In the spring of 1953, Gabrielle traveled to the United States. For three months, she was the guest of Maggie and Egmont van Zuylen in New York. On weekends, they mostly socialized with people Gabrielle already knew. Out on Long Island, for example, she spent time with the photographer Horst. Then there was Mona Williams, later von Bismarck.
Mona had been named by several designers, including Gabrielle, the best-dressed woman in the world; her fame had triggered Cole Porter’s lines “What do I care if Mrs. Harrison Williams is the best-dressed woman in town?” Her husband (who would die that year) was reputedly the wealthiest man in America. Gabrielle had often been a visitor at the Harrisons’ villa on Capri, originally belonging to the emperor Tiberius. Before the war, she and Harrison had had a brief liaison. He had told Gabrielle that his beautiful socialite wife — most famously photographed by Cecil Beaton in Chanel—“is a fashion model, just a model,” and had attempted to capture Gabrielle for himself. She said if he’d asked her a year earlier she would have gone. As it was, “It felt too late.”
Gabrielle’s visit to the States was in part motivated by the prospect of work. Chanel Parfums New York had asked for her assistance in redesigning their new offices. Gabrielle relished the challenge and created a luxurious yet restrained interior. To accompany the group of signature Coromandel screens she had brought with her from France, Gabrielle included another signature: her beige carpets. These worked as soothing background to the honey-colored straw-cloth walls and the warm wood of the antique pink-beige leather-covered French chairs. Around the rooms was a mixture of African bronzes and paintings by Renoir and Henri Rousseau.
In Gabrielle’s years without designing, she almost never spoke of it. Events, however, were leading her toward it once again. While she was in New York, she made a point of being introduced to Alex and Tatiana Liberman, who had escaped France to safety in America in 1940. Liberman was both talented and tremendously ambitious, and had risen to become the art director of Vogue. He recalled how Gabrielle’s business manager, Count Koutouzof, introduced to her by Dmitri Pavlovich, had “brought Chanel to our house, and we became great friends.” This was that same Alex Liberman who had charged his Parisian friends to break off their friendship with von Dincklage, shortly before the war.
Liberman enjoyed Gabrielle’s company: “I loved the Proustian aspect… the stories, the legends, and her involvement with Diaghilev and Picasso and Cocteau and Reverdy. She was a constant lesson in refinement… Tatiana and Chanel got along well on the surface, although I don’t think there was ever much warmth between them.”1 Quite possibly this was because of Gabrielle’s liaison with von Dincklage, who had deceived Tatiana’s close friend Hélène Dessoffy so badly.
In 1950, Schiaparelli’s sensational style had run its course, and she was obliged to close down her house. Between the First and Second World Wars, some of the most distinguished and influential Parisian couture houses had been directed by women, but several were now gone. Jeanne Lanvin died in 1946; the great Madeleine Vionnet had closed her house in 1939. Admired by Gabrielle, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo, Vionnet had described herself as “an enemy of fashion,” stating that her interest was in expressing a timeless vision of woman.
The postwar designer Christian Dior, who had shot to overnight fame in 1947, would write that the earliest twentieth-century designers gained variety largely by “trimmings of exquisite craftsmanship.” After the creation and decoration of Poiret:
It was Madeleine Vionnet and Jeanne Lanvin who finally transformed the profession of couturier, by executing the dresses in their collections with their own hands and scissors. The model became a whole and at last skirt and bodice were cut according to the same principle. Madeleine Vionnet achieved wonders in this direction: she was a genius at employing her material, and invented the famous cut on the cross which gave the dresses of the women between the two wars their softly molded look. Freed from the trimmings of 1900 and decorative motives of Poiret, dresses now depended entirely on their cut.2
Another woman, Nina Ricci, was one of the best designers for elegant older women, and Germaine Krebs, known as Madame Grès, was a sculptress whose house had opened in 1942. The last of the couturiers to develop a ready-to-wear collection, Grès called it “prostitution.” Christian Dior knew his subject well, describing the interwar period as “the age of the great couturiers. Outstanding among them was Mlle Chanel, who dominated all the rest… In her personality as well as in her taste, she had style, elegance, and authority. From quite different points of view, she and Madeleine Vionnet can claim to be the great creators of modern fashion.”3
Meanwhile, Marcel Rochas, Lucien Lelong, Jean Patou, Edward Molyneux, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Mainbocher and a handful of other young male designers were now the dominant figures in the couture. At the same time, many commentators agreed with Dior that postwar fashion lacked purpose and was often rather ugly: “Hats were far too large, skirts far too short, jackets far too long, shoes far too heavy… and worst of all there was that dreadful mop of hair raised high above the forehead in front and rippling down the backs of French women on their bicycles.” Appreciating that this zazou style had originated in the desire to “defy the forces of occupation and the austerity of Vichy,” nonetheless, as fashion, Dior found it repellent.4
Paris had become cut off and impoverished during the war, while American ready-to-wear designers and manufacturers had forged a place amongt the leaders of female taste, and were absolutely set on making New York the world’s new fashion capital. At the same time, with backing from the textile magnate Marcel Boussac, a young Dior set out to reinstate France’s premier role. In February 1947, it was freezing cold and the French press was on strike, yet word had got around that something unusual was about to happen. Dior’s first show, at his elegant avenue Montaigne premises, was oversubscribed. On the day, the crowded salon was tense with anticipation. Society, fashion’s attendants and its commentators were there, including Carmel Snow, the omnipotent American editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Close by was the Vogue team, led by Michel de Brunhoff, his famous joie de vivre never to return after the Nazis had shot his son.
