The Rite of Spring

In 1913, some doubted whether France was still the cultural arbiter to the world, arguing that it had become more fascinated by foreign culture than by its own. While French artists and composers such as Renoir, Braque, Matisse, Ravel, Debussy and Fauré were being seen and heard, it was the innovation of the foreigners — Picasso, Chagall, Apollinaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Arthur Rubinstein, Rachmaninov and the Ballets Russes — that was attracting more animated attention. The foreigners seemed more thrusting in their search for liberation from past aesthetic and moral ideals, from authority and bourgeois conformity. They had traveled, physically and mentally, from the margins to Paris, which they saw as the place where revolution was fermented. The Polish-Italian Frenchman Guillaume Apollinaire understood that an essential element of the modern mentality was exile, the “battle on the frontiers.” The French painter Jacques-Emile Blanche wrote that the French capital had become the central station of Europe, and that “in Paris uncertainty rules.”¹

One May evening in 1913, following much anticipation, the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev presented a new ballet at the avant-garde Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. This work embodied the rejection of everything in art and life that its creators regarded as outmoded, and was to become one of the seminal works of the modern era. In the audience on that historic occasion was Gabrielle Chanel, invited by her dance teacher Elise Toulemon. (Eurythmics had become so influential that Diaghilev and his dancer-choreographer, the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky, had visited its founder, Jaques-Dalcroze, to ask for help with the dance movements for their ballet.)

Its composer, Igor Stravinsky, had named the ballet Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). He said that “it represents pagan Russia, and is unified by a single idea: the mystery surge of the creative power of Spring. The piece has no plot.”² Nijinsky, who was Diaghilev’s lover, had written to Stravinsky: “Now I know what Le Sacre du printemps will be when everything is as we both want it: new, beautiful and utterly different — but for the ordinary viewer a jolting and emotional experience.”³

Stravinsky told his mother not to be afraid if the response to the ballet was negative, saying that “it is in the order of things.”⁴ Meanwhile, Nijinsky’s dancers complained that his ideas were incomprehensible and his style entirely without beauty. With Stravinsky and Nijinsky, Diaghilev was intent on confrontation; their united goal was to shock.

How had it come about that Sergei Diaghilev and his dance troupe, the Ballets Russes, had not only become essential elements of the Parisian avant-garde but were central to the development of the modern movement?

A younger Diaghilev had described himself candidly to his beloved stepmother in a letter expressing his anxieties about his younger brothers: “As for myself… I am first a great charlatan, although one with great flair; second, I am a great charmer; third, I’ve a great nerve; fourth, I’m a man with a great deal of logic and few principles; and fifth, I think I lack talent; but if you like I think I’ve found my real calling — patronage of the arts.”⁵ He had written that he felt a force in himself, and had come to realize “that I for the devil am not an ordinary person.”

Sergei Diaghilev’s father was a cultivated provincial aristocrat who had become a bankrupt. His son learned to convert several vital elements — the collapse of his family, his sexuality and the loss of his homeland through revolution — into an evangelical blurring of all present boundaries. Diaghilev had early flaunted his homosexuality — then a dangerous thing to do in Russia — and established himself as a cosmopolitan dandy with deeply antiestablishment sentiments. If he lacked the essential talent to become an artist, nonetheless, Diaghilev’s remarkable ability to innovate and transform the world of art itself would be carried out with an extraordinary degree of creativity. He loved the tension caused by all that was contradictory: “He loved the friction, the struggle and the fire that was engendered by the new but not necessarily… for its own sake.”⁶

Diaghilev had founded an influential art journal in Russia, had mounted highly successful exhibitions and gradually had come to believe that only the ballet exemplified the ideal, which was that all art forms should be united into one. By 1909, he had formed his own company. The Ballets Russes de Diaghilev caused a sensation across Europe. The colors and boldness of the sets and costumes and the foreignness and exoticism of the company’s Russian and oriental themes became all the rage. But while Diaghilev’s aim was a totality of art, it was as much about liberation of all kinds, including sexuality. And sexuality became a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values and one of the central themes of the modern movement.

