Flapper (20 page)

Coco had been ready to make the break for some time. “I had just spent two years in Compiègne, riding horses,” she said—actually more like four years, but when it came to Coco, who was counting?—“[and] I couldn’t earn a livelihood with that. And, now that I loved someone else, I had to move to Paris.”

Had theirs been a conventional story, Coco and Boy would have ridden off into the night, severing all ties to Etienne Balsan. But these weren’t conventional people. Balsan’s ego was probably bruised, but he tried not to let on. “Like every good Frenchman,” Coco later remarked, “like all men in general, Etienne Balsan began to love me again because I’d left him for someone else.”

The year 1908 found Coco living with Boy Capel at his apartment on rue Gabriel—and sometimes in a furnished suite at the Hotel Ritz—and running her upstart millinery out of Etienne’s apartment on the boulevard Malesherbes, an elegant, tree-lined thoroughfare
bordered by expensive shops, banking houses, and private apartment buildings. With both men now invested in Coco’s success—Etienne had put up the real estate, and Boy had lent her starting capital—the three friends became almost inseparable. “I was just a kid,” she later explained.
¹²
“I had no money. I lived at the Ritz and everything was paid for me. It was an incredible situation. Parisian society talked about it. I didn’t know Parisian society. I still didn’t know anybody.”

But her objective was independence. “It was very complicated,” she admitted.
¹³
“The cocettes were paid. I knew that, I’d been taught that. I said to myself, ‘Are you going to become like them? A kept woman? But this is appalling!’ I didn’t want it.” Etienne and Boy agreed. “You have no idea how amusing it was,” Coco recalled with a smile, “that three-sided discussion that started up fresh every day.”

Coco didn’t have to wait long for success to beckon. Headquartered just blocks from the Greek Revival columns of the Madeleine, Chanel found that her quirky style might be out of pace with old Paris, but it was right in step with the modernist sensibility that was taking hold among the fashion-conscious New Women of France, England, and America. Within months, the business was booming.

It was the beginning of the House of Chanel.

Years later, when asked how she emerged from obscurity to become the world’s most important designer of women’s clothes, Chanel said it was simple.

“Two gentlemen were outbidding each other over my hot little body.”
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14
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T
HE FEMININE AESTHETIC
that Coco Chanel set out to revolutionize from her small shop on the boulevard Malesherbes had stayed remarkably consistent over the better part of the preceding one hundred years.
¹

To be sure, the long nineteenth century—stretching from the French Revolution in 1789 to the Guns of August in 1914—had borne witness to a multitude of fashion cycles. At the dawn of the century, the typical well-heeled woman on either side of the Atlantic would have favored the Empire dress, a tapered, one-piece affair with an artificially high waistline that fell just below her breasts and drawstrings that met at the small of her back. Featuring a high, ruff-collared neckline for daylight hours and a more tantalizing décolletage at night—one that formed a perfect line across the top of her breasts—the Empire style recalled the toga of ancient Greece and was trimmed with puffs, scallops, and other three-dimensional frills.

By the 1830s, the Empire dress gave way to a new mode whose slightly lower waistline and leg-of-mutton sleeves—fitted forearms with puffed upper sections—presented a more top-heavy silhouette.

This style yielded in turn to a new midcentury aesthetic favoring enormous bell-shaped
skirts that trailed around women’s feet and asymmetrical “pagoda sleeves” that widened toward the wrist.

This pattern was superseded in the 1870s by wide, triangular skirts that culminated in a bustle—layers of material gathered at a woman’s back that resembled a large, decorative drapery.

Three young women in Chicago, 1924, proving that sports and competition were not just a man’s game.

The bustle fell out of vogue in the early 1870s, then came back into fashion in the 1880s.

The 1890s saw the popular rise of the two-piece dress suit whose starched white shirtwaist, tight jacket, leg-of-mutton sleeves, and belted midriff gave the impression of a tall hourglass.

Yet despite this constant evolution in fashion, a single, overriding theme remained the same:
control.
By painfully disciplining women’s bodies, clothing helped impose the political and social subordination of America’s daughters and wives and enforced the rigid separation between the masculine public sphere and the feminine domestic sphere.

Consider the daily torment experienced by a typical woman just in getting dressed each morning.
²
Whether the year was 1800 or 1900, whether she was fifteen years old or sixty, rich or in the middle class, married or unmarried, the representative American woman kicked off her ensemble with a one-piece foundation garment combining drawers and an undershirt, complete with a built-in “trapdoor”; then a tightly bound corset with drawstrings or metal clasps to contort the waist and midriff; next, restrictive silk pads that slipped in above the hips and in the underarms to provide the illusion of more dramatic curves; then several layers of petticoats or a steel-and-wood-frame crinoline to hold the skirt in proper shape; then a long-sleeved chemise; then underpants; then silk stockings and garters that fastened to the corset; and, finally, the dress or skirt itself.

This wasn’t just an exercise in extreme pageantry. It was about social control.

The tight-lacing of corsets, which was considered essential until the early twentieth century, artificially reduced women’s waists to as little as seventeen or eighteen inches. By constricting the rib cage just below the sternum, the corset amplified the hips and bust and shrank the waist, bending the feminine form into the idealized “steel engraved lady” whose unreal shape—stick thin in the middle and ample in the bosom, with a protruding rear end—suggested fragility, delicacy, and sexual availability all at once.

