A Rich Man’s Game

In 1900, a notorious Parisian hack, Henry Gauthier-Villars (known as Willy), published a novel he claimed to be the work of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, Claudine. Claudine à l’école and the follow-up novels were hugely successful. Heralded for their style, their frankly sexual subject matter also tainted their author’s reputation with scandal. Willy’s cynical claim that Claudine at School had been written anonymously would eventually be exposed by its real author, his wife, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, writing to order for her husband. By the time she revealed her true identity, she had left him.

That some find the sexual promise of an adolescent arousing is nothing new. But the traditional French view, in which a woman becomes more seductive as she grows beyond her teens and twenties and gains experience, had an unorthodox competitor in the raw young Claudine. On the surface, the Claudine novels served as soft porn for the bourgeoisie, but below the titillation and sexual heresy, Colette was articulating an unsettling version of a gnawing contemporary problem: the battle between the sexes.

Many men were ambivalent about women. On the one hand, woman was Venus, whose corseted and exaggerated hourglass figure was worshipped; on the other, the male fin de siècle mindset had become increasingly preoccupied with the image of the femme fatale, the man-consuming sphinx. One of the best examples of this was the proscribed, ritual drama played out between the fin de siècle courtesan (the femme fatale) and her lover. And many found this a more insidious relationship than the traditional balancing act of man-woman relations described in earlier literature.

In the provocatively unorthodox Claudine, Colette had captured something in the contemporary mind, and literary versions of the character became common in literature. Nothing like the seductive and majestic grandes courtisanes, this younger woman, with her unripe allure, had an edgy, anarchic femaleness, her ignorance and unself-consciousness liberating her from constraint. In the future, a man of experience would write, “Today, I miss… the time one spent waiting. The penitence and the continence that society imposed on us imparted an unbelievable flavor to the opposite sex, and they conferred something sacred that has been lost.”¹ In contrast, devoid of cultivation, Claudine was confrontational, revealed her confidence in a caustic sense of humor, cared little for tradition and was utterly impervious to the notion of maturity. While encapsulating an important aspect of the sexual flavor of the period, the anarchic Claudine would also emerge as its most unsettling female image.

There is no doubt that Gabrielle’s particular allure lay somewhere in this mold.

Nevertheless, for all the apparent unorthodoxy of Royallieu, she had no more real scope than any traditional mistress. She was “kept” by Etienne, and with her solemn elfin beauty, in photographs Gabrielle often looks fiercely at the camera with an air of studied defiance. Whatever Claudine’s influence, like other women with any ambition, Gabrielle was faced with “a choice as dramatic as it was contrived: between retaining the prestige of their femininity, which left them at the mercy of their men; and renouncing it for the sake of man’s autonomy… which set them adrift in an environment hostile both psychologically and economically to emancipated women.”²

The constant stream of visitors to Royallieu brought a cheerful mix of aristocratic sportsmen, stars of the turf, actresses, singers and demimondaines — young people whose lives revolved around entertainment of one kind or another. Etienne’s friends were strongly discouraged from showing up at Royallieu with their wives. Mistresses were preferred. But if Etienne’s life appeared a carefree round of riding to hounds and house parties, this omits an important detail: in many ways, he wasn’t a carefree soul at all. While his love of playing the fool went in tandem with an aversion to emotional responsibility, in fact, a vein of absolute commitment ran seamlessly through his life: Etienne was dedicated to horses. He knew them, loved them, understood their foibles, their worth, and was capable of fierce competitiveness about them too. When purchasing one or taking part in a race, he was a formidable adversary. As a result, his rise to prominence as both trainer and gentleman rider was rapid, and would eventually make him one of the most famous horse breeders in France. His obsession also left Etienne prepared to live in the country, something most young men of his status were loath to do.

The country house to which he brought Gabrielle was a handsome one. First a hunting lodge for kings, it became La Maison du Roy and, eventually, simply Royallieu. A priory, then an abbey, it was extended and altered over time. Finally, the château became a stud farm, which perfectly suited Etienne’s needs. Royallieu was close to the Chantilly racetrack, in the province of Oise, regarded as the best purebred training ground in France.

At Moulins, while the rich young officers had been flattering and fun, the reality of Gabrielle’s life had been servitude as a lowly shop assistant, with lodgings in a poor part of town. At Royallieu, she experienced for the first time the elements of grandeur, and also a certain public notice. While never the mistress of the house, she was to remain there as Etienne’s irrégulière for several years to come. Absorbing the standards and conventions of Royallieu, however, was a considerable struggle, and for some time, Gabrielle felt out of her depth. She later admitted lying to camouflage her inadequacy.