Suddenly, stepping out fast, the first girl made her entrance; others followed in quick succession. The audience was stunned. The pace of fashion shows was traditionally extremely sedate, as the models gave journalists and buyers time to take in the new collection. Instead, Dior had instructed his girls to walk fast and seductively, heightening the sense of drama. Each girl moved “with a provocative swinging movement, whirling in the close-packed room, knocking over ash trays with the strong flare of her pleated skirt, and bringing everyone to the edge of their seats in a desire not to miss a thread of this momentous occasion.”5
The response was unanimous: the show was a triumph. Madeleine Vionnet, now in her seventies, told Dior, “It has been a long time since I have seen anything as beautiful.” But it was Carmel Snow’s comment that traveled like lightning around the world: “It’s… a revolution. Your dresses are wonderful: they have such a new look!” she told Dior. She had named it. The clothes trade was in an uproar. Millions of dollars had been invested in new stock which, if outmoded by this New Look, would be made obsolete overnight. Buyers cabled the States from Paris predicting “catastrophe. Women will go for this look like bees for honey.” Carmel Snow was interviewed on NBC: “God help those who bought before seeing Dior’s collection. He is a genius. He has changed everything.”6 And he had.
After years of austerity, with strictly regulated yardage for clothes, Dior’s New Look (actually titled “Coralle,” after the petals of a flower) did away with the hard, squared-off padded shoulders and short lengths of the ubiquitous military influence almost overnight. He presented instead softer, feminine, waisted jackets, and dresses and skirts using yards and yards of fabric. Molded shoulders, flattering flared skirts, tightly corseted bodices and provocatively defined breasts helped signal the impression of bodies that were archetypes of the female form.
Describing his couture as “ephemeral architecture, dedicated to the beauty of the female body” for his first collection, Dior was violently criticized by the establishment for not working in the spirit of austerity. Britain’s president of the Board of Trade objected; there were accusations of decadence and “lowering the standards of public morality.” Some women complained about covering up their legs, and during a photo shoot in a Paris market, the models were attacked by women stall holders over the profligacy of their dresses. But all that really mattered was that both women and men fell in love with Dior’s glorification of all that was delicate and feminine.
With great speed, the New Look reestablished Paris as the epicenter of the world’s fashion. Recalling the response to these luxurious and exaggeratedly feminine clothes, one socialite said, “Women had been deprived of everything for years and they threw themselves on fashion like hungry wolves.” Indeed, the New Look was so successful that by the beginning of 1950, approximately 75 percent of French couture exports came from the House of Dior. Within a year, he had become the most famous designer in the world.
Gabrielle was curious. Angry at what she saw as unwarranted attention, she came back to France to see this New Look for herself. Meeting her friend Christian Bérard, who had illustrated Dior’s collection, she berated him for working for someone participating in “the ruin of French couture.” Now hopelessly addicted to his opium, Bérard was also a classic Parisian celebrity, noted for his theatrical decors, his fashion sketches, his gossip and his wit. Annoyed by Gabrielle’s arrogance, he retorted, “Oh stop taking yourself for France and crowing ‘cock a doodle doo!’”
