The Allure of Chanel

RETURN TO PARIS

AFTER THESE FEW MONTHS of exhilarating freedom (I had not taken a holiday for years), I returned to Paris and moved into the Ritz, where I stayed for six years.

I took up my dictatorial life once more: success and solitude. I was exhausted by my break. Nothing relaxes me so much as work, and nothing tires me so much as doing nothing. The more I work, the more I want to work.

I cannot take orders from anyone else, except in love; and even then … Nothing had changed in my absence. In other establishments, they allow for fifty chefs and sous-chefs. With me, there is only “Mademoiselle”. When I go away, I leave only mourners behind me. I very much respect other people’s liberty, while at the same time expecting reciprocity. Liberty, alas, is a gift that terrifies people; I don’t just mean theirs, but one’s own.

I was working towards a new society. Up until then they had been clothes designed for women who were useless and idle, women whose lady’s maids had to pass them their stockings; I now had customers who were busy women; a busy woman needs to feel comfortable in her clothes. You need to be able to roll up your sleeves. Beauty is not prettiness: why do so many mothers teach their daughters to be affected, instead of teaching them about beauty? It’s true, beauty is not learnt in a flash; but by the time you have learnt through experience, beauty has faded away! It’s one of the facets of the female tragedy. There are so many others, about which novelists and those “who look into a woman’s heart” are dreadfully unaware.

(May I be forgiven: it takes a great deal of courage not to see women as goddesses; and to say so!)

A man, for example, generally improves as he grows older, whereas his partner deteriorates. The face of a mature man is more beautiful than that of an adolescent. Ageing is Adam’s charm and Eve’s tragedy.

A woman ages badly. Look at this one, with her legs in the air, doing her physical education exercises under the glaring light of a beach umbrella.

“She’s downright ugly,” we would say.

And they reply to us:

“That’s my grandmother.”

A woman who is getting older takes more and more care of herself with every passing day; and one of the diabolical effects of inherent justice is that taking care of oneself is what ages one most. I feel sorry for those women who take rest cures with specialists who make them sit still for hours, in the darkness, in comfortable armchairs. The worst lines, those of egoism, are etched in their skin, there’s nothing to be done. However much one says, so as to flatter them: “She’s an angel,” angels also grow old. (We’ll talk about “angels” again in a moment.) No point in patting your double chin, it’s better to massage your morale.

Women today certainly look twenty years younger, they certainly continue to display unshakeable energy and behave as if they are never going to die, but nature always prevails over their efforts.

“How lovely Pauline looked, yesterday evening!” people continue to say, out of habit. And nobody dares say, or even think:

“No; she’s old and ugly.”

Beauty endures, prettiness passes. Yet no woman wants to be beautiful; they all want to be ever so pretty.

Bemoaning one’s fate is to cradle complacently the child that continues to live within every one of us, and who is of no interest to anyone. As for the real secret, which is to transform physical beauty into moral beauty, it’s the one trick which most women are incapable of performing.

If they were even distressed about this, that would be their salvation. But they are so sure of themselves!

A distressed woman doesn’t exist.

“I’m a little bit too plump …”

“I’m not all that plump …”

And the young encourage her in her false security. It’s the swan song. Young people’s compliments are delightful, as long as one resists them. Accepting them, that’s a serious matter.

In any case, it’s not so much a question of being young or old, as being on the right or the wrong side. I can call that a good or a bad painting: it’s original, functional, indelible. There are no human beings who are not original and interesting, as long as one has taken care not to teach them anything. There is good painting everywhere, in the trains, in the convoys of emigrants, but you have to know how to see it, to read it. Where women lose out is in having been taught; where the prettiest lose out is in having been taught not just that they are pretty, but in being taught how to be pretty.

People talk about physical care: but where is the moral care? Beauty treatments should begin with the heart and the soul, otherwise cosmetics are pointless.