The contrast between her old life and Royallieu was almost unimaginable. Sloughing off virtually overnight a life ruled by figures she found unsympathetic, it is no wonder that she saw Royallieu’s privilege, its servants and its sophisticated company as a kind of dream. No longer did she need to rise early and cross town to her petit bourgeois employers, bowing and scraping subservience to their condescending clients. Slowly comprehending her new position, Gabrielle learned, for example, to negotiate the thorny problem of the Royallieu domestics, of whom she would say, “I was afraid.” Social hierarchies may have been under attack in 1906, but Etienne’s servants would have disdained to treat their master’s lower-class mistress with much deference. Meanwhile, if she chose, this ex-shopgirl needed do nothing all day except lie in bed, reading her trashy novels.

At first, Gabrielle worked hard at this leisure, something alien to both her nature and her upbringing. Etienne was too active to cultivate the art of languor, and marveled at her ability to read in bed until noon. But Gabrielle was doing more than simply reading popular fiction, she was learning. Since childhood, this highly intelligent young woman had found no one to guide her. Admitting later that her early reading matter was “rubbish,” she added, “The very worst book has something to say to you, something truthful. The silliest books are masterpieces of experience.”³ Indeed, Gabrielle said that she “learned about life through novels… There you find all the great unwritten laws that govern mankind… From the serial novels to the greatest classics, all novels are reality in the guise of dreams.”⁴ Permitting herself the time, previously in such short supply, to luxuriate in her dreams, Gabrielle devoured her cheap romances, the only imaginative fodder that had so far come her way. One wonders if this orgy of immersion in fantasy may also have signaled something about the inadequacy of her relationship with Etienne.

Meanwhile, Gabrielle was that rare thing: a person who changes little over time. One could say that as a child she was an old soul: she was already grown. In this way, her character would not really change much; it was precociously well formed. As a result, growing up for Gabrielle did not come, as it does for most people, through events, which bring personal change. Her particular voyage of self-discovery came through her environment, the situation in which she found herself. And of this, as of people, she was always an unusually good observer.

What was outside her — the world outside her — that was what Gabrielle had to learn. Her unusual mentality in turn provided her with a ruthless attention to the texture of the present. This would become an invaluable asset in her life’s work, for fashion is, as much as anything, about illuminating and articulating the present moment. In years to come, Gabrielle would articulate this precisely when she said, “Fashion should express the place, the moment… fashion, like opportunity, is something that has to be grabbed by the hair.”⁵

Life at Royallieu was to prove an important catalyst for this singular young woman. Immersing herself in her new environment, she began a process of separation from the impoverished world of her origins, projecting herself onto a far more expansive stage. Indeed, without Etienne Balsan and Royallieu, we might never have heard of Gabrielle Chanel. Later, she said of those early days at Royallieu: “I was constantly weeping. I had told him a whole litany of lies about my miserable childhood. I had to disabuse him. I wept for an entire year. The only happy times were those I spent on horseback, in the forest.”⁶ This is undoubtedly an exaggeration, but clearly what Gabrielle described hinted at some kind of emotional crisis during that first year, and in his own way, Etienne must have been supportive. Certainly, whatever she might say of her friends in the future, Gabrielle would never criticize him.

And on whatever basis the intimate life of Royallieu was organized, for a brief period, the courtesan Emilienne d’Alençon and Gabrielle amicably shared Etienne and his home.

Emilienne knew she would eventually be deposed as one of the most fêted grandes courtisanes, but what did she have to fear from this young Gabrielle Chanel? Yes, the girl had sumptuous hair, a long neck and a striking profile, but she was far too thin and flat chested; she just didn’t look the part. Yet while Gabrielle didn’t look or dress like any cocotte Emilienne had ever known, with her wit and talent for mimicry, her intelligence and sheer animal force, she could be a most entertaining and seductive companion. She was also happy to remain silent. This, combined with her mix of defiance and cool reserve, gave Gabrielle an enigmatic quality that Emilienne may well have found attractive.

