The Allure of Chanel

RUE CAMBON

IN THE AUVERGNE, throughout my childhood, my aunts had kept on telling me: “You won’t have any money … you’ll be very lucky if a farmer wants you”. Very young, I had realised that without money you are nothing, that with money you can do anything. Or else, you had to depend on a husband. Without money, I would be forced to sit on my behind and wait for a gentleman to come and find me. And if you don’t like him? The other girls resigned themselves, I didn’t. I suffered in my pride. It was hellish. And I would say to myself over and over: money is the key to freedom. These reflections are self-evident; what gives them substance is that I discovered their reality at the age of twelve.

To begin with, you long for money. Then you develop a liking for work. Work has a much stronger flavour than money. Ultimately, money is nothing more than the symbol of independence. In my case, it only interested me because it flattered my pride. It wasn’t a question of buying things, I’ve never wanted anything, just affection, and I had to buy my freedom and pay for it whatever the cost.

When I moved into the rue Cambon, I knew nothing about business matters, I didn’t know what a bank or a cheque was. I was ashamed that I knew so little about life, but Boy Capel wanted me to remain the unsophisticated, untainted creature that he had discovered. “Business is a matter for banks”, that was the only reply I was given. To enable me to start up, Capel had deposited securities as a guarantee with Lloyd’s Bank, where he was a partner.

One evening, he took me to dinner in Saint-Germain.

“I’m making a lot of money,” I told him immodestly, along the way. “Business is wonderful. It’s very easy, all I have to do is draw cheques.”

I had no idea at the time about what was meant by cost prices, accounting, etc. Rue Cambon was run chaotically.

All I bothered about was the shape of the hats, along with the childish pleasure of hearing myself called “Mademoiselle”.

“Yes. That’s very good. But you’re in debt to the bank,” my companion replied.

“What? In debt to the bank? But since I’m making money? If I weren’t making any, the bank wouldn’t give me any.”

Capel began to laugh, somewhat sarcastically.

“The bank gives you money because I have deposited securities as a guarantee.”

My heart started to thump.

“Do you mean to say that I haven’t earned the money I spend? That money is mine!”

“No. It belongs to the bank.”

I could feel the anger and despair rising. Once we had reached Saint-Germain, I carried on walking, walking straight ahead until I was exhausted.

“Only yesterday, the bank telephoned me … to say that you were withdrawing a little too much, my darling, but it’s of no importance …”

“The bank rang you? And why not me? So I’m dependent on you?”

I felt sick. Impossible to eat. I insisted on going back to Paris. We went up to our flat in the avenue Gabriel. I glanced at the pretty things I had bought with what I thought were my profits. So all that had been paid for by him! I was living off him! There was thunder in the air that evening, but the storm within me was rumbling much louder. I began to hate this well-brought-up man who was paying for me. I threw my handbag straight at his face and I fled.

“Coco! … You’re crazy …” said Capel as he followed me.

I walked through the pouring rain, not knowing where I was going.

“Coco … Be reasonable.”

He ran after me and caught up with me on the corner of the rue Cambon. We were both drenched. I was sobbing.

Capel took me home. The storm had stopped. The deep wound made in my pride was hurting me less. We had a very late supper … What a day! The following day, at first light, I was at rue Cambon.

“Angèle,” I said to my head seamstress, “I am not here to have fun, or to spend money like water. I am here to make a fortune. From now on, no one will incur a centime without my permission.”

“You’re proud,” Capel said to me. “You’ll suffer …”

One year later, Capel’s guarantee had become unnecessary; he could withdraw his securities; the profits from rue Cambon were enough for everything. Pride is a good thing, but that day my irresponsible youth came to an end.

A memory should have a moral ending: it’s its raison d’être, otherwise it’s mere gossip. It’s through work that one achieves. Manna didn’t fall on me from heaven; I moulded it with my own hands, in order to feed myself. “Everything Coco touches, she transforms into gold”, my friends say. The secret of this success is that I have worked terribly hard. I have worked for fifty years, as much and more than anyone. Nothing can replace work, not securities, or nerve, or luck.

