Coco Chanel (18 page)

 

During that same summer of 1915, one of the earliest mentions of Gabrielle's dresses appeared in the influential American journal
Women's Wear Daily
, and showed how the reputation she was already forging was to act as foundation for her latest venture in Biarritz:

The following day it was reported that

This would prove to be something of an understatement. Using all her ingenuity, Gabrielle had quickly turned the grim wartime circumstances to her advantage. Both tenacity of purpose and ingenuity were required to overcome the shortages of textiles and accessories needed to maintain any dress shop, let alone the possibility of three exclusive salons. Gabrielle drew in Etienne Balsan's brothers, Jacques and Robert, who worked for the family textile firm, to help obtain broadcloth and to put her in touch with the silk manufacturers of Lyon. In addition, Arthur sought out for her the best woolen weavers and dyers that Scotland could provide.

However, the fabric whose possibilities Gabrielle was to utilize in entirely new ways, and which was the source of as much attention, indeed amazement, as any of the other unusual things she made in her first years as a designer, was the textile mentioned above: jersey, or
djersabure
. Clothes made from knitted materials—silk or wool jersey—had become fashionable some years earlier, and heavier hand-knitted jumpers were often worn with linen or flannel for tennis, golf and beachwear. However, undyed jersey had never before been used for women and was seen as one of the most humble of materials.

There are several versions of how Gabrielle came to use it, but the gist of the story is that she had met a textile manufacturer named Jean Rodier, who showed her some material he had made up as an experiment before the war. He had intended his machine-made knit for use as underwear for sportsmen, but they found it too scratchy. A machine knit was just what Gabrielle had been looking for, and to Rodier's surprise, she bought the lot. It was its very soberness, which had not drawn others to it, that Gabrielle found attractive, and she asked Rodier to make her up another lot as well as the one she was already buying.

He refused, saying he was doubtful she would ever sell it. And with the war making raw materials difficult to obtain, he was unwilling to run the risk of wasting a consignment. Why didn't she make it up, and if her outfits sold, come back to him for more? Gabrielle's insistence was useless—Rodier was adamant. His reluctance to weave for this woman, who wanted to make into outerwear for her wealthy customers this humble material that had even failed to sell for use as underwear, was reasonable. Of course, with hindsight, we know that Gabrielle proved Rodier wrong.

At first, she used Rodier's natural cream and gray jersey; then, when he saw that she really could sell it, they collaborated to create some beautiful new colors, as noted above. They also developed corals, Madonna blue, what was described as “old-blue,” and various greys. By 1916, when
Women's Wear Daily
heralded the fact that Gabrielle was “the one to bring jersey into prominence,”
Vogue
described her salon as “The Jersey House.” (Gabrielle wasn't the only designer to use the fabric, but she was undoubtedly the most innovative, and the one who transformed it into a high-fashion textile.) War shortages and high prices meant that through Gabrielle's triumphant lead, jersey would overtake more familiar materials such as twill-woven serge, now in great demand for the armed forces' uniforms. In the summer of 1916,
Vogue
revealed Gabrielle's growing influence when describing the promenade of one of the most distinguished streets in the world:

Although jersey was to be the material Gabrielle used most commonly during the war for day clothes, she would also make inspired use of a small number of other fabrics, such as suede for hats as well as coats and jackets, sometimes embroidered with decorative bands. For afternoon and evening, she created dresses of satin, velvet and tulle. On occasion, these were embroidered with cotton, silks or beads. At their best, her clothes were astonishingly beautiful in their masterly unification of fabric, simplicity of design and decoration. In November 1916,
Vogue
gave a hint of impatience that Gabrielle's apparently limitless capacity to design using the previously downmarket jersey was clearly not shared by the readers, when it informed them that “it has been rumored lately that women were growing tired of jersey, but Chanel is master of her art, and her jersey frocks are as complete and as daintily finished as frocks of more thoroughly patrician stuffs.”

In another report,
Vogue
described Gabrielle's decoration of her thoroughly unpatrician jersey, in a “cloak of this thick warm tissue, in yellow, trimmed with grey rabbit.” Here Gabrielle had once again launched one of her remarkable reversals of tradition. For fashionable women, fur had always been one of the accepted means of demonstrating luxury, and the more rare and expensive, the better. Not only had Gabrielle been promoting a textile that in other hands was regarded as entirely downmarket, she now turned another notion on its head: she attached rabbit, that most plebeian of furs, to many of her outfits. And rich and fashionable women flocked to buy them. Gabrielle had the excuse of the war, but selling these downmarket fabrics at upmarket prices, her motivation was complex. She would say:

And then she made one of those singular Chanel remarks: “People confuse poverty with simplicity.”
¹
Nowadays we immediately comprehend this notion in dress, but it was Gabrielle above all others who would teach us to understand it.

