Refashioning Paris

As a collective visual statement, fashion is about the appearance of the individual and of the group. It is at once about self-presentation and conformity. Like music, it is improvisation within a structure. As the human condition doesn’t appear to respond well to too much repetition, fashion could be described as one of our antidotes to boredom. It must be new, but not too new; novel rather than radically different. A kind of planned spontaneity, it is applied art, making use of potentiality. Clothes can change more rapidly than other artifacts; although they are functional, they are statements too. Fashion could be described as the cultural genome of clothes.

Writing on fashion appears almost universally to accept the idea that fashion follows power. At the courts of rulers and kings, this was undoubtedly the case. By the seventeenth century, Louis XIV of France had understood perfectly the connection between fashion and power. His dramatic self-presentation was about manipulating clothes as actual and symbolic reflections of the greatest power — in other words, his own. But the idea that fashion always follows power is far too simplistic and is only an approximation of what actually happens. In Gabrielle Chanel’s case, the story is more complex and interesting than that.

Over time, the most fashionable rendezvous in Paris had been exclusive or semiprivate. As the nineteenth century wore on, however, its sweeping changes were reflected in the fact that one of the most significant and fashionable places to be “seen” was now on the city’s new boulevards — in public, on the streets. Here the populace “treated life as a spectacle… and intensely enjoyed their own and everyone else’s performance.”¹

Between 1830 and 1860 alone, Paris almost doubled its population, rising from half a million to almost a million, spreading ever farther outward. And still it grew, and the city’s social problems multiplied. After years of division, plots, counterplots, massacres and the raising and breaking down of the barricades, in 1851, the Machiavellian nephew of Napoléon I, Louis Napoléon, led a coup d’état. Having hoodwinked the nation, he was soon installed by referendum as Louis Napoléon III, absolute monarch of France.

Over the centuries, many had attempted to organize the chaos of Paris, but when Louis Napoléon took on as his assistant the engineer Georges-Eugène Haussmann, all was set to change. Louis and his accomplice were quintessential representatives of “industrial progress” and saw the hundreds of streets in the city’s busy, cramped, ancient quarters as a series of dreadful anachronisms. In an almost messianic urge to drag Paris into the modern industrial world, the two men conceived an unprecedented urban renewal. Haussmann envisaged “the Imperial Rome of our times,” while Louis saw Paris as the modern capital of the world, and a monument to his power.

Beginning as they meant to go on, in one great onslaught, neither the monarch nor Haussmann, calling himself the “demolition artist,” gave a jot about the Parisians’ sense of their buildings or their neighborhoods, or that the city’s grandeur was found in the densely interwoven layers of its past. For years, as much as one fifth of Paris’s workforce was occupied in making continual noise and dust as buildings, streets, whole quarters were ruthlessly torn down and replaced by acres of large, uniform apartment blocks lining the wide, stately new boulevards. These were too expensive for the working classes, who were pushed to the jerry-built outer suburbs. There they were deprived of either the benefits of the age-old system or those of the new one.² In addition, the railways, bringing food from far and wide, squeezed out the traditional providers of much of the city’s food and drink. The vineyards, market gardens and farms ringing the outskirts of the city for centuries gradually dwindled to a handful. Artisans, small-scale industrial enterprises, merchants large and small, the rich, the middling sort and the poor had always lived and worked cheek by jowl in each of the city’s quarters. For the first time, they were separated, as the new neighborhoods became bound by class.

And while Paris’s great new inner boulevards, road junctions, squares and vistas were quite breathtaking in scale, this modern city par excellence had lost much of its previous intimacy. Many were troubled by the loss of “old roots.” Not only were at least 350,000 displaced by the “Haussmannization” of Paris, but one critic also complained that for the first time, the city was physically divided in two: the rich and the poor. It was said that the continual destruction of Paris had led to a destruction of its “society,” and as a symptom of this loss, Parisians were more detached from one another. Paris had become superb, but it was also slightly chilling.³

But France was a world power and Paris was its capital. Emulating London’s Great Exhibition, with the expositions of 1855 and 1867, Louis Napoléon succeeded in attracting millions. These trade fairs celebrating the nineteenth-century cult of technology were nowhere invested in so heavily or used so impressively as in France. The Paris Expo of 1878, for example, launched the first experiments with electric street lighting; 1889 saw the building of the Eiffel Tower. This masterpiece of technology, at first condemned by the literary and artistic establishment as “the dishonor of Paris,” soon became one of the most iconic city emblems in the world. With the Expo of 1900, the Paris underground network, the Métropolitain, was opened.