One day I ran into M B.

“Apparently you’re working?” he said to me ironically. “Can’t Capel support you then?”

What a joy it is to be able to respond to these idle rich, these petty horse-breeders: “I owe nothing to anybody”! I was my own master, and I depended on myself alone. Boy Capel was well aware that he didn’t control me:

“I thought I’d given you a plaything, I gave you freedom,” he once said to me in a melancholy voice.

1914. The war. Capel persuaded me to withdraw to Deauville where he rented a villa for his ponies. Many elegant ladies had come to Deauville. Not only did they need to have hats made for them, but soon, because there were no dressmakers, they had to be properly attired. I only had milliners with me; I converted them into dressmakers. There was a shortage of material. I cut jerseys for them from the sweaters the stable lads wore and from the knitted training garments that I wore myself. By the end of the first summer of the war, I had earned two hundred thousand gold francs, and … the stable had ousted the enclosure into second place!

What did I know about my new profession? Nothing. I didn’t know dressmakers existed. Did I have any idea of the revolution that I was about to stir up in clothing? By no means. One world was ending, another was about to be born. I was in the right place; an opportunity beckoned, I took it. I had grown up with this new century: I was therefore the one to be consulted about its sartorial style. What were needed were simplicity, comfort and neatness: unwittingly, I offered all of that. True success is inevitable.

The enclosure before 1914! When I went to the races, I would never have thought that I was witnessing the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century, the end of an era. An age of magnificence, but of decadence, the last reflections of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body’s architecture, just as parasites smother trees in tropical forests. Woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for lace, for sable, for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious. Complicated patterns, an excess of lace, of embroidery, of gauze, of flounces and over-layers had transformed what women wore into a monument of belated and flamboyant art. The trains of dresses swept up the dust, all the pastel shades reflected every colour in the rainbow in a thousand tints with a subtlety that faded into insipidness. There were parasols, aviaries and greenhouses in gardens. The uncommon had become the normal; wealth was as ordinary as poverty.

As a child, I had succumbed, like everyone else. In Mont-Dore, aged fifteen, I had been allowed to order a dress of my choice: my dress was mauve, as mauve as a bad novel published by Lemerre, laced at the back, as though I had had hundreds of maids, and with bunches of artificial Parma violets on each side, as in a play by Rostand; a collar held up by two stays that dug into my neck; below, at the back, a sweeping train with which to gather up all the sweethearts behind you.

I had one obsession when I ordered this dress: to look like the “lady with the metal hand”. She was a woman from the neighbourhood. She was poor and spoke very little (in my region people say very little), and, prompted by some repressed narcissism, or secret day-dreaming, she dressed herself in some extraordinary clothes. She wore close-fitting dresses that filled me with admiration; but what left me open-mouthed was the fact that she had a mechanical hand, a kind of metal pincers in the shape of a hand, to hold her train and to raise it, like the tie-back of a curtain. She said modestly that she wore it to save money, but I saw it as the height of elegance. I would never dare to borrow this mechanical hand, which looked like a contraption for picking asparagus, but I promised myself a train like hers. Mine was so long that I carried it under my arm; how smart I was! I would go to mass dressed like this; I, too, would rustle and swish; I would amaze everybody … I got dressed, I went downstairs. The outcome was what one might expect: “And now,” my aunts said, “go upstairs and get dressed for mass.” It was a dreadful put-down! I cried during the service; I asked God to let me die.

This first failure was also my first lesson in tact and good taste provided by the provinces. Indirectly, it was my Auvergne aunts who imposed their modesty on the beautiful Parisian ladies. Years have gone by, and it is only now that I realise that the austerity of dark shades, the respect for colours borrowed from nature, the almost monastic cut of my summer alpaca wear and of my winter tweed suits, all that puritanism that elegant ladies would go crazy for, came from Mont-Dore. If I wore hats pulled down over my head, it is because the wind in the Auvergne might mess up my hair. I was a Quaker woman who was conquering Paris, just as the stiff Genevese or American cowl had conquered Versailles a hundred and fifty years previously.

