aubazine. Here the orphan girls trudged up and down the great stone steps several times each day.
The show including Marie Pavlovna’s embroideries lasted a full three hours — this was not untypical — but from Gabrielle’s aerie at the top of the stairs, Marie was amazed at the speed with which she had absorbed and gauged the audience’s interest. Long before the concluding piece, Gabrielle told the dazed young Russian duchess that her work was a success.
The biggest orders for these embroideries — indeed, all Chanel clothes — came from America, a tendency that would become the norm. It was the sophisticated yet pervasively casual and sportive element of American society that had appreciated Gabrielle’s “language” as quickly as France, and possibly more so.
Marie learned much from Gabrielle, not least the example of her worldliness. While, at first, the young aristocrat found the way clients were referred to “behind the scenes” quite shocking, she eventually came to the conclusion that, in fact, “any noble sentiments were wasted” on the customers of haute couture: “Mlle Chanel did much to give me more practical views on life. A number of my illusions were destroyed in the process.”
Gabrielle, with her “usual outspokenness,” also steered Dmitri’s sister away from the puritanical belief that taking trouble with one’s appearance was unseemly. She told Marie that it was “a great mistake to go round looking like a refugee… people will end by avoiding you. If you wish to do business, the first thing is to look prosperous.”
Gabrielle’s abhorrence of amateurism impressed her employee. In this same spirit, Marie was taught how to use makeup and instructed to lose weight. Still despairing of Marie’s long hair, one day Gabrielle declared, “No, I really cannot see you any longer with that unattractive bun… it will have to come off.” Deftly removing Marie’s hairpins, she “snatched up a pair of scissors and was cutting off my hair by the handful.” While subsequently having this “cut” improved, from that day, Marie Pavlovna was more modish and wore her hair short.10
In early 1920, Cocteau had invited Gabrielle to a “spectacle concert” of art, music and popular entertainment called Le boeuf sur le toit (The Ox on the Roof). Financed by Comte Etienne de Beaumont, the show was Cocteau’s, music was by Darius Milhaud (of Les Six) and sets were by the painter-designer Raoul Dufy. Le boeuf sur le toit reflected the fascination with all things American and proved a great success with its avant-garde audience. In January 1922, when the patron of a bar called The Gaya, a focal point for artistic Parisian gatherings, launched his enlarged restaurant-bar on the rue Boissy d’Anglas, he had been given permission to call it, after Cocteau’s spectacle, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Often known to English enthusiasts as The Nothing Doing Bar, overnight, Le Boeuf sur le Toit became one of the most fashionable meeting places for artists and their cronies. Quickly rivaling the reputation of the Moulin Rouge or Maxim’s, Le Boeuf was noisy, smart and “amusing”; it was the place to be seen. And with her artist and society friends, Gabrielle soon became one of its regulars.
Le Boeuf was one of the first bars hosting what came to be known as café society, both leading and reflecting a new kind of salon — a public one. Here sexual preferences were openly indulged, and Le Boeuf appeared to be for everyone. As well as beautiful women and men, and beautiful boys, and boys dressed as girls, and girls dressed as boys, there were the poets, painters, musicians, actors, dancers, the titled, the rich and the famous. Anyone could speak to anyone. They talked, they danced, and the atmosphere was alive with possibility.
Opium, morphine and cocaine were acquiring a certain ubiquity at the time. And while it wasn’t only the social and artistic elite who regularly used one or more of these preferred narcotics, a good many became hopelessly addicted. Just three of the more famous examples would be Jean Cocteau; the lesbian princess Violette Murat, hostess to a salon of prominent artists and musicians; and another of Gabrielle’s friends, Misia Sert. Confirmed opium smoker that Cocteau would become, he, like Princess Murat, also used cocaine, while Misia Sert’s need for morphine was to get the better of her in the end. Despite Diaghilev’s absolute veto of any drug use in his company, it has been said that he was a cocaine user himself.11
Le Boeuf sur le Toit aficionados soon read like a list of the contemporary avant-garde combined with the fashionable elite of Europe. On any night of the week, one might come across André Gide swathed in a black cape; the wunderkind writer Raymond Radiguet; Jean Cocteau; and Max Jacob, the brilliant semialcoholic, semitramp, homosexual, Jewish Catholic-convert poet. Then there were the “nonpainters”: the Cuban Dadaist Francis Picabia; Dada’s Hungarian founder, Tristan Tzara; and any number of musicians and composers, including Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric; Marie Laurencin, painter-printmaker and future illustrator for the surrealists another painter, Valentine Hugo; Misia and José Maria Sert, whose booming voice could always be heard above the hubbub; Stravinsky the dandy, with his “mustard-yellow trousers, black jacket, blue shirt, yellow shoes, clean-shaven and with slicked-down blonde hair”;12 more Russians; and Erik Satie, the “faun with the little beard and cracked laugh.” Then there might be Diaghilev and his entourage; the protosurrealist André Breton and his cronies; Maurice Sachs, with some beautiful boy, or girl, in tow; and then numbers of now-forgotten minor luminaries and colorful unknowns.
