The Allure of Chanel

ON FASHION OR: A GOOD IDEA IS MADE TO PERISH

FASHION SHOULD BE DISCUSSED enthusiastically, and sanely; and above all without poetry, without literature. A dress is neither a tragedy, nor a painting; it is a charming and ephemeral creation, not an everlasting work of art. Fashion should die and die quickly, in order that commerce may survive.

At the beginning of creation, there is invention. Invention is the seed, it’s the germ. For the plant to grow, you need the right temperature; that temperature is luxury. Fashion should be born from luxury, it’s not twenty-five very elegant women (dressed, incidentally, free of charge, which is not luxurious), luxury is first and foremost the genius of the artist capable of conceiving it and giving it form. This form is then expressed, translated and disseminated by millions of women who conform to it.

Creation is an artistic gift, a collaboration of the couturier with his or her times. It is not by learning to make dresses that they become successful (making dresses and creating fashion are different things); fashion does not exist only in dresses; fashion is in the air, it is borne on the wind, you can sense it, you can breathe it, it’s in the sky and on the highway, it’s everywhere, it has to do with ideas, with social mores, with events. If, for example, at this moment, there are no indoor dresses, none of those tea-gowns beloved of the heroines of Paul Bourget and Bataille, it is probably because we live at a time when there is no longer any indoors.

I have created fashion for a quarter-of-a-century. Why? Because I knew how to express my times. I invented the sports dress for myself; not because other women played sports, but because I did. I didn’t go out because I needed to design dresses, I designed dresses precisely because I went out, because I have lived the life of the century, and was the first to do so.

Why have the ocean liners, the salons, the big restaurants never adapted to their real purpose? Because they are conceived by designers who have never seen a storm, by architects who have never been out in the world, by interior decorators who go to bed at nine o’clock and dine at home. Similarly, before me, couturiers hid away, like tailors, at the back of their shops, whereas I lived a modern life, I shared the habits, the tastes and the needs of those whom I dressed.

Fashion should express the place, the moment. This is where the commercial adage ‘the client is always right’ get its precise and clear meaning; that meaning demonstrates that fashion, like opportunity, is something that has to be grabbed by the hair. I am looking at a young woman on her bicycle, with her bag on her shoulders, one hand placed chastely on her knees that rise and fall, the material of her clothing cleaved to her stomach and chest, and her dress puffed up by the speed and the wind. This young woman has developed her own fashion, according to her needs, just as Crusoe built his hut; she is admirable and I admire her. I admire her so much that I don’t see another woman who approaches me at full speed. She crashes into me, we fall down together, and I find myself on the ground with my face between her two bare thighs: it’s wonderful. She yells at me, it’s perfect.

“So what were you looking at?” she says to me.

“I was looking at you, Madame, to make sure I was not behind the fashion.”

For fashion roams around the streets, unaware that it exists, up to the moment that I, in my own way, may have expressed it. Fashion, like landscape, is a state of mind, by which I mean my own.

“This dress will not sell,” I sometimes tell my staff, “because it is not me.”

There is a Chanel style of elegance, there was a 1925 or 1946 elegance, but there is no national fashion. Fashion has a meaning in time, but none in space. Just as there are Mexican or Greek dishes, but no authentic cuisine in these countries, there is a regional type of clothing (the Scottish plaid, the Spanish bolero), but nothing else. Fashion came from Paris, because for centuries everybody used to meet there.

Where then does the couturier’s genius lie? The genius is in anticipating. More than a great statesman, the great couturier is a man who has the future in his mind. His genius is to invent summer dresses in the winter, and vice versa. At a time when his customers are basking in the burning sun, he is thinking of ice and of hoar frost.

Fashion is not an art, it is a job. If art makes use of fashion, then that is sufficient praise.

It’s best to follow fashion, even if it is ugly. To detach oneself from it is immediately to become a comical character, which is terrifying. No one is powerful enough to be more powerful than fashion.

Fashion is a matter of speed. Have you visited a fashion house just before the collection is shown? Something I made at the beginning of the collection, I may find outdated before the end. A dress that is three months old! A collection takes shape during the final two days; in this respect our profession is like the theatre; how often does a play only come together between the rehearsals and the final dress rehearsal? Ten minutes before the buyers arrived, I would still be adding bows. At two o’clock in the afternoon, we would still be trying dresses on the models, to the despair of the manager of the fitting rooms, who is responsible for organising these pretty performers’ manoeuvres.

If the role of the fashion designer is reduced by you to so little, to the blithe and brisk art of capturing what’s in the air, don’t you think it’s only natural, people say to me, that others do the same, that they copy you and draw their inspiration from your ideas just as you were inspired by ideas that were scattered around Paris?

But of course: once an invention has been revealed, it is destined for anonymity. I would be unable to exploit all my ideas and it’s a great pleasure to me to discover them realised by others, sometimes more successfully than me. And that is why I have always differed from my colleagues, over the years, about what for them is a great drama, and which for me does not exist: copying.