Moral behaviour, the art of presenting oneself with charm, taste, intuition, people’s inner sense of life, none of these things can be taught. From a very young age, we are fully formed; education can change nothing. It is useless having teachers, teachers have lost many more men (and women, especially) than they have produced. Clemenceau’s remark about Poincaré: “He knows everything and understands nothing”, coupled with his remark about Briand: “He knows nothing and understands everything”, remains true, and always will.

Another axiom: there are intelligent women, but there are no intelligent women at a couturier’s. (Nor moral women; they would sell their soul for a dress.)

Mirrors no longer exist for the woman who is growing older. She replaces the mirror with conceit. It is true that when one reaches fifty, everything becomes difficult. A highly intelligent woman with a head of grey hair tells me:

“I’m calling it a day. Make me an outfit that I can wear from now until I die.”

“It’s impossible,” I reply to her. “A woman who is growing older must be in fashion; only a young woman can be in her fashion.”

Women should age with the times we live in, not with their own. People say to them: “Take this,” (which means: “In this black dress, people will see you have been beautiful”). But they don’t listen … The tragedy of the ageing woman is that she suddenly remembers that light blue suited her when she was twenty.

“Make me an old lady’s dress,” Hélène Morand says to me.

“There are no more old ladies,” I reply.

The shops see women as they ought to be; dressmakers’ salons see women as they are.

“Dora, Daisy, Dorothea, Diane, she’s an angel!” say their friends.

The angel returns her dress, having worn it at a soirée where everyone could admire it; the angel returns it saying that she had ordered a red velvet gown when in fact she had ordered it in black, as can be proved by the purchase order, signed by her.

The angel accompanies a friend to the fitting:

“This white velvet dress is pretty, but it’s not your style …”

“I had it made for the Rothschilds’ ball.”

“Trust me, come to Lelong’s instead. You’ll be another woman.” (How charming!)

The friend begs us to take the dress back. The next day the angel appears who had been unable to sleep thinking of her friend’s dress.

“That white velvet dress which was returned to you yesterday, I’ll take it, but you’ll have to sell it to me at half-price. It’s a sale item. OK?”

The angel always says: “OK?”

Sometimes the angel, having created a great deal of publicity about the clothes she had made for her, reappears at the fashion show and whispers in customers’ ears:

“Don’t make any decision, my dear, without having seen the Molyneux collection.”

If I am only too familiar with this last glint of romanticism, the Angel, so dear to Gide and to Giraudoux, it is because I have heard what the sales assistants say. Our sales assistants, generally former models, know their jobs, which they adore, wonderfully well. They know how to listen, to listen on their feet; they know the right time to sit down. They are the best confidantes (a woman is always frightened that her lady’s maid may blackmail her; but she has total trust in her sales assistant). The sales assistant has the enormous privilege of hearing the angel’s confessions.

“Should I leave him?”

“Does he love me?”

“What would Vera think of him? Is it a good match?” (and other equally banal and heavenly remarks …)

While they are recounting their life stories to the sales assistants (the women are all gossips), the sales assistant is not selling and the fitter is getting impatient; three dressmakers are waiting on the fifth floor. But the angel thinks only of herself. The angel does not know the price of time. The angel has a dress that suits her perfectly well, but wants to be able to say, at a smart lunch party:

“I must go round to Chanel’s.”

She returns again once, twice, three times, to no avail. Out of pure sadism the angel manages to prevent the sales assistant from continuing her job on another floor, which is to sell dresses and earn her commission, and to keep her unoccupied for an entire day.

At this point I must stop these stories from the fitting room.

I believe I have raised dressmaking to a certain level of importance. The purpose of my relating this is to say so and not to spread gossip.

I conclude by observing that one has to have experienced the company of women in order to know what a woman is like. The angel is a creature without any scruples, a real man-eater.

