Master of Her Art

Perhaps it was while Arthur and Gabrielle were nearby at Saint-Jean-de-Luz that they came to the conclusion it was the right moment for Gabrielle to open another salon. This time in Biarritz. Whenever the decision was made, before Arthur returned to the front he had already put up the finances for a venture on a far larger scale than Gabrielle’s salon at Deauville. The site she chose was one of the grander private buildings in Biarritz, the Villa Larralde, on the rue Gardères. A faux castle, its situation was perfect: facing the casino, it was en route to the promenade and the beach. Gabrielle was preparing to launch not only her first maison de couture but also the first couture house in Biarritz.

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

Deauville, July 14

Everything points to a brilliant season here. Already quite a few of the villa colony have opened their homes and the leading hotels… are well filled… An interesting feature of life at Deauville for the fair sex is shopping, and the most fascinating shops to be found anywhere in the world are situated principally on the rue Gontaut-Biron and the rue de Casino. These shops are branches of well-known Paris houses. The Maison Chanel has reopened for the season. This house, by the way, was the first to employ Rodier’s golfine and last season launched here the sport coat made of that material. At once golfine became the craze. One wonders what novelty M. Chanel is holding back to launch this year.

The following day it was reported that

Gabrielle Chanel has… some extremely interesting sweaters which embrace new features. The material… is wool jersey in most attractive coloring as pale blue, pink, brick red and yellow. Striped jersey… in black and white or navy and white, is also employed. These sweaters… slip on the head, opening at the neck for about six inches and are finished with jersey-covered buttons… A great success is predicted for these sweaters.

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

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

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

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

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

The Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne presents a rather animated appearance. There is the brilliancy of all the Allied uniforms, starred with decorations of all kinds, and there is the measured clank of swords… There is the sprinkling of the new frocks… against the background of neutral-tinted garments which are affected just now. There is the subdued woolen glow of jersey cloth… the liking for jersey has… developed into a passion — a veritable craze. Everyone goes clad in jersey; in palest gray, in beige, in white, and in all shades of blue. Bordeaux jersey is smart… and for young girls there is a red… the modish jersey frock is exceedingly simple in line… [jersey] is cool looking and indescribably chic.

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

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

I had decided to replace expensive furs with the humblest hides. Chinchilla no longer arrived from South America, or sable from the Russia of the czars. I used rabbit. In this way I made poor people… and small retailers wealthy; the large stores have never forgiven me… Like Lycurgus I disapproved of expensive materials. [This is an exaggeration, but the essence is correct.] A fine fabric is beautiful in itself, but the more lavish a dress is, the poorer it becomes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While Gabrielle was kept tremendously busy with her most ambitious undertaking so far, Arthur was once again back at Baroness de la Grange’s château, experiencing the vicissitudes of war. In the first days of August 1915, a wretched experience badly unsettled him, giving a small insight into the strain of life near the front. The baroness would record that

A car driven by Captain Capel skidded… and was hurled against a peasant’s cart. The shaft struck poor Hamilton-Grace full in the chest and flung him out on the road. [It] was not fully realized for a moment, and when they ran back to help him he was already dying. Captain Capel was nearly out of his mind with despair. Luckily, my nephew, Odon de Lubersac, his friend… prevented another misfortune…

The coffin was borne by the men… and the heavy tread of spurred boots rang like a knell on the paved road… That same evening the Cavalry Corps left here. After nine months together, we have become great friends… and my adieux were full of regret.⁶

When the baroness wrote that her nephew had “prevented another misfortune,” she meant that Arthur was in such distress that if, at that moment, he hadn’t been prevented, he might well have shot himself. One wonders whether he confided this sad episode to Gabrielle. Or had the war, which kept so many couples apart, already inculcated the need for a new kind of emotional self-sufficiency? While we will never know how much Arthur confided his troubles to Gabrielle, we do know that, notwithstanding their separation, she gained immeasurably from Arthur’s support and confidence in her abilities.

In spite of Arthur’s inherited wealth, as we saw, he chose to make money. He told Gabrielle that it wasn’t out of greed. At first he had been driven to do it for personal reasons, but in these times, it was becoming something he did for his country. At the same time, his own instinct for business was remarkable, and in the previous couple of years, Arthur had shown himself to be an entrepreneur of genius. (This included his advice to Gabrielle.) His fleet of ships carried coal to France at such a rate for vital manufacture and heating that soon he was dubbed King Coal.

Distance, perforce, may have made conversations rare between Arthur and Gabrielle about how and where to proceed next, but those conversations they were able to have were of great import. Gabrielle’s lover encouraged her entrepreneurial spirit and confirmed his faith in her by continuing to contribute to the large finances necessary to make that spirit flourish.

