Coco Chanel: The Importance of Being Coco

The Cinderella story was now complete. The Duke of Westminster, reportedly the richest man in England, wanted to marry her during their six-year affair, but she refused. "The moment I had to choose between the man I loved and my dresses, I chose the dresses," she later said "Work has always been a kind of drug for me, even if I sometimes wonder what Chanel would have been without the men in my life." Indeed, influenced by her time in Great Britain with the Duke, she added to her collections, which led to Scottish tweeds and the famous Chanel suits. A sailor's cap she spotted on the Duke's yacht became an item in her line with a (faux) jewel pinned to it.

An independent, self-made woman, Chanel was not just attracted to titles or wealth. Ultimately, she was always more at home with creative types. One romantic liaison, with artist and designer Paul Iribe, almost lead to marriage, but Iribe died of a heart attack during a tennis game with Chanel at her country home before definite plans were made. And poet Pierre Reverdy, her literary and spiritual "guide," dedicated poems to Chanel and continued correspondence with her long after their affair had ended.

When Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn offered Chanel a very generous contract in 1931, she decided to give it a try and arrived in Los Angeles in a luxurious, custom-decorated white train car. Even Greta Garbo came out to greet her ("The Meeting of Two Queens," the Columnists gushed). In Hollywood, Chanel designed costumes for Gloria Swanson in Mervyn LeRoy's Tonight or Never, and for Ina Clare and Joan Blondell in The Greeks Had a Word for Them, but arranging fittings in Paris for movies made in Hollywood proved problematic. Perhaps the right love affair would have kept her in California longer, but as things turned out, Chanel was merely bored there.

It was in America, and partly in Hollywood, though, that Chanel ultimately capped off her legend. Most of Chanel's "fashion universe" was created before 1938. She was increasingly upstaged by her bitter rival, Elsa Schiaparelli, who was inspired by the prince of surrealism, Salvador Dali, and celebrated the absurd and the ironic by using "shocking pink," neon purple and sulfur yellow--and creating such things as a dress with a giant lobster print with sprigs of parsley on the bodice. (Dali suggested to splash it with real mayonnaise, but the designer stopped short of that.) Chanel finally closed her shop when the Nazis invaded France in 1940. "Les Parfums de Chanel," headquartered in the U.S., continued doing business but she retired and there were no collections for a decade.

What galvanized Chanel back into action was Dior's 1947 collection: tiny waist, huge skirts, corseted bodices--the dresses so stiff, Chanel observed, they could prop themselves on the floor without a body inside. In a replay of her early reaction to the fashion of her youth, she unveiled her revamped Chanel classics in 1954. But this time around, the French and English press was flat to negative--they thought she would want to stun with new inventions. She actually wanted to remind the world what it would lose if her styles were forgotten. It was the American press that embraced her return. New York society and Hollywood celebrities jumped on the bandwagon. Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall and Elizabeth Taylor all bought her designs. Marlene Dietrich, who'd befriended Chanel during her short-lived Hollywood stint in 1931, was now out of retirement as well, in a new role as a celebrated bi-continental chanteuse. Both agreed that retirement had bored them to death.

One of the young men attending the show in Paris was Karl Lagerfeld, a 17-year-old student at the Chambre Syndicale design school. "You had a feeling you were seeing something prehistoric," he recalled later, "but I loved this look that harked back to a prewar world I hadn't known but found more intoxicating than any current fashion." He would go his own way for the next 30 years or so and make a name for himself, but eventually, 11 years after Chanel's death at 87 in 1971, and after several attempts by other designers to step into her shoes without much success, Lagerfeld was contacted by the House of Chanel. What happened next is the subject of "Chanel, Part 2" in our November issue.

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