While these fairs dazzled on an enormous scale, another type of urban spectacle was locating itself in a new kind of marketplace: the department store— le grand magasin. As multistory temples to modernity, the department stores overflowed with goods never seen before under one roof. (At Le Bon Marché one could find fifty-four different types of crinoline.) Lined up along Haussmann’s grands boulevards, these vast palaces of consumption became household names. They included La Belle Jardinière and La Samaritaine on the Right Bank by 1870; Le Bon Marché and the Galeries Lafayette, well established on the Left Bank by 1900. In ultramodern settings, using the latest technology, the grands magasins displayed their myriad luxuries in fabulous interiors at a range of prices everyone could manage, “from the duchess to the flirt and from the millionaire to the beggar.”⁴ At least, that was the theory. In practice, the poor couldn’t afford them.

If the better off had always had their dressmakers, many of the rest had bought much of their clothing from the wardrobe dealers selling castoffs in markets around the town. Although this trade would continue, by the 1850s, it had also become possible to buy a variety of inexpensive new ready-to-wear clothing. While the invention and development of the sewing machine spurred on this democratization, it was the grands magasins that first introduced off-the-peg clothes to a bourgeois clientele in upmarket settings. In these Aladdin’s caves, Parisians learned to indulge themselves as never before and acquired the habit of mass consumption. The launch of mail-order catalogues extended further the grands magasins’ influence, and thousands of women, such as Gabrielle’s aunt Louise, living far away from Paris, longed to visit these great cathedrals to the new religion of commerce.

Many disliked the new city of inexhaustible pleasures, and writers, such as Emile Zola, set out to record the particular conjunction of sexual and financial transaction seen as emblematic of Haussmann’s newly corrupt Paris. Fashionable women of all sorts now rubbed shoulders in the grands magasins, and one observer wrote, “One does not know, nowadays, if it’s honest women who are dressed like whores, or whores who are dressed like honest women.”⁵ Commerce became impersonal, and many of the small boutiques, relying on relatively local suppliers and serving regular customers, were overtaken by the department stores, which often bought from international sources and sold to people whom they had never met before.

Unlike old Paris, however, the new inner city did actually function. Despite the criticisms and the failure of “all classes to mix,” from the sanitation system to the department stores and the cafés, restaurants and theaters found on the grands boulevards, central Paris was indeed the epitome of modernity. Even those who disliked it were forced to admit that its thrusting energy and creative life gave the city a savage new, kind of magnificence.

While the nineteenth century had witnessed the confident emergence of the bourgeois, at first considered philistines in all matters of taste, their rise had left them a powerful force across society. The industrialization of France, the parallel exodus from the country and the growth in population had meant that huge numbers of lives had changed more rapidly than their parents could ever have dreamed possible. As the bourgeois caste had grown, so its members were keen for guidance, and the proliferation of magazines for their women had grown proportionally.

In September 1909, that same year in which Gabrielle began living with Arthur Capel, a fashionable young actress, Lucienne Roger, was featured wearing one of Gabrielle’s hats on the cover of one of these magazines, Comœ-dia Illustré. Inside the magazine were two more of Gabrielle’s hats, bearing the commentary:

I have just written a name which needs to be introduced to those of my readers for whom it should still be unknown. In this column we show two delightful models by the refined artist Gabrielle Chanel. First and foremost a lover of the line, her imagination is always… inspired and full of surprises, and always remains in good taste.

Comœdia Illustré was the recently launched weekly supplement to the French daily Comœdia. Run by Maurice de Brunhoff, scion of one of the most influential publishing families in France, Comœdia Illustré was devoted to coverage of the arts, and catered to an eclectic band of sophisticates whose social mix would have been virtually impossible a few decades earlier. Brunhoff set his sights on the personalities and professionals who were representative of the social changes sweeping through large sections of French society. The financiers, industrialists, socialites, artists, writers, actors and demimondaines read such a magazine because it made them feel they were keeping abreast of the increasingly fragmenting artistic world and the radical changes emerging in all matters of style and taste.