Much more, however, than Gabrielle’s pique at the brilliance of Dior’s success, she was appalled at the reintroduction of so many aspects of women’s dress from which she had worked so hard to free them. It was ironic that Dior, a gifted, gentle and retiring homosexual, had returned women to an updated version of the Belle Epoque. Woman was once again to be worshipped as an image. She was an immensely elegant, padded, corseted and constrained symbol. With her tiny waist, voluptuous breasts and elegantly female hips, she was costumed as a beautiful ideal. For all its undoubted beauty, this image presented woman as an adored object who moved with less freedom than she had done for many years. Some of these lovely and graceful costumes were so structured that they could almost stand up on their own. Whatever else it did, Dior’s couture symbolized the more reticent role women were expected to revert to in the years following the war.
When Gabrielle was met by reporters on her 1953 visit to the States and asked what she thought of the New Look, wearing one of her own suits from a prewar collection, she answered, “Just take a look at me.” The exquisite couture Dior and his fellow designers created throughout the late forties was the antithesis of everything in Gabrielle’s sartorial philosophy.
For many years, the upper floors of Gabrielle’s rue Cambon boutique had been deserted. After the war, she sometimes returned to Paris and “walked through the silent workrooms where pieces of fabric, dress dummies fallen over on to tables, and rusting sewing machines, were left miserably about. Life had stopped there.”7 Without the work that had filled Gabrielle’s days, all her houses, her money and jewels rewarded her only with boredom.
In 1954, while American Vogue would say that Gabrielle probably meant nothing more than the name on a perfume bottle to those born after 1939, for those born before it, the rumor of her return had sent a frisson around a series of inner circles. Gabrielle denied it and played coy. Then, finally, after considerable planning and guile, involving recalling some of her best premières, and the employment of some of the most well-born girls in Paris as models, Gabrielle reopened her couture house in early 1954. If she was yielding to the need to throw off the boredom of these last years, perhaps she also hoped her return might be recompense for what she had sacrificed and lost in the name of the House of Chanel. Speculation was rife. What had made her, at seventy-one, decide to reopen? What on earth would her first collection be like?
If boredom was one of the drivers of Gabrielle’s return, so was her dislike of present fashions. But a visit to Switzerland by Pierre Wertheimer was probably the final trigger that spurred her to act. In the summer of 1953, Wertheimer came in person to give her some worrying news. Despite the magazines all quoting Marilyn Monroe’s claim — a famed Chanel Nº 5 promotion — that she wore nothing else in bed, for the first time in thirty years, № 5’s sales were down. Wertheimer was soothing. Gabrielle should not concern herself; profits were still substantial. She did not react with the anticipated indignation, instead quietly suggesting they launch another perfume. Wertheimer told her that this wouldn’t be good business. On the one hand, Paris no longer had automatic precedence in the world of fashion, perfume and cosmetics; on the other, the life of these things was becoming shorter each year. Gabrielle didn’t persist, and Pierre Wertheimer was relieved to see that, at last, she was mellowing. He was wrong.
Very shortly after this meeting, Gabrielle returned to Paris, reinstated herself at the Ritz and set about getting rid of her buildings on rue Cambon, with the exception of number 31. Here she refurbished the boutique on the ground floor; the grand salon, where she had always shown her collections; and her third-floor apartment and workrooms above. Once again, Gabrielle spent her days working and entertaining at rue Cambon, and her nights over the road at the Ritz. She also sold her beautiful house in the south of France. La Pausa was bought by Emery Reves, literary agent and friend to Winston Churchill. It seems fitting that not only was Churchill to spend much time in his last years at this, one of Gabrielle’s most perfect creations, he would also write a good part of his war memoirs there. Gabrielle would later buy a house in Switzerland for retirement, but no longer kept a home in France outside Paris.
She sold La Pausa knowing she would need every centime she could lay her hands on. As much as anything, however, letting it go was a return to her real life: her work. La Pausa had represented the discreet yet luxurious leisure Gabrielle had been one of the first to develop. There she had shared some of the best aspects of the life she had created. Gabrielle was controlling, but she was also its contrary, nonjudgmental, and life at La Pausa had been very nonjudgmental of its guests. Gabrielle had said, “It pleases me infinitely more to give than to receive, whether it is at work, in love or in friendship.”8 In relinquishing La Pausa, she was taking stock before relaunching herself upon the world. Paramount was her belief in the future. In the end, houses and many objects were consigned to the past. Her rebirth was to be about work, not holiday. Connected with this thinking was a more profound move.