Le Boeuf came to represent not only the turmoil, disenchantment and excesses of the period, it also reflected every aspect of the intense, almost febrile creative atmosphere of those interwar years in Paris. In those same years, Gabrielle and Cocteau’s friendship was cemented. While Cocteau was accused of having no path of his own and of walking along everyone else’s, in writing about his spectacle Le boeuf sur le toit he also epitomized the mood of the times when he said, “Here, I avoid subject and symbol. Nothing happens, 13 or what does happen is so crude, is so ridiculous, that it is as though nothing happens.” Cocteau’s dizzyingly varied artistic activity antagonized many, yet it was the ever-perceptive English poet W. H. Auden who captured what Cocteau had to offer and saw that it was important. Here one sees how modern Cocteau was, and also why Gabrielle had so much time for him:
Now and then an artist appears… who works in a number of media and whose productions in any one of them are so varied that it is difficult to perceive any unity of pattern or development… Both the public and the critics feel aggrieved… His fellow artists… are equally suspicious and jealous of a man who works in several [media]. His first concern is for the nature of the medium and its hidden possibilities… a person who is open to the outside world, so little concerned with “self-expression,” is naturally responsive to the present moment and liable, therefore, to incur the charge of wanting, at all costs, to be chic. To this one can only answer that to be “timely” is not in itself a disgrace: Cocteau has never followed fashion though he has sometimes made it.14
In 1919, Cocteau had met and fallen for the precocious sixteen-year-old writer Raymond Radiguet, whose “cool insolence, now spontaneous, now calculating,” people found either repulsive or alluring. His quite remarkable callousness aside, Radiguet’s astounding precocity and association with the great socializer Cocteau meant that he not only became known, he made it his business to know all Paris. This included frequently being present at Gabrielle’s table.
Radiguet periodically resisted his clamorous lover-mentor Cocteau and would disappear to indulge in one, or all, of his escape routes: alcohol, opium and women. Madame Warkowska, frequenter of Le Boeuf sur le Toit, introduced him to opium. Her effortlessly modish judgment on the prevalence of the drug was: “Opium? Why make such a fuss? I smoked at my first communion in Shanghai.”15 When Radiguet wasn’t fulfilling Max Jacob’s injunction “You have to do things,” the boy wrote hard. Cocteau said, “He wrote the way Beau Brummel dressed. No tics, no patina, but a special gift… of making the new look as though it had been seen before.” Referring to Diaghilev’s famous command to Cocteau—“Astonish me”—Radiguet subsequently countered with the remarkably adult “Elegance consists in not astounding.”16 These two injunctions—“making the new look as though it had been seen before” and “Elegance consists in not astounding”—so exactly characterized Gabrielle’s philosophy, they could have been her motto.
In the autumn of 1922, Cocteau asked Gabrielle if she would design the costumes for his modernized version of Sophocles’ Antigone. The play’s theme, defiance of the establishment, was then a most attractive one. With scenery by Picasso and music by Arthur Honegger, of Les Six, the actor Charles Dullin played Creon. (This was the same Charles Dullin who had accompanied Gabrielle to the first night of The Rite of Spring, in 1913; his lover Caryathis had wanted to attend the performance with her other lover.)
Cocteau said, “To costume my princesses I wanted Mlle Chanel, because she is our leading dressmaker, and I cannot imagine Oedipus’s daughters patronizing a “little dressmaker”… I chose some heavy Scotch woolens, and Mlle Chanel’s designs were so masterly, so instinctively right.”17 Indeed, Gabrielle’s costumes were powerful and convincing, and Vogue said they looked like “antique garments discovered after centuries.” However, in an angry moment during a rehearsal, when Gabrielle felt her contribution wasn’t being appreciated, she grabbed a strand of the heroine’s hand-knitted coat and pulled it so far undone that there was no time to reknit it; the heroine wore one of Gabrielle’s own coats.