1914 was still 1900, and 1900 was still the Second Empire, with its frenzy of easy money, its habits of straying from one style to another, of romantically taking its inspiration from every country and all periods, for it lacked a way of expressing itself honestly, and aesthetically pleasing appearance is never anything but the outer expression of moral honesty, of authentic feelings.

That is why I was born, that is why I have endured, that is why the outfit I wore at the races in 1913 can still be worn in 1946, because the new social conditions are still those that led me to clothe them.

That is why the rue Cambon has been the centre of good taste for thirty years. I had rediscovered honesty, and, in my own way, I made fashion honest.

In 1914, there were no sports dresses. Women attended sporting occasions rather as fifteenth-century ladies in conical hats attended tournaments. They wore very low girdles, and they were bound at the hips, legs, everywhere … Since they ate a great deal, they were stout, and since they were stout and didn’t want to be, they strapped themselves in. The corset pushed the fat up to the bosom and hid it beneath the dress. By inventing the jersey, I liberated the body, I discarded the waist (and only reverted to it in 1930), I created a new shape; in order to conform to it all my customers, with the help of the war, became slim, “slim like Coco”. Women came to me to buy their slim figures. “With Coco, you’re young, do as she does,” they would say to their suppliers. To the great indignation of couturiers, I shortened dresses. The jersey in those days was only worn underneath; I gave it the honour of being worn on top.

In 1917 I slashed my thick hair; to begin with I trimmed it bit by bit. Finally, I wore it short.

“Why have you cut your hair?”

“Because it annoys me.”

And everyone went into raptures, saying that I looked like “a young boy, a little shepherd”. (That was beginning to become a compliment, for a woman.)

I had decided to replace expensive furs with the humblest hides. Chinchilla no longer arrived from South America, or sable from the Russia of the czars. I used rabbit. In this way, I made poor people and small retailers wealthy; the large stores have never forgiven me.

“Coco succeeds because there are no more grand soirées,” said the best known couturiers of the pre-1914 years, “but an evening dress …”

An evening dress, it’s the easiest thing. The jersey is another matter! Like Lycurgus, I disapproved of expensive materials. A fine fabric is beautiful in itself, but the more lavish a dress is, the poorer it becomes. People confused poverty with simplicity. (It’s better, by the way, to deprive yourself of things than for others to do so.)

After 1920, the great couturiers tried to fight back. At about that time, I remember contemplating the auditorium at the Opéra from the back of a box. All those gaudy, resuscitated colours shocked me; those reds, those greens, those electric blues, the entire Rimsky-Korsakov and Gustave Moreau palette, brought back into fashion by Paul Poiret, made me feel ill. The Ballets Russes were stage décor, not couture. I remember only too well saying to someone sitting beside me:

“These colours are impossible. These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black.”

So I imposed black; it’s still going strong today, for black wipes out everything else around. I used to tolerate colours, but I treated them as monochrome masses. The French don’t have a sense of blocks of colour; what makes a herbaceous border beautiful in an English garden is the massed array; a begonia, a marguerite, a larkspur … on their own, they’re not at all special, but over a space twenty feet thick, the accumulation of flowers becomes magnificent.

“This removes all originality from a woman!”

Wrong: women retain their individual beauty by belonging to an ensemble. Take a bit-part actress in a music hall; isolate her, and she’s a ghastly puppet; put her back in the chorus line, and not only does she resume all her characteristics, but, compared to those alongside her, her personality is released.