Working in secret, seamstresses searched every evening on leaving the workshops, counterfeit proceedings, spies, samples that vanish, patterns that are fought over as if they contained the secrets of the atomic bomb, all that is pointless, puerile and ineffectual. I began with two collections a year. My colleagues embarked on four of them, so as to have time to copy mine. (“Only better,” they used to say; and occasionally they were right.)

What rigidity it shows, what laziness, what unimaginative taste, what lack of faith in creativity, to be frightened of imitations!

The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.

I remember an evening at Ciro’s where there were seventeen Chanel dresses, not one of which was made by me. The Duchesse d’Albe greeted me with these words: “I swear that mine came from you.” It was quite pointless. And this was what the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld said to a friend, whom she had invited there with me: “I don’t dare meet her, my Chanel dress did not come from Chanel’s.” I retorted: “I am not really sure myself any more that my own dresses are made by me.”

It is because fashion must move on that its fragile existence is entrusted to women. Women are like children; their role in everyone’s eyes is to use things up, to break, and to destroy: an appalling turnover. It is essential for those industries that only exist because of them. The great conquerors measure themselves by the ruins they leave behind them.

I only like what I create and I only create if I forget.

So, a little over ten years ago, the big fashion designers ganged together and formed an ‘exclusive’ club known as the P A S (Protection des Arts saisonniers) which, under the guise of a league against copying, was a trust. Was it really necessary for twenty or so favoured fashion designers to prevent forty-five thousand from earning their living?

What can these little designers do if not interpret the big ones?

To have to take out a patent for a dress, even less, for a drawing, just as one would on a brake for a quick-firing machine-gun, I repeat, it’s not modern, it’s not poetic, it’s not French. The world has lived off French inventions, and France, for her part, has lived off the development and shaping of ideas invented by other people; existence is nothing more than movement and change. If these couturiers are the artists they claim to be, they should know that there are no patents in art, that Aeschylus did not have a copyright and that the Shah of Persia did not sue Montesquieu for infringement. Orientals copied, the Americans imitated, the French reinvented. They have reinvented Antiquity several times: Ronsard’s Greece is not Chénier’s; Bérain’s Japan is not that of the Goncourts, etc.

One day, in 192– at the Lido, because I was growing tired of walking barefoot in the hot sand, and because my leather sandals were burning the soles of my feet, I had a shoemaker on the Zattere cut out a piece of cork in the shape of a shoe and fit two straps to it. Ten years later, the windows of Abercrombie in New York were full of shoes with cork soles. Weary of carrying my bags in my hand and losing them, in 193– I had a strap attached and wore it on my shoulder. Since then …

Jewellery from jewellers’ shops bores me; I had the idea of getting François Hugo to design clip-on earrings, brooches, and all that fancy costume jewellery that one sees today even in the galleries of the Palais-Royal and the arcades on the rue de Rivoli.

I would be sad if all those little things had a brand name. I’ve given life to all that, but if I had wanted to protect myself, I would have given my own life.

I wonder why I embarked upon this profession, and why I’m thought of as a revolutionary figure? It was not in order to create what I liked, but rather so as to make what I disliked unfashionable. I have used my talent like an explosive. I have an eminently critical mind, and eye too. “I have very certain dislikes”, as Jules Renard said. All that I had seen bored me, I needed to cleanse my memory, to clear from my mind everything that I remembered. And I also needed to improve on what I had done and improve on what others were producing. I have been Fate’s tool in a necessary cleansing process.

In art, you always have to start out with what you can do best. If I built aeroplanes, I would begin by making one that was too beautiful. You can always do away with it later. By starting out with what is beautiful, you can always revert to what is simple, practical and cheap; from a finely made dress, revert to ready-made; but the opposite is not true. That is why, when you go out into the streets, fashion dies its natural death.

I often hear it said that ready-made clothes are killing fashion. Fashion wants to be killed; it is designed for that.

Cheap clothes can only originate from expensive ones, and in order for there to be low fashion, there must first be a high one; quantity is not just quality multiplied, they are essentially different. If that is understood, if people are aware of it and admit it, Paris is saved.

“Paris will no longer create fashion,” I hear people say. New York will invent it, Hollywood will propagate it and Paris will be subjected to it. I don’t believe that. Of course, cinema has had the same effect on fashion as the atomic bomb; the ratio of the explosion of the moving image throughout cinemas knows no bounds on Earth, but I, who admire American films, am still waiting for studios to impose a figure, a colour, a style of clothing. Hollywood can deal successfully with the face, with the outline, the hairstyle, the hands, the toenails, with portable bars, refrigerators in the drawing-room, clock-radios, with all man’s repercussions and knick-knacks, but it doesn’t deal any more successfully with the central problem of the body, which it has not managed to disassociate from man’s inner drama, and which remains the prerogative of the great designers and ancient civilisations. At least until now.