Comœdia Illustré acted as cultural guide for its elite readership. Besides fashion, it presented photographs (very few magazines yet did this), illustrations, exhibition reviews and new elite music as well as popular entertainment. And the magazine’s largely youthful readership also identified with its undertone of rebellion. When Gabrielle had used her powers of persuasion on this, one of the city’s most stylish magazines, her liaison with one of the most high-profile young men in Paris would not have gone unnoticed. With Lucienne Roger wearing Gabrielle’s hat on Comœdia ’s cover, Gabrielle had carried off a brilliant piece of self-promotion.

Maurice de Brunhoff ’s gamble on the newcomer paid off; the response to Gabrielle’s hats was good. As a result, for the next month’s issue, October 1909, Gabrielle herself modeled two of her designs. Whether large, or small and close to the head, her hats were very simple, with no more than a single flourish. They were described as having “a style and harmony of lines that are unique to her,” and in November, Gabrielle once again got herself coverage, taking up a full page of the magazine. The December issue had another actress modeling another of Gabrielle Chanel’s hats, and throughout the following year, coverage of her work continued, with comments such as: “This design and those which surround it are of a rare distinction, and they honor Gabrielle Chanel, whose chosen and numerous clientele appreciates the assured and delicate taste more every day.”

The actresses and demimondaines of Gabrielle’s acquaintance were regularly prevailed upon to help in her promotion. Thus, in January 1911, her friend the actress Jeanne Dirys appeared on a Comœdia Illustré cover in an illustration done by the precocious young artist Paul Iribe. By May that year, the same magazine is telling us that Gabrielle Chanel’s distinguished work is now just as much sought after by beautiful women in town as in the theater.

As so often in the past, under the influence of actresses and the demimonde, society women were beginning to take note. In early 1912, Gabrielle’s work was described as “original,” and she herself was hailed as “this clear-sighted artist.” Meanwhile, Gabrielle Dorziat, Royallieu habitué and high-profile actress, modeled Gabrielle’s hats for Les Modes, another influential magazine. Dorziat wore Gabrielle’s daringly simple hats in an adaptation of Maupassant’s Bel Ami; the press loved the actress, and her hats. Before the year was out, Comœdia Illustré declared that “this young artist… [Gabrielle] is taking a dominant place in fashion at the moment.” Not only were her hats lauded for their “unfailing stylishness and good taste,” they were used to complement outfits by fashionable couturiers.

In all the commentary on Gabrielle the designer, one is told that it was her astounding simplicity that was so radical. However, while bearing in mind that our own perception of past fashion must differ from that of its contemporaries, looking through a cross section of old magazines, Gabrielle’s hats do not stand out as entirely radical. In the elite magazines, one comes across a handful of other designers who were also throwing out the complexity and grandiosity of much contemporary fashion in favor of simplicity. Gabrielle was not alone in thinking “the women I saw at the races wore enormous loaves on their heads; constructions made of feathers and improved with fruits and plumes.”⁶ The difference was that her designs were more conspicuous because they reflected her own unconventional lifestyle. The other designers were not the live-in mistress of one of the most up-to-date young men in Paris. Gabrielle would say, “In the grandstands they were talking about my amazing, unusual hats, so neat and so austere, which were somehow a foretaste of things to come.”⁷

Meanwhile, she had stiff competition in quality from the big names in Parisian millinery. The atelier system involved apprentices slowly working their way up under the severe and demanding premières. These years of training equipped the best milliners with great craftsmanship, subtlety of design and an inside knowledge of the trade, none of which Gabrielle possessed. The ambitious young woman Gabrielle had filched from the Maison Lewis, Lucienne Rabaté, grew impatient with Gabrielle’s refusal to take her advice (to make sure, for example, that a woman and her husband’s mistress never met at the Chanel atelier). Instead, Gabrielle squandered attention on a famous courtesan, the kind of undesirable whom Lucienne disdained. Society clients were the prize. Perhaps Gabrielle wasn’t so unaware of the nuances, and simply chose to ignore them. She was defiantly comfortable with the courtesans; she admired them, spoke the same language. At least they “worked” for their living and were not out to make her feel socially inadequate.

Lucienne eventually left the Chanel atelier, a story to be repeated many times with Gabrielle’s employees. No matter how much more knowledgeable than Gabrielle they might be, they accepted her way or they left. Gabrielle’s own unorthodox instincts were, however, to serve her very well. But her intense dislike of selling, or of ingratiating herself with her clients—“The more people came to call on me the more I hid away… And I didn’t know how to sell; I’ve never known how to sell. When a customer insisted on seeing me, I went and hid in a cupboard”⁸—led to her sister Antoinette’s assuming most of this role.