Bearing this idea in mind, the clothes she made with jersey were perhaps the first Gabrielle created that were truly original. And while, as the century progressed, she was to go on and initiate many of the crucial elements in the modern woman's wardrobe, her influence was to become more far-reaching than simply being first. By the end of the First World War, it would be Gabrielle more than any other designer who had revolutionized women's dress. But concentration on a length, a style or a type of material is not always the most significant aspect of her originality. What women wore was only the most visible aspect of more profound changes Gabrielle would help to bring about. Through her own extraordinary and unconventional example, she was to become instrumental in forging the very idea of modern woman.

Gabrielle always understood fundamentals and would say, “Eccentricity was dying out; I hope . . . that I helped kill it off. Paul Poiret, a most inventive couturier, dressed women in costumes.” And she went on to describe the varieties of make-believe she thought that people indulged in, so that “the most modest tea party looked like something from the Baghdad of the Caliphs. The last courtesans . . . would come by, to the sound of the tango, wearing bell-shaped dresses, with greyhounds and cheetahs at their side.” She said this was all very pleasant but warned against “originality in dressmaking, you immediately descend to disguise and decoration, you lapse into stage design.”
²

She concentrated on the silhouette, the structure and architecture of clothes. In making it clear that she believed simplicity of line counted above all and that decoration and ornamentation were the secondary elements of what one wore, Gabrielle had a more accurate finger on the pulse of her times than many of her competitors. Understanding better than most what those times were about—Poiret had very daringly revealed the foot!—it was Gabrielle more than anyone else who was responsible for lifting the hemline above the ankle. Already she was loosening the waistline; in time, she would drop it below the waist.

She had done away with the decoration that life in the past could support, the details that had become obsolete. But in doing this, as in her own life, Gabrielle was also attempting to clear away the games and the pretenses about women. In making clothes fit for the women of a new and mechanical age, she declared, “I had rediscovered honesty, and in my own way, I made fashion honest.”
³

 

Meanwhile, in that summer of 1915, with some reservations, Antoinette arrived in Biarritz to help her prospering sister. She was now twenty-eight, and unmarried, and worried that living and working far from Paris would make finding a husband even more difficult. As for Adrienne, Gabrielle's stalwart, this time, she remained obdurate: she could not come to Gabrielle's aid just yet. She was on tenterhooks, awaiting permission to visit her lover at the front. When that permission finally came, the demure Adrienne was shocked, apparently at being asked by the soldier checking her visitor's pass if she was Baron de Nexon's wife. Embarrassed, she admitted that she wasn't, upon which the soldier waved her through, telling her that the colonel didn't like wives; they made a man soft. Girlfriends, they were a different matter!

In Biarritz, where the balmy weather made the season pretty well continual, and where sports and youthful activities had not long since become the order of the day, Gabrielle saw her clothes fulfilling a hitherto unrecognized need. She also sensed that time was of the essence and, for the first time, pushed on without Adrienne.

When the frantic preparations were at an end and Gabrielle threw open her sumptuous
maison de couture
, she was taken aback at the enthusiasm that greeted her new business. The highly priced accessories and chic day clothes for tennis, golf or swimming; the ensembles for the casino or the races; and the new evening dresses she had designed for the resort's hectic nightlife, all dazzled her excited clients.

What Gabrielle offered was quite different from the overt luxury and opulence hitherto expected of an upmarket boutique. What her clients now found was what Gabrielle's head of workrooms, Marie-Louise Delay, later described as the “sensational quality of unparalleled simplicity and chic.” This, Marie-Louise said, was “so different from Poiret and Madeleine Vionnet.” The Maison Chanel, with Antoinette greeting the clients, was overwhelmed by orders. They came from Bilbao, San Sebastián, Biarritz, Madrid, Paris, other French cities and also farther afield. Europeans, bored by the dullness of war, could afford to ease their tedium in one of the last outposts where luxury remained the highest priority.

While Gabrielle and Marie-Louise Delay were organizing the seamstresses to work as fast as they could, Antoinette returned from Paris with several others she had brought back from the boutique in rue Cambon, itself already busy. From the outset, Gabrielle used as much cotton and jersey in Biarritz as she was now using at the salon in Paris. While her lease on rue Cambon forbade her to make dresses, jersey was considered such a lowly material, not previously used for them, that, apparently, it didn't count.
⁴

Gabrielle called in her acquaintances and friends: Marthe Davelli became a devoted client and brought along other singers and actresses, while the powerful socialite Kitty Rothschild kept up her influence on French women staying at Biarritz. Some of the most significant clients for Gabrielle's luxurious new shop came, however, from just across the border in Spain. Both the Spanish aristocracy and several members of the royal family were much taken with her stylish clothes. Indeed, in that year, 1915, the American magazine
Harper's Bazaar
stated that “the woman who doesn't have at least one Chanel is hopelessly out of the running.”
⁵
In February 1916, the authoritative
Women's Wear Daily
reported that in France, “It is not unusual for smart women to place orders for three or four [Chanel] jersey costumes in different colors at one time.”