Unlike Britain, France didn’t punish homosexuality, which was a major feature of Belle Epoque society. Indeed, by 1900, French tolerance had not only made Paris an international refuge for homosexuals, it was also dubbed ‘Paris-Lesbos’ for its reputation as the lesbian world capital. There were a number of married society women who enjoyed lesbian affairs, leading one society hostess to say, “All the noteworthy women are doing it.”⁷ While it wasn’t against the law, there were very strict social conventions against the sexual experimentation in which both men and women indulged freely. If upper-class women were protected by their social status and greater freedom, sexual deviance had to be acted out with the utmost discretion away from the public sphere. Financially dependent women were obliged to preserve themselves from public scandal. Above all, they had to give the appearance of normality.

In his novel Nana, Emile Zola’s description of the widespread Parisian subculture of lesbian courtesans reflected a contemporary fascination with these transgressive relationships. Watching a lesbian couple perform was a popular “turn” at brothels and burlesque shows, and in À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust’s Marcel finds his courtesan mistress, Albertine, more desirable when he discovers that she is bisexual. For many men, lesbianism was “seen as a charming caprice, a sensual vice from which he too may profit.”⁸ Colette’s notorious experimentation with sexual identities introduced her to that Parisian lesbian subculture that included Emilienne d’Alençon. Indeed, Colette would remember a Mardi Gras ball in Nice in 1906 where Renée Vivien and the courtesans Emilienne d’Alençon, Liane de Pougy and Caroline Otero were with “a crowd of courtesans, actresses, corps de ballet members… down from Paris, most of them part-time members of le Tout Lesbos.”⁹ No prosecution was brought against Liane de Pougy, for example, when her sensational novel Idylle saphique trumpeted her affair with that suave seducer of women, the beautiful and highly intelligent American heiress Natalie Barney. One of Barney’s many lovers was the same Renée Vivien from that lesbian Mardi Gras ball in Nice, who died at the age of thirty-two from anorexia, drink and drugs. Renée Vivien and Barney were two of Emilienne d’Alençon’s most famous female lovers.

Though lesbianism wasn’t illegal, the rigid social conventions against its public display included a very intolerant attitude toward cross-dressing — indeed, female transvestism was held in great public contempt. A woman on a Parisian boulevard in trousers ran the risk of immediate arrest. Two of those who notoriously flouted this rule were George Sand and, later, Sarah Bernhardt. (As a writer and an actress, they were considered outsiders and thus managed to avoid public censure.)¹⁰

But in private, women in men’s clothes had for long been a common theme in erotic art and was seen as highly suggestive when practiced by the demimondaine. When playing at being a man, rather than threatening the superiority of her client, she provoked an erotic frisson. When Emilienne d’Alençon took to cross-dressing in the early years of the century, however, she may well have been trading on a double message. Her regulation ties and stiff collars, set off by pert female hats, were possibly as much a covert sign of sisterhood to fellow lesbians as they were an appeal to voyeuristic male fantasies.

Etienne Balsan was a man with worldly and sophisticated friends who brought their lovers to have fun at Royallieu. Virtually all the female visitors whom Gabrielle would befriend there were, like her, skirting the edges of society. Society still looked askance at actresses and singers, regarding them as little different from kept women; they often were. The courtesans’ sexual attitudes, in combination with the cheerfully liberated sexual atmosphere at Royallieu, may have a bearing on what we will discover about Gabrielle’s own sexuality. It is quite possible that, at Royallieu, she succumbed to the advances either of Emilienne or another of the bisexual female visitors who found her delicate androgyny seductive. And Gabrielle and Emilienne were to remain friends long after Etienne and Emilienne had separated.

In comparison with the drama expected of female dress at that time, Gabrielle’s lack of flamboyance was understated to the point of sobriety. This austerity was, in part, a determination to distance herself from the ostentation of the courtesan, or the more subtle flaunting indulged in by a mistress. But it should also be remembered that Gabrielle’s attitude was an identification with certain social movements of the period. There was a small number of other young women reacting against the tendency to overstatement in contemporary dress who were presenting themselves with greater simplicity.

Living openly as Etienne’s mistress, Gabrielle had signaled that she was unconventional, something accentuated by her unusual style of dress. By contrast, Adrienne, who was also averse to being taken for a cocotte, dressed as she would like to be perceived — as a woman of good taste and breeding. She was not interested in making a new world; what Adrienne wanted was to find a better place for herself in the old one. Thus she looked elegant and uncontroversial, presenting an understated version of the contemporary female drama of lace, draperies, trimmings and triumphal hats. This held no interest for Gabrielle.

