From TimesOnlineUK 3/28/09-
Why there's no true story of Coco Chanel
Mystery surounds the couturier from her illegitimate birth in Saumur through her depiction as revolutionary and man-hater
Like a baby in a pram, fashion is always ready to throw away the old toy for the prospect of some new and shiny bauble dangled before it. That’s why fashion reputations soon fade and even the greatest names become nothing but footnotes for academics. In fashion as in everything else, how- ever, the bigger the noise, the longer its echoes — and, as in most areas of life, the one who gets in first makes the greatest impact.
Yet some survive by breaking down the glass wall between fashion and the real world to become names known to all. In the 20th century, there were three, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel — and the most widely known was Chanel, not because of what she achieved, but because of what she came to symbolise. Add to that a name easily recognised, remembered and pronounced (even now, within fashion, many are stumped by the pronunciation of Schiaparelli, Ghesquière and many others), and an iconic perfume recognised the world over, and you have the basis for a kind of immortality.
Certainly, extravagant claims have been made on Chanel’s behalf, not least the sweeping judgment of Diana Vreeland, high priestess of 20th-century fashion and editor in chief of American Vogue in the 1960s. “Chanel invented the 20th century for women” is a claim more hyperbolic than factual, but, like so much in fashion, it is accepted without question. She didn’t, any more than she invented the little black dress, the other claim made on her behalf. What Chanel did — and I love her for it — was fight the establishment with all the guerrilla tactics of a born outsider. She hated authority and hated those who wielded it — in her day, even more so than now, men. To know why, we need to look at her background.
Gabrielle Chanel’s illegitimate birth in 1883, to a peasant family, is shrouded in mystery. It seems likely that she was born in Saumur, in western France. When she was a child, her mother died and her father abandoned her to be brought up by the nuns, with iron discipline and frequent beatings. Strange and farouche, Chanel never trusted a man again, and hated all forms of authority for the rest of her life. Yet, although she hated to recall those early days, they had a great effect on her fashion thinking. She was the first couturier to use men’s fashion and dress as the basis for womenswear, and she chose the black and white of the nuns’ habit to give women’s clothing an authority that she remembered from her convent days.This was Chanel, however, a woman so fatally scarred by her early years that she could not resist using fashion to avenge the lowly position in which society had placed her. Attracted to the upper classes because they were the ones who held the power in the first decades of the 20th century, she still couldn’t resist pulling them down. In the aftermath of the first world war, there was barely a family in France or Britain that was not in mourning. Women wore black, often for several years. Chanel found it boring. But she thought back to the nuns, as well as noting the dress of servants in the early 1920s, and decided that what was needed to make black chic was white — at neck and cuffs. It also gave her a frisson to dress the rich and fashionable in the same way as their servants.
Her class war continued with the men. In a determined bid for power, she became the mistress of rich — always rich — and powerful males able to set her up in business and open all social doors. She used them as they used her: as trophies to attract more trophies. Much has been written about her love affairs, but Chanel remained silent on the subject. There is no record of her admitting to having any of them. I believe that when her father abandoned her, he made it impossible for her to love men, love being based on the one thing she could never give them: trust. But she wore their clothes and adapted them for women — whether to demean masculinity or to empower women remains debatable.
It has been suggested many times that Chanel was more at ease with women than with men, but her contempt for most of her sex, allied to her vicious, uncompromising tongue, terrified most women. Again, she was attracted to power players. She was a close friend of the socialite Misia Sert, who exercised authority over the social, artistic and fashionable world of Paris throughout the 1920s. In her last years, it was the independence of American women — who enjoyed much more freedom than those in Europe — allied with their clean, fresh fitness, that attracted her. She adored the 1950s model Suzy Parker, for example.
Was Chanel a lesbian? It has been hinted at many times, but it seems unlikely. But she was fond of the world of male homosexuals, to which Sert introduced her — not because they were gay but because they were clever. Her high-profile lovers, such as “Boy” Capel, the Duke of Westminster and Grand Duke Dmitri, had all inherited their position and were generally considered rather limited, whereas Cocteau, Dali and Diaghilev were important for what they had achieved. As a self-made woman, Chanel always admired and envied the achievements of others.
So, why has her name survived where those of other designers, equally important in her time, have disappeared from current currency? Was it because she was a woman? Hardly: Paquin and Lanvin beat her to that. A modernist? No: Poiret, who released women from the Edwardian constriction of corsets, got there first. The fact that she put women in informal casualwear? No: her contemporary and detested rival, Patou, was ahead of her.
Coco Chanel was not always a trailblazer, but this shrewd little businesswoman had learnt a thing or two on her climb to the top. Above all, she understood the job, which was to sell clothes. Unlike other couturiers, she professed to be happy when she saw cheap copies of her clothes on the streets of Paris. Having started at the bottom of the social heap, she knew all about dreams and the need for aspirations. For her, the models who paraded down her catwalk were as important as the clothes because “a good model makes women in the audience envious and this makes them insecure, so they buy in order to re-establish their self-esteem”. This was 60 years before Versace invented supermodels in the form of Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. Such prescience is entirely typical of her unique combination of earthy reality and romantic dreams.
What did Chanel have that has created a mania that shows no sign of abating? Vreeland once explained it to me: “She understood all women because she had been all women. She despised men, yet she loved men. She had been bullied and shamed, and she bullied and shamed in her own way. But, above all, she wanted women to have the freedom that men took as their own right.” That is why Chanel’s name remains as strong as ever.