I brought in tweeds from Scotland; home-spuns came to oust crepes and muslins. I arranged for woollens to be washed less, so that they kept their softness; in France we wash too much. I asked wholesalers for natural colours; I wanted women to be guided by nature, to obey the mimicry of animals. A green dress on a lawn is perfectly acceptable. I called on Rodier: he proudly showed me a range of twenty-five different greys. How could a customer reach a decision? She would rely on her husband, who had other things to do, the woman would postpone her order, and the sales people wasted their time; once the dress was cut, she would change her mind etc. I really had to congratulate myself for having simplified the choice.

Let’s stop there. I’m not chattering on to expound truths that have become truisms. All this is common knowledge, and we have moved on. For a quarter-of-a-century, the fashion pages and the magazines have been full of my working methods: how I work with the mannequins themselves, whereas the others make drawings, or construct dolls or models. (My scissors are not those of Praxiteles, but nonetheless, I sculpt my pattern more than I draw it.) Why are my mannequins always the same, to such an extent that their faces and bodies are more familiar to me than my own? Why is it that everything that comes from my workshops, from the simplest suit to the smartest dress, appears to be cut by the same hand?

Were I writing a technical handbook, I would say to you: “A well-made dress suits everyone.” Having said that, no woman has the same arm width; the shape of the shoulder is never the same … everything depends on the shoulder; if a dress doesn’t fit on the shoulder, it will never fit … The front doesn’t move, it’s the back that takes the strain. A plump woman always has a narrow back, a slim woman always has a wide back; the back must have room to move, at least ten centimetres; you have to be able to bend down, play golf, put on your shoes. The customer’s measurements must therefore be taken with the arms crossed …

All the articulation of the body is in the back; all movements stem from the back; so one has to insert as much material there as possible … A garment must move over the body; a garment should be fitted when one is standing still, and be too big when one moves. No one should be frightened of pleats: a pleat is always beautiful if it is useful … Not all women are Venus; however, nothing should be concealed, trying to cover up something only accentuates it … You don’t get rid of bad legs by lengthening a dress … With the mannequin, I think firstly of the clothed shape; the choice of material can come later; cloth that is well-fitted is prettier than anything … The art of couture lies in knowing how to enhance: raising the waist in front to make the woman appear taller; lowering the back to avoid sagging bottoms (the ‘pear-shaped’ bottom is, alas, all too frequent!). The dress must be cut longer at the back because it rides up. Everything that makes the neck longer is attractive …

I could go on like this for hours and hours: it would only be of interest to a few people, these basic facts are well known to all the specialists anyway, and thousands of copies of Marie-Claire have circulated them to the humblest dwellings; as to America, I am amazed to see, when I go there, that they know it all: the year in which I began making long dresses, and which year I shortened them. I don’t have to explain my creations; they have explained themselves.

There, in a word, is why I would never tell you how a dress is made: I have never been a dressmaker. I admire those who can sew enormously: I have never known how; I prick my fingers; in any case, everybody knows how to make dresses nowadays. Gorgeous gentlemen who have failed at the Ecole Polytechnique know how to make them. Doddery old ladies know how to make them; they have used a needle all their lives; they are eminently sympathetic people.

Me, I am quite the opposite. I am a loathsome person and I hope that these sincere remarks will be appreciated.

Boy Capel and I lived in the Avenue Gabriel, in a delightful apartment. The first time I saw a Coromandel screen, I exclaimed:

“How beautiful it is!”

I had never said that about any object.

“You who are such an artistic person …” an elderly gentleman whom I didn’t know said to me at a dinner party.

“I am not an artistic person.”

“Then,” he replied, squinting anxiously at my invitation card, “you are not Mlle Chanel.”

“No, I am not her,” I replied, to simplify things.

I have had twenty-one Coromandel screens. They play the role that tapestries did in the Middle Ages; they allow you to recreate your home everywhere. Bérard used to say to me:

“You’re the most eccentric person on earth.”

But Cocteau, who knew me better, said:

“I don’t dare tell people how you live, rising at seven o’clock, always in bed by nine, no one would ever believe it. And you don’t care about a thing!”

I don’t like eccentricity except in others.