While by living at Royallieu she may have sacrificed any respectability, she had also been given a unique opportunity to leave behind her miserable beginnings. However, it didn’t take Gabrielle long to recognize that country-house life could be an indolent one for the masters. Living as Etienne’s mistress failed to consume enough of her prodigious energy, so she launched herself into an activity that both did this and also contributed toward the refashioning of Gabrielle Chanel. The most successful courtesans were those who mimicked best the attributes of better-off women. Only higher-class women rode, and with Etienne’s tutelage, Gabrielle now set about becoming a horsewoman.

Etienne taught her about the handling of the horse at all stages of its training. Gabrielle proved a most willing and able pupil, luxuriating in an experience that took her outside her normal self. A personality of extremes, once she had decided to apply herself to something, it was done with a fierce intensity. And in her determination to ride, on the days when she and Etienne weren’t training together, Gabrielle was up at dawn and off with his apprentice jockeys and the trainers. With these men she felt at ease, understanding their working-man’s language. She rapidly became not only a fearless and skillful rider, but also a fine polo player, at that time unusual for a woman.

Gabrielle would say that her fine horsemanship didn’t spring from an obsession with horses, that she wasn’t like Etienne or those English women who “loved hanging around the stables.” Nonetheless, it was for her horsemanship that she was remembered by Valéry Ollivier, one of Etienne’s friends, himself a distinguished horseman. He and the other visitors to Royallieu hadn’t regarded Etienne’s young mistress as particularly significant: “She was a tiny little thing, with a pretty, very expressive, roguish face and a strong personality. She amazed us because of her nerve on horseback, but aside from that there was nothing remarkable about her.”¹¹

Valéry Ollivier was correct: Gabrielle did have a strong personality. And as a character of outstanding force and intelligence, she could also have excelled at a number of things. In the future, she would say of her couture business, “I could easily have done something else. It was an accident.”¹²

After the mid-nineteenth century, it had become increasingly fashionable for women of means to go horse riding. Both female riders and lesbians were called Amazons (referring to those sexually suspect women in Greek mythology). This was because their riding habits had for many years been quasi-masculine ensembles and were regarded as an especially forward-thinking, modern aspect of female dress.¹³ The riding habits were made of woolen cloth and dark, sober colors (then uncommon for women of means in their daily attire). The women wore severely tailored jackets and skirts over chamois trousers, attached to a corset, frequently made by men’s tailors. It was accepted that these outfits were intentionally masculine, made even more so with the addition of a man’s bowler or top hat. But while the adoption of semimale attire for riding had remained much the same for years, some of the women who hunted were more radical in their appropriation of men’s clothing. For several years, they had worn shorter skirts or even breeches — and rode astride their horses.

Not long after Gabrielle began learning to ride with Etienne, she was to make another gesture revealing her capacity for nonconformity: she went to the tailor at La Croix Saint-Ouen, in the forest of Compiègne, whose usual clients were stable boys and huntsmen, and had him make her a riding outfit. She didn’t request a female ensemble of fitted tailored jacket and a long skirt; she wanted a pair of trousers — in other words, jodhpurs. Years later, she remembered the tailor’s confusion at her request.

A photograph shows her sitting astride her horse in her new riding gear: a short-sleeved, mannish shirt, a knitted tie and those rather shocking men’s jodhpurs. Nudging again at tradition, Gabrielle has also substituted the woman’s riding hat — either a top hat or a bowler — for one both less formal and more feminine-looking, wide brimmed and made of soft felt. With her slight figure and broad young face, in this outfit she could almost have been mistaken for a boy.

If Gabrielle’s part in the evolution of women’s dress was not always as outrageous as others have suggested, while riding astride her horse was in the vanguard, and most shocking was her wearing men’s riding trousers, and not only when she was hunting. And Gabrielle was famously to take this idea further. Rather than confining her blurring of male-female sartorial boundaries to horse riding, it was to become one of her great trademarks; with a hint of that frisson given by cross-dressing, femininity and seductiveness were heightened by borrowings from a man’s wardrobe.

Etienne Balsan was neither a man of politics nor a man of letters. He was a most gifted and dedicated sportsman whose favorite reading was the racing and the gossip columns in the daily papers. Most important of all the equine pursuits at Royallieu was the racing timetable. From Royallieu, it was possible to visit a racetrack most days of the week, and Gabrielle did so with Etienne and his friends. Mondays at Saint-Cloud, Tuesdays at Enghien, Wednesdays at Tremblay, on through the end of the week to Sunday at Longchamp, the most elegant of racecourses, in the Parisian park of the Bois de Boulogne.