Gabrielle was fully conscious that Etienne Balsan had enabled her to leave behind her background and make the first significant steps toward her redefinition. She also knew perfectly well that without Arthur’s backing and connections, she could have achieved little more. However, while she never forgot that her great self-belief was fostered in these early years more than anything by the support of a remarkable and powerful man, no amount of support would have helped if she hadn’t possessed exceptional gifts and an extraordinary dedication to work. In years to come, she would say, “To begin with you long for money. Then you develop a liking for work. Work has a much stronger flavor than money. Ultimately, money is nothing more than the symbol of independence.”⁷

Meanwhile, the orders flew in and Gabrielle sent her première, Marie-Louise Delay, to Paris, where she was in charge of an atelier in which sixty people worked making Chanel couture for Spain. The Spanish court “bought dresses by the dozen. Soon I was one of five forewomen,” said Marie-Louise.⁸ With five workrooms working for her, Gabrielle still chose everything herself: “laces, ornaments, colors. She always chose the most beautiful tones among the different pastel shades that the Lyon and Scottish dyers could produce in silk and wool. Our workrooms were like a fairyland, a veritable rainbow.”⁹

By late 1916, Gabrielle’s archrival, Poiret, had directed his efforts toward the army and successfully redesigned its greatcoats to reduce their cost. Whatever Poiret’s patriotic labors, Gabrielle had, meanwhile, effectively lost her rival and now appeared unstoppable in the field of wartime fashion. At this point, she had more than three hundred people working under her command.

Clearheaded and decisive, Gabrielle had already arrived at her own working methods. Marie-Louise recalled how she “never set foot in the workrooms. She would call us together to tell us what she wanted after she had chosen the fabrics.” While admiring Gabrielle’s ability to evoke and describe what she wanted, her première also believed that her lack of technique sometimes created misunderstandings. When this happened and they made something Gabrielle didn’t like, she didn’t hide her frustration.

Although Marie-Louise believed that Gabrielle’s lack of technique led her to compensate with an unsettling need to demonstrate her authority, Marie-Louise was in awe of what she described as “her innate taste.” Whatever the première ’s criticisms, she remained impressed by her employer’s “audacity and incredible nerve, especially since she was a milliner and knew little about dressmaking.”¹⁰ She would add that Gabrielle’s method “must have had something good in it, since we made such admirable things.” As for Gabrielle herself, Marie-Louise found her “extraordinarily chic. You should have seen her, getting out of her Rolls-Royce in front of the firm on the stroke of noon, for she had… acquired a Rolls with a chauffeur and footman. She was a queen!”¹¹

This “queen” remained at the salon until two or three o’clock, depending upon the importance of her customers. And then “she retired to her drawing room, where she entertained a great deal.”¹² The impression this gives — that Gabrielle didn’t work hard — was just what she intended, and is also entirely inaccurate. And one remembers her famous remark, made years later: “It is through work that one achieves. Manna didn’t fall on me from heaven; I molded it with my own hands… The secret of this success is that I have worked terribly hard… Nothing can replace work; not securities, or nerve, or luck.”¹³

At the same time, as we have seen, Gabrielle had insisted on remaining in the background when she sold hats from Etienne Balsan’s garçonnière, sending her assistants out to deal with the customers rather than meeting them herself. And over the preceding few years, as she had become familiar with people and surroundings of the highest sophistication, the impression that would sometimes be given, that Gabrielle didn’t do much work, signaled something significant in her present thinking. She had recognized that in order to acquire a greater reputation than her fellow designers, she would be wise to cultivate the impression that she didn’t need to work hard; that, by implication, she was the equal of her clients. Having had her nose rubbed in her social inferiority throughout her life, as Gabrielle grew more successful, she felt less and less a sense of personal inadequacy before those more socially exalted than herself.

Under Arthur’s watchful eye, at first using her contacts and the press to promote her hats, Gabrielle’s keen instincts had begun telling her she needed something more all-encompassing than the old-fashioned virtue of a well-known name. However consciously, we will never know, Gabrielle began fostering something on a grander scale.

Even her première, who knew Gabrielle’s working methods and something of her complex personality, was persuaded enough by her projection of status to call Gabrielle “a queen,” and misinterpreted her entertaining as no more than that — entertainment. As Gabrielle’s innate self-belief began to flourish, she was also drawing the outlines of a persona. She was cultivating around her name something that can thrive on any real scale in the modern world only through an ongoing relationship with the press: a public image.

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