I had the first carpets dyed beige. It reminded me of the soil. All the furnishings immediately became beige. Until the day came when the interior designers begged for mercy.

“Try white satin,” I told them.

“What a good idea!”

And their designs were shrouded in snow, just as Mrs Somerset Maugham’s shop in London became buried in naive innocence and white satin. Lacquerware, Chinese blues and whites, expensively designed rice papers, English silverware, white flowers in vases.

I have never forgotten how astonished Henry Bernstein was the first time he came to avenue Gabriel:

“How lovely it is here!”

(Since then, Antoinette Bernstein’s delicate hand has put on the market this new decorative art which, from the Gymnase theatre to the Ambassadeurs, has made its way to all levels of society.)

Eccentricity was dying out; I hope, what’s more, that I helped kill it off. Paul Poiret, a most inventive couturier, dressed women in costumes. The most intimate lunch party became a Chabrillan2 ball, the most modest tea party looked like something from the Baghdad of the Caliphs. The last courtesans, admirable creatures, who have done so much for the glory of our arts, Canada, Forsane, Marie-Louise Herouet, Madame Iribe, would come by, to the sound of the tango, wearing bell-shaped dresses, with greyhounds and cheetahs at their side.

It was delightful, but easy. (A Scheherazade is very easy, a little black dress is very difficult.) One must beware of originality; in dressmaking, you immediately descend to disguise and decoration, you lapse into stage design. This princess, who is so happy with her green scarf printed in all the signs of the zodiac, will only astonish those who don’t know; as paradoxical as it may seem, it has to be said that extravagance kills the personality. All the superlatives are devalued. An American delighted me with this compliment:

“To have spent so much money without it showing!”

Most of all, I bought books: to read them. Books have been my best friends. Just as the radio is a box full of lies, so each book is a treasure. The very worst book has something to say to you, something truthful. The silliest books are masterpieces of human experience. I have come across many very intelligent and highly cultivated people; they were astonished by what I knew; they would have been much more so if I had told them that I had learnt about life through novels. If I had daughters, I would give them novels for their instruction. There you find all the great unwritten laws that govern mankind. In my region of the country people didn’t speak; they were not taught through the oral tradition. From the serial novels, read in the barn by the light of a candle stolen from the maid, to the greatest classics, all novels are reality in the guise of dreams. As a child, I instinctively read catalogues like novels: novels are merely big catalogues.

“I never give you presents,” Boy Capel said to me.

“That’s true.”

The following day I opened the casket he sent me: it contained a tiara. I had never seen a tiara. I didn’t know where to put it. Should I wear it round my neck? Angèle said to me: “You wear it on your head; it’s for the Opera.”

I wanted to go to the Opera, in the way a child demands to go to a show at the Châtelet theatre. I also discovered that men sent flowers.

“You could send me flowers,” I said to Capel.

Half-an-hour later, I received a bouquet. I was delighted. Half-an-hour later, a second bouquet. I was pleased. Half-an-hour later, another bouquet. This was becoming monotonous. Every half-hour the bouquets kept arriving in this way for two days. Boy Capel wanted to train me. I understood the lesson. He trained me for happiness.

Thus did our happy days pass at avenue Gabriel. I hardly ever went out. I dressed in the evening to please Capel, knowing very well that there would shortly be a moment when he would say: “why go out, after all, we’re very comfortable here”. He liked me among my surroundings, and there’s a girl-from-the-harem side of me which suited this seclusion very well.

The outside world seemed unreal to me; I never got into the habit of moving about in it; like children, I had no sense of social perspective; the mental picture I had of Paris resembled a fifteenth-century panel in its unworldliness. One day, for example, I went to the Chambre; I was in the diplomatic gallery, in the seats reserved for the British Embassy. A young speaker was attacking Clemenceau in a cutting, sarcastic and extremely discourteous tone of voice. My reactions were those of the denizens of the gods faced with this treacherous tirade; I shouted out in a loud voice: “Shame on you, insulting the saviour of the nation!” A commotion, everyone glared at me, the usher stormed up, etc.