It also restricted oxygen intake, crushed the internal organs, caused chronic fatigue and headaches, and created serious long-term medical complications.

An English magazine correspondent—a proponent of women’s dress reform—shared with readers the story of her daughter, who left for boarding school (uncorseted) a “merry, romping girl” and returned (corseted) a “tall pale lady” who had to strain just to “languidly embrace me.”
³
The daughter told her mother “how the merciless system of tight-lacing was the rule of the establishment, and how she and her forty or fifty fellow-pupils had been daily imprisoned in vices [
sic
] of whalebone drawn tight by the muscular arms of sturdy waiting-maids, till the fashionable standard was attained. The torture at first was, she declared, intolerable; but all entreaties were vain, as no relaxation of the cruel laces was allowed during the day under any pretext except decided illness.”

By the time her daughter returned home, “her muscles [had] been, so to speak, murdered.”

A study of fifty women conducted in 1887 revealed that the corset forcibly contracted their waists by anywhere between two and a half and six inches.
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The pressure it applied to women’s bodies averaged twenty-one pounds but could reach as high as eighty-eight pounds. Tight-lacing was thus akin to crushing oneself slowly from all sides. As a harsh critic of the corset noted, “It is evident, physiologically, that air is the pabulum of life, and that the effects of a tight cord round the neck and of tight-lacing only differ in degree … for the strangulations are both fatal. To wear tight stays is in many cases to wither, to waste and to die.”

Not only did these devices force women’s bodies to conform to popular standards of beauty. They helped police the “weaker sex.” This was no conspiracy theory drummed up by protofeminists and dress reformers. The loudest defenders of the corset routinely used words like “discipline,” “confinement,” “submission,” and “bondage” and spoke favorably of “training the figure” with a degree of pain “rigidly inflicted and unflinchingly imposed.” A Victorian man admitted that “half the charm in a small waist comes not in spite of, but on account of, its being tight-laced.”

“
The corset is an ever present monitor,” argued yet another man, “indirectly bidding its wearer to exercise self-restraint: it is evidence of a well-disciplined mind and well-regulated feelings.”
⁵

The corset was only one of many clothing features that reinforced women’s subordination to men. The design of women’s sleeves and silk pads made it impossible for them to raise their arms to shoulder height. Both bell dresses, which were popular in the antebellum period, and barrel-shaped “hobble skirts”—which narrowed at the ankles and came into wide fashion in the early twentieth century—severely restricted women’s ability to walk. Running was simply out of the question.

“No one but a woman,” wrote one fashion critic, “knows how her dress twists about her knees, doubles her fatigue, and arrests her locomotive powers.”
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If layers of clothing choked off women’s ability to move and breathe, crinolines kept them in a literal state of captivity. Built out of flexible steel, whalebone, or wood, these contraptions were little more than hooped cages that gave full definition and body to women’s dresses while simultaneously confining their subjects within an intricate enclosure. Sometimes as much as five yards in circumference, crinolines visually and physically reinforced a political order that denied most women the right to hold property, vote, file for divorce, or sit as jurors in criminal and civil courts.

To add injury to insult, wooden crinolines commonly ignited when women stepped too close to a fireplace or caught their dresses on a loose ember. “Take what precautions we may against fire,” wrote one Victorian woman, “so long as the hoop is worn, life is never safe … all are living under a sentence of death which may occur unexpectedly in the most appalling form.”
⁷

With women so tightly bound, layered, and caged, it’s little wonder that the typical Victorian wife experienced fainting spells, headaches, exhaustion, and “neurasthenia”—a fictive nervous disease that supposedly befell women who wasted their energy reserves on strenuous endeavors like a college education or sensual experiences like masturbation.

Of course, there is no such thing as neurasthenia. Women suffered
physical and nervous attacks because they were laced with twenty pounds of weight and trapped beneath layers of hot, cumbersome petticoats. But doctors didn’t know that in the 1890s. Viewing the feminine body as a fragile, closed system that contained a fixed amount of energy, the finest minds of the nineteenth century agreed that a woman’s natural condition—dictated by birth and nature—required protection from the harsh realities of the world and a supreme imposition of control—from both within and without.

Clothing was just one piece of the larger puzzle.

There were lots of other ways to impose masculine authority over women.

Take medicine. With pronounced enthusiasm, American medical experts in the mid–nineteenth century embraced the groundbreaking efforts of J. Marion Sims, a country doctor from Alabama who pioneered the field of gynecological surgery.
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Unaware of recent developments in anesthesia, Sims subjected helpless black slaves to four years of brutal, experimental study. One of his subjects endured thirty gynecological “operations,” all in the name of unlocking the mysteries of the female reproductive system.

Based on his research, Sims passionately believed—and convinced most of the American medical establishment—that the only legitimate function of women’s reproductive organs was to procreate. He frowned upon “too frequent sexual impulse” and maintained that female arousal was an extraneous, even counterproductive, phenomenon. “It is only necessary to get the semen into the proper place at the proper time,” he wrote. “It makes no difference whether the copulative act be performed with great vigour and intense erethism.” In other words, the male orgasm was vital and useful; the female orgasm, not.

Sims invented surgical instruments like the “uterine guillotine” and taught adoring medical students how to amputate ovaries and clitorises. By the late 1800s, his techniques were commonly used on women whose physical or nervous conditions seemed to derive from an overexcited libido. What these women needed, the theory went, was management, discipline, and control.