Audiences were awed by Diaghilev’s lover, the extraordinary dancer Nijinsky, whom Debussy called “a perverse genius… a young savage.” It had been Nijinsky’s elemental faun simulating orgasm in Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune that broke all traditional rules of good taste and brought the underlying eroticism of much of the Ballets Russes’ work blatantly to the fore. Women, and men, were left in a heightened erotic state; Faune had caught the imagination of a generation. Privately, homosexuality, too, was a powerful element of the rebellious theme pervading the Ballets Russes; Stravinsky noted that Diaghilev’s entourage was “a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard.” While each new success encouraged Diaghilev to blur yet more boundaries and become still more daring, any disquiet at his company’s work was outweighed by the loud approval.

By 1912, Diaghilev had turned to more introspective and expressionistic music. Without any overarching philosophy of art, he was a master of a powerful strand in modern artistic thought. This was the belief that art delivered people from the constraints of morality and convention to recover a spontaneous life of the emotions. A man constrained by morality would never be free to create. In this way, art was seen as a life force greater than the individual and, eventually, a substitute for religion.

Thus it was only natural that Diaghilev should become one of the standard-bearers for this developing attitude to life and art. Emotions and intuition had just as much validity as all that was rational and objective, and an element of shock was necessary to provoke experience. Art would no longer teach. Its aim was to excite, provoke and inspire, to unlock experience. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was a success because the spirit behind it was already in the air.

However, in 1913, at the first performance of The Rite of Spring, Diaghilev and his colleagues’ daring was to unsettle even this audience that saw itself as in the vanguard of change. Rumor and counterrumor had carefully been circulated by Diaghilev for weeks, and the air of anticipation was palpable. An observer wrote later that, in fact, the audience’s “role had been written for it.” This was that it should be scandalized.

As the very first mournful notes of the bassoon melody rose up, some in the audience began to whistle. But by the time the weirdly dressed dancers appeared, with their shivering and shaking and jumping up and down in ugly and angular poses, there were cries of disapproval. Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s staunch followers loyally cheered, but many others booed at this “grotesque caricature.” People began to argue. Some apparently exchanged punches, a society woman spat in a man’s face and it is said that a duel was fought the next morning. It was reported that there was pandemonium.

Over the years, many told their memories of that heady night. Comparing several of the “memories,” however, one finds a mass of contradictions. It turns out that not only did almost everyone remember inaccurately, some of those who “recalled” the hysteria of that night weren’t even there. But the audience had become as significant a part of the performance as the dancers and the musicians. They were part of its “living elements,” and their response was as important to the meaning of this art as the intentions of those who introduced it. This new art had indeed “transcended reason, didacticism, and a moral purpose” and become “provocation and event.”⁷

While Gabrielle would later admit that she hadn’t understood much of The Rite ’s first performance as a “living element” of the ballet, one of those who would contribute to the overthrow of much in life and art seen as outmoded, it seems most fitting that she was present.

Meanwhile, her own so far modest contribution to the avant-garde was about to become more prominent. For some time, Gabrielle had interspersed her wardrobe with her own designs, but by 1912, she was consolidating her style. This is reflected in the earliest known dress probably designed by her: an utterly simple sheath of dark velvet set off by a collar of delicate white petals. It was made in 1913 for Gabrielle’s friend Suzanne Orlandi, mistress to Etienne Balsan’s friend Baron Foy. Gabrielle would become fiercely protective of her reputation for originality and was neither to leave any record of her earliest ideas about clothes nor speak about her influences. What she did talk about was motivation, and she famously said, “My work came about as a reaction to my times.” But while admitting her admiration for the designer Vionnet, Gabrielle would play down the influence of another designer, Paul Poiret. Perhaps more even than the clothes, Gabrielle observed his example in self-presentation and the way one ran a business. Yet she would also understand her century better than Poiret and consequently go far beyond him.

In 1911, Poiret was a charismatic young couturier (just four years older than Gabrielle) who had provoked outrage with the introduction of his harem pants. Seen as a perilous development, they were thought to challenge male supremacy and encourage the women’s movement. Nonetheless, by 1914, Poiret would hold sway as one of the most radical designers in Paris.