Capel brought to Clemenceau’s home, where he was always welcome, the mindset of a businessman who was not hampered either by precedents or hierarchy. He provided simple solutions and good practical advice, which was not always followed. Clemenceau took a fancy to him, in the way that old men do when they are in a hurry; he could not do without him, and he begged him to accept the job of military attaché, which he could arrange quite easily with the British government. Capel, who did not want to fall out with Spears, refused.

When peace came (in those days peace came after war), Capel was killed in a motor accident. I shall not embellish this memory … His death was a terrible blow to me. In losing Capel, I lost everything. “He was much too good to remain among us,” wrote Clemenceau. Boy was a rare spirit, an unusual character, a young man who had the experience of a fifty-year-old, a gentle, playful authority, and an ironic severity that charmed people and won them over. Beneath his dandyism, he was very serious, far more cultured than the polo players and big businessmen, with a deep inner life that extended to magical and theosophical levels. He wrote a great deal, without ever publishing anything; writings that were often prophetic; he had foreseen that the 1914 war was only the prelude to another great conflict that would be far more dreadful. He left a void in me that the years have not filled. I had the impression that, from the beyond, he was continuing to protect me … One day, in Paris, I had a visit from an unknown Hindu gentleman.

“I have a message for you, Mademoiselle. A message from someone you know … This person is living in a place of happiness, in a world where nothing can trouble him any longer. Receive this message of which I am the bearer, and whose meaning you will certainly understand.”

And the Hindu man passed on the mysterious message; it was a secret that no one, other than Capel and I, could have known.

What followed was not a life of happiness, I have to say, however surprising it may seem. What kind of person was I then? After days spent working at rue Cambon, all I thought of was staying at home, similar in that respect to many busy Parisians, too busy to go out in the evening. (That is something that surprises people from the countryside, foreigners, and Americans especially: many French people do not live in the street or in cafés; they live at home.)

If I have known how to make the people around me happy, I don’t have a sense of happiness myself. Scandal upsets me. I am reticent in various ways. Just as I don’t care to leave my home, I don’t like being interrupted, I don’t like changing my ideas. I loathe people putting order into my disorder, or into my mind. Order is a subjective phenomenon. I also loathe advice, not because I am stubborn, but, on the contrary, because I am easily influenced. Besides, people only offer you playthings, medicaments and advice that work for them. Neither do I like to attach myself to anyone, for as soon as I grow fond of someone, I become cowardly (it’s my way of being good); and cowardice offends me. As Colette, in the words of Sido, says so profoundly: “Love is not an honourable sentiment”. I love to criticise; the day I can no longer criticise, life will be over for me.

Others have lived out their youth. Mine was a dream. Reality would no doubt have been better. But I thrive on solitude. I stop winning the game as soon as a gentleman comes up to me and whispers in my ear:

“May I put a thousand francs behind you?”

In that case, I know I have lost beforehand.

I hate people touching me, rather as cats do. I walk straight along the path I have plotted for myself, even when it bores me; I am its slave, because I have chosen it freely. Being as tough as steel, I have never missed a day’s work, and I’ve never been ill; I avoided various famous doctors who forecast different deadly diseases that I have failed to treat. Since the age of thirteen, I have no longer contemplated suicide.

I have made dresses. I could easily have done something else. It was an accident. I didn’t like dresses, but I liked work. I have sacrificed everything to it, even love. Work has consumed my life.

Gradually, rather than be surrounded with friends, I have found it more convenient to surround myself with regular visitors to whom I can freely say: “go away now”.

I gave my time to work alone. M A, whom I had offended, said to me one day:

“You dislike me.”

I replied:

“When did you think I had the time to do that?”

For people think of everything, they imagine every sort of hypothesis, apart from one: that one works and that one takes no notice of them.

2 Named after a celebrated nineteenth-century courtesan. [Tr]