Spectating at the races had become an immensely popular pastime across the social spectrum. One writer went so far as to say that in France, sport was the turf. As an activity with great social prestige, racing had quickly become a stage on which to vaunt one’s social position. This, of course, included the competitive spectacle of fashion. Indeed, many of those who regularly attended the races were far more interested in the promenade of fashion and society than the racing itself. A microcosm of Parisian society, racetrack meetings attracted enormous crowds, and by the early 1900s, the Longchamp racecourse was one of the most fashionable public venues in France. A huge draw for other forms of entertainment, race days were rich pickings for prostitutes of all kinds.

While a respectable woman was obliged to be escorted in public, the demimondaine usually arrived unaccompanied and was consequently forbidden access to the enclosure. Yet as the most seductive celebrities of the day, these women were also major attractions. The Second Empire had flourished, and with it the demimonde had flowered, and the grandest of its denizens met with society women, with whom they now frequently shared the same couturier. “At first glance they were the same women dressed by the same dressmakers, the only distinction being that the demimonde seemed a little more chic. ”¹⁴

By contrast with the worldly image of these exotic fin de siècle creatures, Gabrielle always appeared unadorned, modest and neat; without exception, her dress was very simple. At the racecourse, intent on watching one of Etienne’s horses in training, she might wear a loose, mannish coat over a tailored jacket, collar and tie, with an undecorated straw boater. She made a practical, sporty look appear most desirable.

A good many American women appear to have adopted tailored outfits for practical activities as far back as the 1880s. This fashion was well ahead of France. As late as 1901, the influential French magazine Les Modes was still describing the female suit as “a revolutionary development,” adding the caution that “gentlemen have not fully appreciated the tailored costume. They have found it too closely resembling their own.”¹⁵

Gabrielle would say in the future that she had been unaware of being watched and gossiped about as Etienne Balsan’s mistress at the races. She also said, “I looked like nothing. Nothing was right on me… Dresses didn’t fit me and I didn’t give a damn.”¹⁶ Gabrielle didn’t wear the traditionally exaggerated female getups for the races, and instead stuck to her simple tailored outfits. Again, it wasn’t that wearing a tailored outfit was unheard of, but it was seen as unconventional for a woman to wear it to the races.

Despite her belief that if she didn’t dress like a kept woman, she wouldn’t be seen as one, Gabrielle was, nonetheless, a mistress. As for her looks, opinion was divided. While some didn’t find her particularly attractive, others were in thrall to her unconventional beauty. She was told she “looked noble” and that she possessed an “authentic exoticism.”¹⁷ Gabrielle was never very adept at the simpering demeanor of many contemporary women; with hindsight, her manner was an intimation of the future.

She had chosen to leave behind her previous servitude by becoming a kept woman, but her intelligence was too keen and her energies too restless for her to find the passiveness of this existence rewarding for very long. And after a time, the entertainments at Royallieu would come to bore her too. If, by any chance, Gabrielle articulated her dilemma to herself, for the moment she could find no answer. Living with the trappings of luxury and the apparent freedom that many women from her background would have fought for, she recognized that, really, she had simply swapped one kind of bondage for another. Yet while her ambivalence about her position is sometimes revealed in photographs of her at this time, in others her expression displays by turns her confidence, her wit and an unusual ability to appraise herself and her audience. What the photographs show, too, is the odd glimpse of her diffidence and vulnerability, and also of her most elusive and feminine allure.

In one such photograph Gabrielle walks along the promenade at Nice. Dressed almost head to toe in black, she sports a muff, a huge-brimmed hat, white shirt and tie. A beautiful young woman, she is attended by three highly eligible young men — Comte Léon de Laborde, Miguel de Yturbe and Etienne Balsan. All wealthy horsemen, they are charming cynics who speak the language of a sophisticated, knowing elite. Gabrielle was learning and, at Nice, she was also luxuriating in the only power then available to her, a sexual one emanating from the possession of great character and unusual beauty. And her eyes tell us that she knows it.