He had trained with the great Jacques Doucet, himself a product of the extravagant nineteenth-century Second Empire and a fierce advocate of taste and discrimination. Doucet’s rue de la Paix atelier was only a few doors away from that of his own mentor, Charles Frederick Worth, the first couturier of them all and still the dominant figure in the fashion industry at the end of the nineteenth century. Like Worth, Doucet amassed a large library and works of art, including Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, bought directly from the artist. Doucet believed the watchwords for couture were luxury and distinction rather than practicality and function. Young Poiret had set out to emulate his master.

At first, Poiret gained notoriety with dresses and costumes for famous actresses, including Sarah Bernhardt and the courtesan Réjane. Then he quickly outstripped Worth and Doucet to become the fashion guru of the moment. His greatest contribution toward the history of dress was in his outright rejection of a fundamental convention. This was the fierce division of a woman’s body to two. Previously, the abdomen and rib cage were encased in armorlike corsets, while the lower half was swathed in voluminous skirts, plumping out the behind. (Proust said that women looked as if they were “made up of different pieces that had been badly fitted together.”)⁸ Instead, Poiret utterly shocked his contemporaries by doing away with this rigid division and making dresses that clung revealingly to the body in soft, fluid lines, from a high waist just below the bust. Provoking still further outrage, he insisted his clients must dispense with their armored corsets. This gave the Poiret silhouette a particularly sinuous and alarmingly natural effect, driving furious critics such as Worth to denounce it as “hideous and barbaric.” Worth thundered that Poiret’s clothes were really “only suitable for women of uncivilized tribes.”⁹

Fashion is a fabulously subjective pastime, and contemporaries were unable to see that Poiret’s designs weren’t really so outlandish. Above all, they were a reflection of fashion’s frequent tendency to look over its shoulder to the past. Poiret’s major inspiration was in fact the postrevolutionary Directoire period, whose “classical” understatement was in turn inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. At the same time — largely under the influence of the Ballets Russes — all things exotic and oriental were then much in vogue, and Poiret’s intense palette of colors as well as his layered dresses and turbans earned him the description “Pasha Paris.” In strong contrast to the Belle Epoque craze for embellishment, which was synonymous with haute couture since its beginnings, any ornament or elaboration in Poiret’s dress, hairstyles or millinery was very spare. As with Gabrielle’s hats, it was the very simplicity of Poiret’s designs that some at first regarded as disturbing.

By 1913, Vogue announced that Poiret had become the “prophet” of simplicity, and quoted his claim that “it is what a woman leaves off, not what she puts on, that gives her cachet.” Poiret was interested in the underlying structure of clothing, saying that he rejected the confusion of richness with what is beautiful, and costliness with what is elegant. As the first truly modern designer, while his vision was an original one, Poiret found phenomenal success not only as a result of the design of his clothes.

In newly urbanized France, this young entrepreneur understood that a name needed constant airing, to appear in as many different guises as possible. And in those rapidly changing times when many were unsure, Poiret was sure, and promoted his own way of life as an idealized lifestyle that his clients were able to purchase. The first designer-entrepreneur to use the now ubiquitous concept of the “brand,” Poiret not only put his name on perfumes but also on cosmetics and accessories. Indeed, his strategy of extending the designer’s name far beyond the simple promotion of clothes would eventually become the financial pillar of almost every twentieth-century fashion house.

Meanwhile, as far as the traditionalist Worth was concerned, fashion had become a “meaningless jangle, hopelessly out of tune.” And while this description synchronized with the growing restlessness of an age of fast motor cars and flying machines, several other couturiers were catching up with Poiret’s simpler, unstructured shapes. Indeed, during the first decade or so of the century, high fashion was making a momentous move away from the Belle Epoque’s leisure, consumption and waste toward what was memorably described as “conspicuous outrage.” Indeed, flouting traditional standards of “good taste” was almost becoming the rule.¹⁰ Gabrielle’s unusually simple hats had already placed her in the category of unconventional and daring, but with her next step, she was to initiate a far more concerted attack upon the idea of the traditional.