The Americans have asked me countless times to go and launch a fashion show in California. I have refused, knowing that the outcome would be contrived and therefore negative. There are much richer terrains than stony Burgundy or sandy Guyenne; from Persia to the Pacific they have tried to make wine, but they have never succeeded in creating the red wine of the Clos-de-Vougeot, or Vin d’Aÿ. Wealth and technique are not everything. Greta Garbo, the greatest actress the screen has given us, was the worst dressed woman in the world.

A well-known manufacturer of Lyonnais fabrics grabbed hold of me on my way through Lyon.

“I’m going to show you something that will revolutionise dressmaking,” he said to me.

And he brought out some cartoons printed on silk.

“I’ve bought the rights from Walt Disney,” he announced proudly. “What do you think of that?”

“You’re wasting your money on inanities,” I replied.

“Aren’t you keen on the idea?”

“I’m very frightened of ridicule. Walking along with a cow on your behind, it’s there for all to see. I am all for what is unseen. Keep your fabrics. They’ll make charming nursery-room curtains. Would you dress your wife like that?”

“Ah! No. ‘My sovereign’” (that’s what he called his wife) “cannot wear such things.”

Colleagues will say to you:

“Chanel lacks daring. Chanel is a revolutionary who has been overtaken by the revolution.”

I would reply that there can be revolutions in politics, which is a poor thing (since there are but two solutions, ever since the world began, to man’s ability to live in society, liberty and dictatorship, solution A and solution B) and which has only a semi-circle in which to move, a right and a left; but that there can be no revolution in couture, which is something rich, subtle and profound, like the social mores of which it is an expression.

To sum up, prêt-à-porter clothing exists. There is some marvellous prêt-à-porter. Prêt-à-porter has triumphed, and it is already flooding the world, but to mix quantity with quality, is to add apples to pears. France will be the last to be conquered. Paris never will. Our country is too small for prêt-à-porter. Our exiguity rescues us. Citroën thought he was Ford; he came from Holland, he did not understand that Grenelle was not Detroit.

And to go back to imitation in dressmaking, I have asked my colleagues: can they copy us freely abroad? Yes. Do they? Yes. Then it’s totally pointless to take out a patent on a dress. It’s admitting you have run out of ideas. And if you relent against the big international sharks, why take the bread out of the mouths of our little couturiers? Racine and Molière never had to put up with teachers. Along with plagiarism go admiration and love.

People have loathed me for defending this thesis, I’ve been boycotted and I’ve been deprived of raw materials for seven years. But my thesis is as good today as it was yesterday.

If I have dwelt on this argument about copying, it’s because it has created a gulf between my colleagues and me that has never been filled. However much I might introduce new fashions or designs, bring about new manufacturing processes, and keep vast industries alive, the world of couture has not understood a thing. Man is born a bureaucrat, you can’t change him. He codifies everything; he dykes up all the rivers and religions end up in green files.

Do you see what a foul temper I really have?

I admire and love America. It’s where I made my fortune. For many Americans (whom we don’t know, and neither do I), I am France. I think I would be better understood there than anywhere else, because America does not work ‘for Americans’; that is to say, like our French couturiers do, with their gazes fixed on Life and Fortune. Present-day America is overpopulated with French people, with writers, professors, politicians and journalists. Have American fashions been influenced in the slightest way? There is luxury in America, but the spirit of luxury still resides in France. I know what luxury is. For ten years I lived in the world’s greatest luxury. Why go and look for American or English models, as Molyneux does? Why go to New York to look for a style that is brought back to Paris and transformed? A dress is not like those Bordeaux wines that travelled round the world and which would improve during their crossing by sailing ship.

People in the trade are not meant to think about eccentricity, but quite the reverse, to remedy whatever there may be that is excessive. I prefer what is too respectable. You have to use what is at your disposal; a woman who is too beautiful upsets others, and one who is too ugly depresses the strong sex.

There are five intelligent women in a million: who can say this to them, if not a woman?

Women think of every colour, except the absence of colours. I have said that black had everything. White too. They have an absolute beauty. It is perfect harmony. Dress women in white or black at a ball: they are the only ones you see.

Customers are solely interested in detail; they can’t concentrate. They are wrong to disregard men’s opinions. For men love to go out with well-dressed women, but not when they are conspicuous. If their partner looks conspicuous, they prefer to stay at home, to avoid the agony of being stared at. Why are women not content simply to please, but have to surprise? Only very young men need to have their happiness spelled out to them, for the crowd to turn round as their partner passes by.

Revolutions in fashion should be conscious ones, the changes gradual and imperceptible. I have never started off with a preconception, with an abstract idea; I have never decided ten months beforehand that dresses would be worn longer the following season.

I have never had actresses as customers. As far as fashion is concerned, actresses no longer existed after 1914. Before that, they dictated the fashion.