Combining disingenuousness and the capacity for searing truth, Gabrielle was always a bag of contradictions, including the possession of extraordinary confidence and driving fear. Knowing, for example, that if a client found a hat too expensive, she might well reduce it, she kept herself in the background. Her most significant intuition here was the courtesanlike understanding that being enigmatic only made one more fascinating, and she coined the axiom: “A customer seen is a customer surely lost.” Despite the numerous mistakes and the slowness of it all, Gabrielle’s determination and growing sense of priorities were assuring her reputation.

There were also lighter moments. When the salon was empty of clients, for example, she and Antoinette could often be heard singing their hearts out in risqué numbers from the café-concerts. Business and its lighter moments weren’t, however, the only things then on Gabrielle’s mind. For the first time, she was truly in love. Not only did she love, she was loved in return, and experienced a rare sense of well-being.

Her lover, meanwhile, was, like her, possessed of tremendous energy; he was forever on the move. After the launch of Deauville’s polo club by his friend Armand de Gramont, other grounds had sprung up in a small number of country estates and elite summer resorts and, with his friends, Arthur played them all. Thus, in January 1911, The New York Times announced he would play at Cannes, while another newspaper reported his arrival with his polo ponies on the Côte d’Azur. In May, he was taking part in a tournament at Compiègne, and in August he was back competing at Deauville. At Dieppe, and then Châteauroux, in August, Arthur and Etienne Balsan coursed their greyhounds, and then played more polo. The personification of the modern man, Arthur was either in a state of distraction or doing something at breakneck speed.

After the hunting, the galas and the balls, he even managed to find time to expand his fortune. Apparently, Gabrielle didn’t feel neglected by her lover’s tremendous pace; to a degree, it matched her own. She admired in him “the mindset of a businessman… not hampered either by precedent or hierarchy,” and she loved his “eccentricity.” Yet in the whirl of Arthur’s life, how much of it included his mistress? A man in the vanguard of his times, he was, for example, a staunch believer in the emancipation of women. No doubt bearing Gabrielle in mind, in a political treatise he was soon to write he would say:

The door to the future city is still closed to women. For centuries women have been considered by their masters as inferior creatures, as beasts of burden or of pleasure. The time has come to liberate them. Already they are liberating themselves… The education of women tends to teach them only the art of pleasing. In society as it is conceived, the woman who is incapable of pleasing falls into a state of dependency and inferiority. As the convent is no longer very much in fashion, one must choose between prostitution and work. The latter has shown that the inferiority of women was only an illusion of the other sex.⁹

However, with the customary tension between belief and practice, Arthur’s actions weren’t always quite consistent with his sentiments. It was common knowledge that he lived with his mistress, but where a liberal upper-class hostess might now welcome a bohemian artist, writer or musician into her salon, it was a rare one who yet dared do the same for a tradeswoman. But if attendance with one’s mistress was out of bounds in the salons of the haut monde, obliging contemporary double standards enabled navigation around such prohibitions. In the theater, in fashionable restaurants and bars, it wasn’t only acceptable, it increased one’s cachet to be seen out with one’s mistress. And at private suppers where fellow diners were not all entirely “respectable,” Gabrielle felt at ease. These people, too, lived at the edge of society.

And yet, largely untrammeled by the constraints of family, Gabrielle had also been left rudderless by her dysfunctional upbringing. With the exception of Adrienne and Antoinette, she saw very little of her family. This was the great significance of her statement that Arthur was her brother, her father, her entire family. Meanwhile, Gabrielle’s failure to become a singer in the café-concerts in Vichy had left her hankering after something other than hats, and her tremendous energy and rich inner life hadn’t yet found an adequate outlet for expression. While Arthur was often away and understood Gabrielle’s need for occupation, he now encouraged her in an activity that, although unrelated to her work, did have a bearing on her perception of herself as a modern woman.