A month or so after The Rite of Spring ’s dramatic premiere, Arthur and Gabrielle left for Deauville, the “elegant kingdom,” with its world-renowned racecourse, France’s first polo ground and a sumptuous casino. The resort’s rail link with the capital had made it easily accessible for well-to-do Parisians, and its glamour and proximity to the English Channel proved attractive to the British nouveau riche and upper classes. This in turn meant that the British love of games and sports was catered to with tennis courts and a golf course.

As a young man of distinction and a polo player of note, Arthur was one of the resort’s darlings. And so its habitués looked on with interest as he arrived for the season with the woman rumored to be his live-in mistress, and whose hats were becoming familiar to the beau monde. Vogue had recently given Deauville its stamp of approval as “the summer capital of France,” with the “shortest, gayest, and most exciting season of any of the fashionable resorts on the continent.” Arthur now took a suite of rooms at one of the grandest hotels, the newly opened Normandy, which was connected by an underground passage to the opulent new casino.

While society dismissed the rumored talk of war and flocked to the “summer capital,” Gabrielle was preparing to launch her new venture: with Arthur’s financial backing, she was about to open a new shop. Having chosen with Arthur premises on the rue Gontaut-Biron, the smartest street in Deauville’s select shopping quarter, Gabrielle had hired two country girls as seamstresses, organized the redesign of her shop and begun putting out the word.

Like all resorts, Deauville’s prestige was sustained by the theatricality of its daily life. All events and venues, from the restaurant to the parties and the polo ground to the boardwalk by the beach, relied for their entertainment on the dress and behavior of the visitors. Catering to a community of ever-changing, socially fluid personalities, the resort’s entertainments were promenading, sports and parties. The changes of dress required for the morning promenade; the afternoon’s races, polo, golf; the evenings spent dancing, at the casino or a party called for large and varied wardrobes.

And it was aspects of resort lifestyle that had inspired Gabrielle’s designs. Few women took part in any sports; they were observers dressed in immensely impractical clothes. But for the small group of younger women like Gabrielle, who played tennis or golf or actually went to the beach to swim, what they now wanted was fashion with greater ease of movement.

In Gabrielle’s boutique, with its striped awning proudly bearing the name “Gabrielle Chanel,” she offered clothes and hats based on simplified elements. There were open-collar blouses; simple sweaters; loose, belted jackets and long skirts for relaxed and outdoor living. Most famously, Gabrielle had taken familiar items of men’s practical clothing and turned them to her advantage. The fisherman’s shirts, turtlenecks and oversized sweaters, the polo sweater — Arthur’s having apparently been donned one day because Gabrielle was cold — all these she modified for women. The polo shirt, for example, became an open-necked, belted tunic with sleeves rolled up. Borrowing from those workaday wardrobes, she amazed and delighted her audience by demonstrating that the practical and the everyday could be the source of high style, until then invariably rooted in luxury and the exotic. In a place like Deauville, attuned to the slightest diversion in dress, Gabrielle’s salon immediately set tongues wagging.

Adrienne was once again pressed into service, leaving the boutique several times a day to spend time around the town with friends, sporting one or another of Gabrielle’s outfits. This proved so successful that Antoinette joined the ranks as mannequin, while Gabrielle and Arthur’s circle was also drumming up interest. This first range of clothes was almost certainly ready-to-wear, Gabrielle’s first couture collection coming later. At the beginning of September, the magazine Femina published a full-page illustration evoking the jolly atmosphere around Gabrielle, accompanied by the following puff:

Every morning at the chic hour, groups form outside the fashionable shop. Sportsmen, noble foreigners and artists shout at one another and chat; some, friends of the house, harangue female passers-by, inviting them to come in… “Come on, dear countess, a little hat, just one, only five Louis…!” And one goes in: people chat, they flirt, they show off amazing outfits… Outside it’s a hubbub, the double rank of people sitting down who watch, contemplate and criticize: a non-stop double-stream, moving toward the sea.¹¹

Femina showed Gabrielle with a client and some illustrious friends, including one of the most celebrated contemporary painters, Paul Helleu, and the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont. Santos-Dumont was a Brazilian whose aeronautical feats had included the first European public airplane flight, making him one of the most famous men in the world.