The angel is not bothered about pleasing; she thinks only of money. To the angel who believes I am a businesswoman and who asks me for financial tips, I reply:

“I am not Madame Hanau. Marthe Letellier, the greatest beauty of the pre-1914 period, thought of nothing but the Stock Exchange. The Marquise de J doesn’t need a footstool at Court, she wants an armchair in front of the tap at Saint-Phalle’s. And yet she’s an angel, and everyone in her circle is agreed on this. An angel never pays in cash, however (in my business, paying cash is like paying in instalments). An angel pays on the never-never.”

The angel, who is now a widow (for angels have a sex) and who, dressed in mourning, gives a grand dinner party:

“He would have hated me to be bored …”

Or:

“Come to dinner; we’ll talk about him …”

The theosophical angel:

“My religion forbids me to mourn.”

Man has a certain ingenuousness, but woman has none; as for the angel, it’s capable of everything. The angel knows it cannot be killed because it is immortal; it knows it cannot be put in prison, because it has wings.

Society (with very rare exceptions, under Marie-Antionette or under the Empress Eugénie) took notice of invitations from the fashion houses, but none of the couturiers themselves. After the last war—I mention this because all Parisians know it—I was much sought after. Sought after, but not easily found, for I continued scarcely ever to go out in the evening; I could count on my fingers the number of grand dinner parties or receptions I attended. Ten years later, you could see many of my colleagues mixing in social circles. In another ten years there will be scarcely any couturiers’ salons: there will just be society couturiers, and we will hurry along to the Dior ball, to the Patou cocktail party.

Since I went out very little, I needed to be kept informed about what was going on in the houses where my dresses were displayed; so I began the practice, which was then unprecedented, of surrounding myself with people of quality to act as a liaison between myself and society, between the inside and the outer world. Englishwomen from high society, from the Russian, Italian and French aristocracy, came to work at rue Cambon. People said I was an anarchist and that I took an evil pleasure in humiliating people of standing, by placing them under my command. A great many foolish remarks have been made on this subject.

The Ballets Russes had jolted the world of dance; October 1917 had jolted the whole of Russia, and Paris became filled with émigrés. Bravely, they started to look for work, just as our own people did, in London and St Petersburg, after 1793. I employed some of them; I have always felt immensely sorry for princes of royal blood; their job, when they are able to carry it out, is the saddest there is, and when they are unable to carry it out, that’s worse. Furthermore, Russians fascinated me. Inside everyone from the Auvergne there is an Oriental one doesn’t realise is there: the Russians revealed the Orient to me.

It has been said that “every woman should have a Romanian in her life”. I would add: every Westerner should have succumbed to “Slavic charm” to know what it is. I was captivated. Their notion of “everything that is yours is mine” thrilled me. All Slavs are naturally refined, and the most humble ones are never common.

Feodorowna came to work at rue Cambon. One day, I discovered her in tears. She explained, in between sobs, that she owed a lot of money and that, in order to pay off her debt, she had to give herself to a monster, a horrible frizzy-haired, flabby-lipped oil tycoon; of the two dishonours she would choose the latter.

“How much do you need?”

“Thirty-thousand francs.”

“Thirty-thousand francs to sleep with someone is expensive,” I said; “but for not sleeping with him, it’s dirt cheap. Here you are, I’ll lend it to you.” (I used the word “lend” without any delusions; one does not lend to Russians. But giving brings bad luck; if small gifts maintain a friendship, expensive gifts compromise it.)

A few days later, Feodorowna invited me to her home. It was dusk, there were mauve lampshades on the parquet floor, a balalaika, caviar in a block of ice, vodka in carafes, Gypsies: in short, one of those island nights that Russians love to recreate everywhere. I was enchanted. The idea that my friend had escaped from the clutches of the Caucasian monster delighted me.

But with all this nocturnal glamour, I wondered whether my loan had covered the costs.

“Did you make use of the thirty-thousand francs?”

“What could I do … I felt so sad … I wanted to have a bit of fun first … I kept it … I bought this caviar with …”

I never saw the money again, but it was not long before I saw Feodorowna again in the company of the oil tycoon, whom she adored and whom she soon left for a far more monstrous Czech.