Back in the 1870s, France had taken up “physical culture,” and following Britain, sport for men was promoted as patriotic and a healthy and moral outlet for the newly urban masses. Upper-class women, who had enjoyed croquet, archery and horse riding for some time, were now joined by their bourgeois sisters, who also took to the streets in outdoor clothing developed by the English companies Burberry and Aquascutum. Country walks became a favorite feminine pastime. A small fraction of women also took up physical culture and other forms of exercise such as calisthenics, and in the early years of the twentieth century, the idea of exercise as a form of self-expression was developing.

In 1913, the American dancer Isadora Duncan was scandalizing Europe. Her uninhibitedly sensual emphasis upon the expression of emotion and physical improvisation was revolutionary, and deeply shocked many of her contemporaries who were still convinced that the body was a shameful thing. Duncan believed intensely in the idea that we are mind and body; her body was not external to her, it was her. She rejected formal dancing, including ballet, with its strict rules of posture and formation, because they were “ugly and against nature.” Her following was huge. Whatever Isadora Duncan’s pretentiousness and however justified her critics, this woman had responded to the emotional and physical alienation emerging as a side effect of life in the first machine age. She touched many of those who flocked to see her in revealing the very unmachinelike possibility of an unself-conscious relationship with one’s body. When the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was completed in 1913, Duncan’s reputation was such that her likeness was carved by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle over the entrance, while inside the theater, Duncan appeared in Maurice Denis’s murals of the nine muses.

Gabrielle was in search of a means to express something in herself as yet undefined, and now believed that she, too, wanted to be a dancer. Contriving an invitation with a friend to a private performance at Duncan’s house, she was game enough to be unimpressed and would remain caustic in her criticism of the great muse. Rejecting such a distinguished teacher, she found instead Elise Toulemon (stage name Caryathis), an early devotee of the dance methods of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze.

In about 1905, while attempting to improve his music students’ abilities, Jaques-Dalcroze had created a system of musical education. Naming his “harmonious bodily movement as a form of artistic expression” eurythmics, his intention had neither been an end in itself nor a form of dance. However, the timing was propitious and his ideas had spread quickly across Europe. Suggesting as they did nonballetic dance techniques, the principles of eurythmics would soon be used to develop radically new dance forms. At the same time, by 1912, eurythmics as a form of dance-exercise had become something of a Parisian fashion.

The health-giving aspects of sport, and Isadora Duncan’s and Jaques-Dalcroze’s philosophies of self-expression, encouraged a small number of young women to take up these ideas as a form of self-development as well as a means of maintaining lithe and exercised bodies. Such attitudes were seen by most contemporaries as distastefully antifeminine, and the young women were regarded as more or less outrageous. They themselves saw their exercising as a kind of emancipation. Reacting against the flaccidness of middle-aged women, made taut by nothing more taxing than a corset, Gabrielle diverted herself with the unconventional idea that physical perfection could be gained only via exercise.

Her dance teacher Elise was most definitely unconventional. Having escaped from a background as impoverished and defective as Gabrielle’s, Elise ended up in Montmartre, where her flamboyance had given her a wild reputation. Later, she would make a tempestuous marriage to the troubled homosexual writer Marcel Jouhandeau, but for now, she was one of the dancers at the Théâtre des Arts. In the period when Gabrielle met her — about 1912–13—while Elise’s talents as a dancer and choreographer were becoming recognized, to make ends meet she also gave classes in expressive dance. Her extrovert sensuality would be captured in the Russian artist-designer Léon Bakst’s poster for the composer Erik Satie’s “ballet” La belle excentrique. La belle excentrique, Elise, danced her invention in a provocatively scanty outfit designed by a very young poet-artist, Jean Cocteau. Renowned for her wit, her untamed and extravagant personality and her numerous affairs, at the time she and Gabrielle met, Elise was in the midst of a tumultuous relationship with Charles Dullin, the avant-garde actor-producer.

Day after day, Gabrielle climbed up to Elise’s studio in Montmartre and then strove to convince her teacher that she could become a dancer. Once again, however, she was to be disappointed; after several months, Elise told her that she just wasn’t right for the stage. For all her noted grace, was it that some part of Gabrielle remained self-conscious, inhibiting her ability to abandon herself completely? Whatever the reasons for her failure, she was by now devoted to her expressive dance lessons (and her eccentric teacher), and continued with the classes. Convinced by the idea that a beautiful body was a slim and exercised one, for the rest of her life Gabrielle would work to keep hers that way. If she couldn’t become a dancer, at least she would have a dancer’s body.

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