Charles Dullin said, “Many society people came to the performances because of Chanel, Picasso and Cocteau.” The play was a success, and while the likes of André Gide and the poet Ezra Pound spoke in its favor, in the end, it was Gabrielle who was commended for her costumes, rather more than her collaborators.
By March 1923, elite magazines such as Vogue were writing that “Gabrielle Chanel is now famous for her treatment of the youthful short-skirted silhouette which innumerable smart women have achieved.” While a leader of fashion, at the same time, Gabrielle was almost “outside” it. Thus Vogue wrote, “She doesn’t concern herself with fashion but with her fashion, she improvises dresses which… do not age.”
The following month, the magazine stated, “There is not only a Chanel Collection, there is a Chanel ‘style’ made of youth, suppleness… [Its] somewhat sporty, yet very feminine look, met the needs of our time so well that women adopted it with enthusiasm as soon as it appeared.” Gabrielle herself was always the best advertisement for her fashions, and Vogue wrote, “Mlle Chanel… wears the designs her clients love with so much chic herself… that her daring provokes admiration; her success applause!” And in August, about a Diaghilev gala, the magazine cooed, “Snobs would have given anything to be there that night! Just think: the Marquise de Ludres is on the right… the Comtesse de Beaumont… the Duchesse de Gramont… Comtesse de Requena, Mme Sert, Grande Duchesse Marie, the Comtesse de Chevigné.” (All, except Requena, were dressed by Gabrielle.) Vogue continued, “And there is Gabrielle Chanel, dressed entirely in white, and covered in pearls.”
Three more of that summer’s grand events give a flavor of Gabrielle’s entertainment: the Beaumonts’ fabulous annual fancy dress ball; Diaghilev’s premiere party for Stravinsky’s ballet Les Noces, at Le Boeuf sur le Toit; and a now-fabled party for Stravinsky, given by the wealthy expatriate American socialites Sara and Gerald Murphy, said to be the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night.
Gabrielle could not only be found more than once a week at Le Boeuf, she went to other restaurants and clubs and also entertained regularly at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. One marvels at her energy and how she fitted any work into her punishing social schedule. Unsurprisingly, one finds references to her constant lack of time. A terse note to Etienne de Beaumont refers to a meeting that “wasn’t worth the trouble”; another tells him she can’t make an event: “I am sorry but not free tonight”; and yet another turns down an invitation because, finally, she admits, “I am too tired, forgive me.”18
Gabrielle’s chief competitors had been the couturiers Lanvin, Paquin, Cheruit, Patou and Poiret, but, increasingly, she had edged her way out in front. Somehow, besides the socializing, Gabrielle not only found the time to work, she was also dedicated to it. The result of this intense application was a couture that received more plaudits with every season. Again and again, the magazines put their seal of approval on what Vogue described as her “unvarying Short and Slender Silhouette.” It trumpeted the fact that Gabrielle made outfits “the modern woman of today likes best, the type which is best adapted to her life. The clothes made by this designer are simple, becoming, and above all youthful.”
The commentators were intrigued by Gabrielle’s capacity to be “beguiling and consistent without being monotonous. Witness her endless variety within narrow limits.” There were reports of long, straight coats of light wool or silk crepe, lined, for example, with a printed crepe used again for the simple frock underneath. (This was one of Gabrielle’s clever methods of simplification and would become a Chanel trademark.) Another detail that became a signature element was Gabrielle’s introduction of the camellia flower, probably first used in 1922, embroidered on a blouse.
The flower had both exotic and forbidden associations. Alexander Dumas’ passionate story La Dame aux camélias was a favorite of Gabrielle’s, and wearing a camellia had been widely recognized as a signal that a woman was available for seduction. Proust had worn a camellia in homage to Verdi’s La Traviata, itself inspired by Dumas’ novel, and this may in turn have inspired Gabrielle. The camellia has the added advantage of being without scent, and hence would not compete with Gabrielle’s perfumes. By 1924, material renderings of the flower were often added to her clothes.
Meanwhile, Vogue described “straight taffeta evening coats… gorgeous with all-over embroidery and fur collars. The slender frocks worn under them are often beaded. They have a new, deep, oval décolletage in the back.” (That deep décolletage at the back, and the short, beaded and fringed dresses that became so representative of the twenties are all innovations said to have originated with Gabrielle.)