Returning to a hotel, to her work and the recreation of her couture, Gabrielle was, once and for all, giving up on a life that was private. Given her times, her upbringing and her own character, she had failed in her search for long-term emotional contentment. Indeed, she no longer believed it was possible. Work and her public face were the only places where fulfillment had always followed her, so she would devote the remainder of her life to living in the public gaze. From now on, she would cultivate her legend.
Gabrielle’s faith — perhaps credo is a better word — that only she knew how to dress women nowadays sounds like bombastic exaggeration. But while the couture of the contemporary stars — Dior, Givenchy, Fath — had made women look and feel beautiful in clothes that were sensational, opulent and romantic, it was also primarily about escape: escape from the realities of modern life. For some time after the war, that was exactly what the world had wanted. Male designers now dressed women either as exquisite archetypes or as experiments in geometry and color, sometimes with little thought for the body underneath. The sheath, the tent, the trumpet, the A line and the H line were executed in lemon yellows, pumpkin oranges and bright sky blue. Buyers began to complain that there was no decisive lead.
However radical and modern these styles appeared, essentially they alluded to a past where woman was simply decorative. Subtly disempowering her, they implied that the realities of the modern life she actually had to maneuver in just didn’t exist. Skirts were sometimes so tight she could hardly walk, and corsets, jackets and dresses had returned to the underlying whalebone structure of woman’s grandmother, squeezing her into the desirable hourglass shape. These clothes were not about comfort. They transformed woman into a beautiful kind of make-believe. Good dressing was dressing up; it was once again about theater. Against this, Gabrielle’s lament “Dressing women is not a man’s job. They dress them badly because they scorn them” at first sounded a dull disgruntled note.
Meanwhile, hearing of her projected return, one of these men, Balenciaga, a gentle and gifted man who was also a great admirer of Gabrielle’s work, declared, “Chanel is an eternal bomb. None of us can defuse her,” and sent her a heart-shaped bouquet. She was unable to let down her defensive shield; sadly, she diminished herself by scoffing at this distinguished admirer.
Gabrielle had spent her early professional life trying to dispel the notion that dress should be a disguise. Her success had enabled her to supplant the great creator of what she called costume, of make-believe — Poiret — as the Parisian couturier par excellence. But this great coup had come about for far more interesting reasons than simply because Gabrielle was a practical realist who didn’t like “costume.” In her own life and designs she was constantly telling her contemporaries that they lived in a “practical” era. This meant fewer servants, more machines, a more urban life for the majority, and all at a faster pace.
Out of this, Gabrielle’s great feat had been to encourage her contemporaries to accept the times in which they lived. Helping to dispel nostalgia and escapist fantasy about the past, she wanted them to accept, embrace and embellish this machine age, which, for all its faults and problems, was the only one they’d got. At their best, Gabrielle’s clothes made women feel enabled and exhilarated about taking part in this new world, while at the same time looking sleek, seductive and elegant in an entirely new way. Many of the elements she introduced and made fashionable have become indispensable to a modern female wardrobe: women with short hair; in raincoats; in trousers both day and night; in swimsuits, with costume jewelry and sunglasses; handbags with shoulder straps; and the rightly ubiquitous “little black dress.”
Gabrielle had promulgated the idea that if a fashion wasn’t taken up and worn by everybody, it wasn’t a fashion but an eccentricity. This had helped bring about her greatest offering to the world: fashion that was democratic. This was also, however, her greatest dilemma. What she propounded was a democratic belief in a world (haute couture) at whose heart is the idea of exclusion of the majority (the exclusive). Unlike her fellow designers, who understood only the notion of exclusiveness, Gabrielle Chanel knew that any fashion not adopted by the majority was a failure. This, ironically, had also been the source of her waning influence before the war, when Schiaparelli and the surrealists had led the dance in outrage, antitaste and eccentricity.
The period before the war was groping its way toward two related thoughts: an increasing disenchantment with authority and the dystopias created, ultimately, as a result of the machine. Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis had depicted this disenchantment as long ago as 1927. Emerging out of this disillusionment with the modern world, it had been feeling, emotion and the unconscious, as opposed to the rational and the nonfeeling machine, that were explored as never before.