We see Gabrielle in a casual white outfit on the boardwalk by the beach, with that length of dark hair caught up and setting off a loose, easy blouse and a long simple skirt. To this she has added an oversized, open-necked cream tunic with large patch pockets, and into her buttoned belt she has tucked a white flower. Pockets were as yet uncommon on the outside of stylish women’s clothing, unless it was for sporting occasions. (British companies such as Burberry made fishing or walking coats with pockets.) Anyone other than the most forward-thinking observer would have regarded Gabrielle’s hands, dug comfortably into her pockets, as audaciously unladylike. In another photograph, Adrienne poses in a wrap coat, and she and Gabrielle stand together smiling broadly in front of the boutique, its “Gabrielle Chanel” awning wafting in the sea breeze.

Recently discovered photographs give a lively impression of the resort’s street theater. Arthur and his stylish friends lounge nonchalantly around the entrance to Gabrielle’s salon. In another photograph, a group of celebrities passes the time of day on comfortable chairs in front of the salon. Paul Helleu and his friend Giovanni Boldini (also friend to Edgar Degas), probably then the most successful portrait painter in Paris, sit talking with another friend, Sem, pseudonym of Georges Goursat, the most notable French caricaturist of the day. His studio was near Gabrielle’s boutique on rue Cambon in Paris, and he had been a friend and admirer for some time. Sem was a small man who dressed carefully and whose sardonic pen made those in the public eye fear him. In Jean Cocteau’s characterization of Sem, one senses Cocteau’s defensiveness. Sem was “a ferocious insect… progressively taking on the tics of his victims he pursued. His fingers, his stump of a pencil, his round glasses… his forelock, his umbrella, his dwarfish, stable-boy silhouette — all seemed to shrink into and concentrate upon his eagerness to sting.”¹²

That summer, Gabrielle captured Deauville’s imagination. Her lover’s social standing, Gabrielle’s own striking appearance and personality and her cohort of admirers combined to help promote and accommodate this young woman of undistinguished background in this most elite of locations. Later, Gabrielle also recalled her own sense of conviction when she said: “The age of extravagant dress, those dresses worn by heroines that I had dreamed about, was past.”¹³

Among her visitors on the rue Gontaut-Biron was the Baroness Diane “Kitty” de Rothschild, who brought with her Cécile Sorel, one of the capital’s leading actresses. A delicious piece of gossip going the rounds had it that Kitty Rothschild, a devoted client of Poiret’s, had turned up one day at his salon with her retinue of male admirers. They had not only followed the baroness into the dressing room but also entertained themselves by making suggestive remarks to Poiret’s young mannequins. Poiret was at the pinnacle of his career and gave vent to his anger by banishing the Rothschild retinue from his salon. Whether or not this ban was extended to Kitty Rothschild herself is uncertain. Nevertheless, the young socialite let it be known she was intent upon revenge.

Knowing full well that as one of the most fashionable women in Paris, her patronage was invaluable publicity, she shunned Poiret’s salon, putting out the word that she now followed the exciting new designer, Gabrielle Chanel. Soon other stylish young women, such as Princess Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge, née Erlanger; Pauline de Saint-Sauveur and Antoinette, pretty wife to the fashionable playwright Henri-Adrien Bernstein, were to be seen in Gabrielle’s salon. Gabrielle and her assistants were kept frantically busy into the new year of 1914.

In March, Gabrielle was given a sensational public endorsement when Sem parodied the foibles of high fashion in a famous series of satirical albums for the newspaper L’Illustration. Titled “True and False Chic,” in them he compared the ostentatious pomposity of contemporary “false chic” with the elegant lines of “true chic,” for him exemplified by the beautiful courtesan Forsane, whom he depicted in a svelte, fur-trimmed outfit by none other than Gabrielle Chanel. Sem soon followed this up with an even more notable cartoon in which Arthur Capel, drawn as a virile, polo-playing centaur, carried off Gabrielle in his arms. Arthur’s polo mallet was the centaur’s lance, on the end of which dangled a hat, while from Gabrielle’s arm hung an unmistakable hat box inscribed with the word “Coco.” The allusions were clear: the well-known playboy Arthur Capel was both lover and sponsor to Gabrielle Chanel, who was now an identifiable enough figure that she could also be caricatured.

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