From humble birth to the heights of Parisian society, Coco Chanel's life was a wild ride. But it was much more than one big party. The timeless style she created continues to influence fashion and the way women dress even today.
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To anyone who knows even the barest outline of couture legend Coco Chanel's biography, it feels like poetic justice that Nicole Kidman and Baz Luhrmann should be doing the new Chanel No. 5 ad campaign. Kidman and her Moulin Rouge director so clearly reveled in the flavorful, over-the-top decadence of the Moulin Rouge era--the period Coco Chanel was born into (albeit on the lowest rung of the social ladder) and would later transform. These two should certainly be able to appreciate the near operatic intensity of Chanel's life story. The movie Moulin Rouge is tame by comparison.
Young fashion aficionados know Chanel primarily as a luxury brand they associate with elegant tweed suits, quilted bags, classic fragrances and spare, no-tricks dresses that, year after year, make actresses on the red carpet seem to glow in their own limelight. For those who know something of the real woman behind the name, there is still mystique enveloping the vague image of a slim, dark-eyed woman with ropes of pearls, delicate chains and maybe a small hat. The full Coco Chanel story beats all fashion designers' stories--it is Cinderella cum Sleeping Beauty cum Horatio Hornblower. It is a movie that cannot be made because it would be 10 hours long (not that Hollywood hasn't tried: the 1981 travesty Chanel Solitaire was a cliché-ridden, conventional swatch of a highly unconventional life).
Chanel revolutionized women's fashion beginning early in the 20th century. She introduced women's sportswear made of jersey with shorter straight skirts, cardigans and open-neck blouses. She gave couture dresses a spare, modern elegance and distilled chic that keeps them timeless even today. She pioneered costume jewelry of great beauty. She created the eternally popular little black dress. She introduced Chanel No. 22 and the classic No. 5 fragrances in 1923, and they have never gone off the market. She invented suits with short jackets, distinctive trim and buttons that have never aged.
More than anyone else, she is the creator of both the casual and glamorous women's fashion we know today. Designer Cristóbal Balenciaga was not engaging in hyperbole when he famously said, "Chanel is an everlasting bomb that not one of us can defuse."
And here is the adage Chanel herself was famous for: "There is a time for work and a time for love. That leaves no other time." For her it was almost true. Her loves and her work were inextricably intertwined and her conquests were so fortuitous that many of the design coups that made her successful derived directly from her romantic affairs. She had a particular talent for making art out of life and lived with an awareness of that fact. "If I [had an active social life], it was not because I needed to set the fashion; I set fashions precisely because I went out, because I was the first woman to live fully the life of her times," she said somewhat defensively later in life.
Gabrielle Chanel was born poor in Saumur, France, on August 19, 1883, of a long-suffering mother (tuberculosis, six children, a philandering husband) and a traveling peddler father who disappeared permanently after the death of his wife when Coco was 12.
For her first 25 years, Chanel's life was a study in self-education of a peculiar, shaping kind. She was taught little. She learned a lot. At the Catholic orphanage where she was placed upon her mother's death and stayed until 18, Chanel was taught the basics of sewing. She was then a charity case in Notre Dame pensionnat, a finishing school in Moulins, a garrison town. Out in the world, she found a job in a boutique where the well-to-do, often aristocratic clientele--wives, fiancées and mothers of officers stationed in Moulins--appreciated not just her sewing skills but her taste.
What she learned was that the things she made (including her own wardrobe) appealed to wealthy and sophisticated women, and the women who noticed her wanted to emulate her fresh look. She liked to stand out in a crowd by wearing clothes that were different--simpler, more streamlined. She didn't realize yet that she was her own laboratory, but she intuited that in matters of style, she was a step ahead of others. She had been taught by her situation and surroundings that she was poor and that it was better to be rich. What she learned was that it was up to her to climb out of poverty.
As a young woman, Chanel was attractive but not beautiful. She was also opinionated and sharp-tongued but very entertaining, and with these assets she became the mistress of a wealthy bon vivant named Etienne Balsan, who brought her to his luxurious residence where he also kept the notorious courtesan Emilienne d'Alencon. Chanel meticulously studied the other woman, "the odalisque," and proceeded to outlast her, staying with Balsan for five years. At his great stables, she learned to ride astride, borrowing her lover's riding clothes. She went to the races with him and his aristocratic friends and absorbed all the details of social life around her. She learned that leisure eventually becomes boring. When she got an itch to make hats, she found that other women in her circle--which did not include wives, but did include young actresses like Marthe Davelli and Gabrielle Dorziat (who would later become her clients)--all admired them. They were fashioned with one feather instead of the huge concoctions of bows, flowers, veils and birds' nests, and they were chic in a new, young, modern way. Balsan was amused at his mistress' minor creative accomplishment, but shrugged his shoulders: "How can you compete with established names in fashion?"
At 25, Chanel met an acquaintance of Balsan's who became the love of her life and the beginning of her future. Arthur "Boy" Capel was a handsome Englishman from a coal mine-owning family, an accomplished polo player and a man of culture, vision and acute business sense. He both loved and understood Chanel, and he encouraged her. She left Balsan amicably and went with Capel to Paris, where, using Balsan's apartment (this is how amicable the parting was) and Capel's financing, she opened a millinery shop, built her clientele and began getting her designs featured in magazines. The best "product placement" happened when her friend Gabrielle Dorziat wore two of her hats on stage and was photographed wearing one for the cover of Journal des Modes. Schooled in basic business by her commercially savvy lover, Chanel moved to a new store on Rue Cambon and prospered. Success being a great aphrodisiac, Chanel and Capel lived in giddy bliss, dining at Maxim's and the Bois de Boulogne, attending Isadora Duncan performances and the theater and entertaining at home, where Chanel's taste extended naturally to interior design.
Under Capel's influence, Chanel matured greatly. She absorbed his interests and knowledge, from Eastern religions to the subtleties of the Parisian social life, from literature to politics. His sophistication lent her polish and poise.
While on vacation in Deauville in 1913, Chanel decided to open a store on a fashionable thoroughfare in the tony Parisians' retreat. For this expansion of Chanel Modes, she introduced something quite new--resort sportswear for women. For the cool Deauville nights, she had taken one of Capel's sweaters, cut it in front from the V-neck down, finished the edges with a ribbon--and created the first women's knit cardigan. Every woman in Deauville wanted one. "[To think that] my fortune is built on that old jersey I'd put on because it was cold in Deauville," she reminisced later. At the same time she took the jersey fabrics that had previously been seen fit only for men's underwear and created the soft, sporty silhouettes that became her trademark. She turned into an instant sensation and she and Capel were seen as a celebrated couple.
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."
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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