Showing that she was eminently capable of using precious materials such as silk, crepe, satin, chiffon, lace and beading, Gabrielle also continued with her innovative use of jersey, including the most novel introduction of Scottish Fair Isle tricot. Indeed, she took up this comfortable knitted fabric, smooth on one side, with greater texture on the reverse, more than any other designer. Her almost austere elegance suited perfectly the fluid movement of this material, and her use of plain and patterned tricots was most instrumental in promoting the belief that Gabrielle’s particular kind of casualness was tremendously chic. The great push toward more “active” clothes for women was not hers alone, but she was undoubtedly one of its first and most important proponents. (As early as 1921, Gabrielle had set up a “Sports” workshop.)
Gabrielle herself was never anything but slim, but she apparently devoted a good deal of time and trouble to ensuring that she remained so. She joined wholeheartedly in the custom of visiting health spas for reducing and cleansing “cures.” From one of these establishments, Gabrielle wrote to Antoinette Bernstein that she was “tired of resting… I think only of fighting against Fat. I feel completely stupefied,” and hoped to “profit” by her self-imposed ordeal.19
It is said that in the summer of 1923, Gerald and Sara Murphy persuaded the Hôtel du Cap at Antibes to remain open for the summer months. Gabrielle and her artist friends, including Picasso, the audacious and sociable Polish painter Moise Kisling, and Cocteau, had discovered Saint-Tropez, an as yet unspoiled fishing village, some time before, but the opening of the Hôtel du Cap during the summer set in motion the transformation of the area. Until then, the luxurious hotels and villas on the Riviera had their main season in winter and spring. In high summer, all the seaside resorts traditionally closed their doors to avoid the heat. We remember that Gabrielle went south with Dmitri Pavlovich in March, and the hotel where they stayed closed down in May. With the advent of a high-summer season by the sea, sunbathing now became high style. Gabrielle was certainly one of the first to sport a tan (although her friend Marthe Davelli had already taken to it during the First World War).
Gabrielle is so often credited with initiating something, such as cutting her hair short or introducing short skirts, because she had become the quintessence of high fashion. She had an unerring instinct for the moment, and what she did was now noticed and emulated. When as long ago as 1908, the dancer with the wild private life, Caryathis, had chopped off her hair in a fit of pique, most had thought her outrageous and unattractively eccentric. But when Gabrielle cut her hair several years later, in 1917, her timing, as always, was exactly right, and everyone followed suit. By the twenties, what Gabrielle wore, where she went, what sport she took up, how she entertained herself was of interest to the fashionable rich. This included sunbathing. From Saint-Jean-de-Luz, by the sea, Gabrielle wrote to a friend, “I was ill at first but I think it is because I ate too much which is quite disgusting! We’ve had terrible heat and my poor women [her seamstresses] were in a lamentable state, with sunburns which makes them rather ugly. I looked like a crayfish myself.”20 Eventually, thousands would follow.
In December 1923, the Parisian avant-garde was rattled when its prodigy Raymond Radiguet suddenly died. The boy’s book The Devil in the Flesh had become so popular it was even sold on street corners and at train stations, and it had made him famous. Reading France had fallen in love with Radiguet, and was appalled at the speed and premature nature of his demise. He had contracted typhoid when by the sea with friends, then, back in Paris, had once again fled Cocteau to a hotel across town. Here he picked up a girl and lived with her intermittently while revising his second book, Count d’Orgel’s Ball. Radiguet became wracked with chills, and the doctor diagnosed pneumonia. Cocteau was skeptical and called Gabrielle, who immediately sent her own doctor to the patient. He saw at once that it was typhoid and also that it was too late; he sent Radiguet to a hospital all the same. Radiguet’s mother misguidedly left his bedside for the night and in her absence he died, alone. Cocteau neither spent that last night with him, nor would he see him dead, or even attend the funeral.
As always, opinion was divided over Cocteau. Did he behave like “a self-indulgent queen,” or was he so devastated it was best that he keep away? Gabrielle had paid for the doctor, and now she also arranged and paid for the entire funeral, described as “most wonderfully done.” Artistic Paris turned out in force. Valentine Hugo wrote, “We were in utter despair” watching the white coffin, white hearse and white flowers, with just one bunch of red roses. It was all to Gabrielle’s design. The mourners followed in a long procession down the boulevard toward Père-Lachaise, the cemetery already harboring so many fellow writers.
Meanwhile, for several months past, Gabrielle had been spending time with another writer.