Before the First World War, Gabrielle had intuited that this would be the dilemma at the heart of her era. And rather than shying away from it via nostalgia, she faced it, “saw” it for what it was, and designed clothes accordingly. On into the period of tumult between the two world wars, her devastatingly simple clothes had sometimes seemed a little too grown up. And though she would never have admitted it, it was very difficult not to be seduced by the powerfully escapist climate of thought in the later thirties and, for a while, she lost her way. Her chief première would later say, “When she re-started, it’s really then that she invented, reinvented her style. From my point of view, in 1935 she didn’t have a precise style. It’s when she came back she invented le petit Chanel.”9
Gabrielle had had fifteen years to think things over. Times had changed, but she affirmed what she called “the integrity” of her clothes. Living most of her life at the heart of the narcissistic world of fashion, her puritanical streak led her to say, “I am against fashion that doesn’t last.” While understanding its ephemeral nature better than almost anyone, she had come to the radical belief that fashion’s real purpose was not to redefine the way we look, but to tell us who we are. This was how she believed that it was a lasting, recognizable style that made women look beautiful and was the bedrock of the best fashion.
Meanwhile, Gabrielle had no intention of being left behind in her elegance, and was fascinated by much of what was new. An underlying shift taking place in her trade was reflected in one of the remarkable new synthetic fabrics, easy-care nylon. Gabrielle had foreseen that the days of haute couture were numbered, that the effects were related to the cost of labor and an age that had little interest in the artisan. An instant effect now mattered more to women than how something was made.
Since the war, every couture house had been preoccupied with how to balance its costs. The collections — meaning the sales of models to a wealthy private clientele of a few thousand women — no longer covered anything like the huge costs of running the couture house. (All labor costs had gone up, in particular the traditionally appalling wages of those at the artisanal level of couture, those who actually made the clothes.) Using the cachet of their labels, selling prêt-à-porter was the only path down which the couturiers believed they could go. Both a dilemma and contradiction for Gabrielle, like the rest, she saw that prêt-à-porter was an inevitable part of the future.
Accordingly, through Marie-Louise Bousquet in Paris and Carmel Snow in the States, she cunningly set up a most innovative deal that would fund her new collection. To coincide with its launch, she negotiated “Coco Chanel” ready-to-wear originals in New York’s fashion district, Seventh Avenue. Gabrielle calculated — correctly — that this would stimulate considerable interest around the world. Not only that, when Pierre Wertheimer got wind of her crafty plan, to his credit, he made an immediate and generous offer. He would like to underwrite half of Gabrielle’s new collection’s expenses. If it went well, they all knew that the sales of Nº 5 could only benefit. At seventy, Gabrielle had lost neither her market trader’s shrewdness nor her feminine touch. Once more, her old adversary and friend Wertheimer had been won over.
This coup was part of Gabrielle’s carefully considered campaign in which she refused all interviews. The resulting sense of anticipation meant that several months before her collection, journalists began dredging up and expounding on old articles and photographs: Gabrielle’s thoughts on fashion, her look, her extraordinary friends and all those famous affairs. The young were amazed by this woman in whom the press was so interested.
With her retrieved ex-premières, to whom she said, “Come quickly, we only have ten green years,” she had set to work. The premières were in only two of the old workrooms high up in 31 rue Cambon, while Gabrielle herself worked from one small room on the third floor, close by her private apartment. With one mannequin alone to work on, and one fitter, an elderly, white-haired woman, this was nothing like the past. But Gabrielle’s scissors were, nonetheless, once again hanging authoritatively from around her neck. The task before her was almost insurmountable, and with all in Paris with the vaguest interest in couture waiting on this collection, Gabrielle permitted herself no indulgence, such as speaking of her fears. Instead, she spelled out her criticism of other — male—“pederast” designers, whom she decried for designing on paper rather than on the model’s own body, as she did:
To one of the few journalists who were lucky enough to talk to her in the winter of 1953, and who asked her what she was planning to present in her collection, Coco, superb as ever, answered, “How can you expect me to know? Until the last day I alter, transform. I create my dresses on the mannequins themselves.” 10
Meanwhile, for December 20, 1953, Jean Cocteau wrote in his diary: “Sunday with Coco Chanel, Marie-Louise [Bousquet] and [Michel] Déon. Chattered from one till ten at night without saying one nasty thing about anyone. Coco amazingly revivified by reopening her house.”11
The invitation everyone in Paris wanted for February 5, 1954 (always 5 to bring luck), was the one to Gabrielle’s show. Select members of Paris society were invited, as well as every journalist, photographer, magazine editor and buyer deemed worthy. The night before, as had been Gabrielle’s custom, she lay flat on the floor in the grand salon as her models walked past; she was checking the length of their hems.