At the races, we see Léon de Laborde holding Gabrielle’s chin in a gesture both intimate and proprietary. Another photograph shows Gabrielle, Léon and Etienne at the Royallieu stables. Léon has his arm around Gabrielle’s waist and stands between her and her lover. Here and in other photos, one could be forgiven for assuming that Léon, not Etienne, was her lover. (Almost certainly, at some point, he was.)

If a rich man played the game, when he grew tired of his mistress from a lower class, on separating from her he would make her a parting settlement so as to tide her over until she could find another “protector.” With no lover, a mistress was out of “work.” A small number of men gave an indefinite settlement. When the time came for Gabrielle to be rejected by Etienne, if she was lucky, she would pass on to one of his friends or acquaintances. But as her looks faded, unless she had cleverly squirreled away a tidy sum, her future would be one of increasing poverty.

Preoccupied with her sense of powerlessness, by 1908, Gabrielle’s ambition to get to Paris was forming into a plan. She wondered aloud to Etienne what would happen to her. He teased her about being bourgeois and asked her whether she wasn’t all right there at Royallieu. Etienne worked hard, but his mistress had little with which to occupy herself and soon mentioned her future once again. Etienne gave the same response; and so it went on for several months.

Etienne’s wealth meant that he could enter or reject society as he chose. While on the one hand benefiting from the privilege his wealth afforded him, on the other he was irritated by the social codes of his class, its obsession with security, family, property and honor handed down from father to son. Instead, Etienne focused on a particular kind of earthy impermanence. He loved risk: the transience of a horse race, the playing of juvenile games and pranks, a brief, intense affair or a sophisticated gamble begun one day and finished on the next. Gabrielle appears to have stirred in him something different.

No doubt spurred on by her talk about her future, Etienne was apparently moved to ask his shop-assistant mistress to marry him. In years to come, Gabrielle would say that Etienne’s elder brother, Jacques, came twice to Royallieu and asked her to do so. (Etienne may have sought his brother’s assistance here.) When Gabrielle protested, telling Jacques that she didn’t love his brother, he replied that it wasn’t important; she should marry Etienne anyway. With Etienne and Jacques’ parents dead, perhaps Gabrielle’s status as a kept woman with no background mattered less to the Balsan brothers. Gabrielle recalled Jacques’ anger at her refusal, and that he told her she would end up with nothing. When she replied that she wanted to work, he retorted angrily that as she didn’t know anything about anything, what on earth did she think she was going to do?

Work indeed became Gabrielle’s new conviction; it was her only possibility of escape from her position as a demimondaine. She would later recall how, as a mere twelve-year-old, she had realized that “without money you are nothing, that with money you can do anything… I would say to myself over and over, money is the key to freedom.”¹⁸ She told Etienne that although she was good on a horse, she wouldn’t be permitted to earn her living as a female jockey, so she would like to open a hat shop. One can imagine Etienne’s surprise. He knew she was unusual, but employment was not expected of a mistress.

He was probably only vaguely aware that for some time, female visitors to Royallieu had asked Gabrielle where she found her hats. Almost beyond our comprehension today, it is worth remembering that at that time, virtually everyone, however old or young, rich or poor, wore a hat. (In many early photographs, where we see men, women and children too poor to wear shoes, they are, nonetheless, almost without exception, wearing a hat.) And women’s headgear was a highly significant aspect of dress. The fashionable woman’s hat was a dramatic edifice intended to cause a stir, to be noticed for its beauty and its grandeur.

One of the few places Gabrielle had visited on her rare trips to Paris was the palatial department store Galeries Lafayette. Here, instead of leaving with a haul of the seductive luxuries on offer in this temple to the new consumer, Gabrielle bought a number of basic hat forms made of straw or felt. Back at Royallieu, she decorated them, minimally, often with little more than a ribbon around the crown, to which she might simply add a large hat pin.

As in all previous periods, the definition of elegance and fashion was still the beautiful and the refined. Beauty was associated in large part with adornment. And adornment, whether in the form of costly jewels, silks, satins, laces, furs or hugely complicated hats, was associated with luxury and wealth. (The poor quite simply couldn’t afford these things or, therefore, fashion.) The frisson provoked by Gabrielle’s hats thus lay in their great simplicity and lack of adornment. Being shocking wasn’t then something associated with high fashion, but Gabrielle wasn’t entirely alone. Some high fashion was beginning to practice the same thought, put forward by a few radical contemporary artists. To shock was the idea, and this those unconventional female visitors to Royallieu were now keen to emulate.

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