Coco Chanel: The Importance of Being Coco

When World War I broke out, Chanel's boutique in Deauville stayed open on Capel's advice and did terrific business with wealthy Parisian women who moved away from the front. Biarritz, another luxury destination near the Spanish border and even safer, became the location of the third Chanel boutique. Chanel was able to repay her debt to Capel. She had 300 employees and a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. She dealt with the world on her own terms.

In 1917, Chanel met a woman who was to become the second most important person in her ascent. Misia Serf, who had been born in St. Petersburg to a distinguished artistic Polish-French family, was muse to the artistic elite of Paris and a patroness of the arts, especially Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (she was painted by Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard). Spellbound by Chanel's intensity and chic, she introduced her to the crème de la crème of artistic Paris, which included Cocteau, Picasso and Satie.

Meanwhile, Capel was drifting away. His financial success during the war opened the door for an aristocratic match, and he wanted a family. He continued seeing Chanel and she couldn't give him up. He died in an automobile accident in 1919, and she could never get over it. Her response was to throw herself into work, and out of that came brilliant collections--chic, classic, timeless and pure couture. Her designs were worn by the most elegant, top-flight, modern beauties of the day and photographed by Steichen, Penn, Baron de Meyer, Man Ray. Chanel also created costumes for stage productions, collaborating in the case of the avant-garde ballet Le Train Bleu and a production of Antigone with Picasso, Diaghilev, Milhaud and Bronislava Nijinska. Having remembered the scandal created in Paris by The Rite of Spring, the 1913 ballet set to the music of Stravinsky, Chanel personally sponsored the revival, presenting a check in secret to Diaghilev. She supported Stravinsky and had a fling with him, but spurned his further advances, becoming involved instead with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia in a new phase of her "Slavic period."

Exiled to Europe by the Tzar in 1916 for his participation in the assassination of Rasputin, the Grand Duke was thus saved when the other members of the Romanov family were executed in 1919. With a treasure in jewelry but very little actual cash, and surrounded by other cash-poor Russian aristocrats, Dmitri had to be financially supported (Chanel's friend, opera singer Marthe Davelli, said, in essence, "Take him--he's yours. I can't afford him"), but the Duke's milieu made up for that with a wealth of opportunity.

Perhaps the most important person she met through this Slavic circle was the perfumer Ernest Beaux, the son of the former purveyor of fragrances to the Russian court. Having spent his youth in apprenticeship with his father in St. Petersburg, he was now experimenting with the use of synthetic elements that stabilized plant-based components and made novel, mixed scents possible. In 1921, Chanel commissioned him to develop fragrances for her. He offered two sets of five: 1-5 and 20-24. She picked No. 22 and put it on the market just like that--Chanel No. 22, in a specially designed rectangular bottle with a simple white label and black type. The next choice was No. 5, not just for the scent, but also for the connotation of the alchemist's "fifth essence," the magical "quinta essentia." She presented it on May 5, 1921, spraying it throughout her boutique at the unveiling of a new collection. Rumor has it that she kept one fragrance for herself and, whenever asked what fragrance she was wearing, would say, "it's just my skin and the soap." She released it to the market late in her life under No. 19 for the date of her birth.

A gift of magnificent pearls and emerald and ruby Russian and Byzantine crosses from the Grand Duke, possessor of priceless jewelry himself, was an inspiration to Chanel for the idea of costume jewelry. "I couldn't wear my own real pearls without being stared at on the street," Chanel explained, "so I started the vogue of wearing false ones... A woman should mix fake and real. To ask a woman to wear real jewelry only is like asking her to cover herself with real flowers instead of flowery silk prints... The point of jewelry isn't to make a woman look rich but to adorn her." In another perfectly modern gesture, she adroitly mixed and matched various periods of glorious fakes whose design value gave them enormous staying power.

Chanel is considered the first couturier to be treated by her society clientele as an equal rather than a tradesman. Invitations to her residence at Faubourg St. Honoré were coveted. Diana Vreeland, a socialite living in Paris in the '30s and later the editor of Vogue, noted in her autobiography, D.V., her impression of Chanel's home: "It had an enormous garden with fountains, the most beautiful salons opening on the garden and something like 54 Coromandel screens shaping these rooms into the most extraordinary allées of charm. There she received the world. It was a proper society she had around her--artists, musicians, poets--and everyone was fascinated by her. Coco Chanel became a figure in all of this--Paris society--entirely through her wit and taste. Her taste was what you'd call formidable. She was irresistible. Absolutely."

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