"She made up things.” That’s the not entirely encouraging opener to Axel Madson’s 1990 biography of Gabrielle Chanel.
She was so vigilant about kicking over her peasant tracks that she paid off her brothers to “disappear” and went to her grave lumbered with a tombstone that referred to her as Gabrielle Chasnel, since retrieving and correcting the misspelling legally on her birth certificate would have revealed that she was born in the poorhouse.
Perhaps embellishing her history had become a reflex. Maybe she regarded the truth as a bourgeois banal convention.
Not that Chanel’s exhaustive self-invention has ever deterred the biographers. Madson’s is one of numerous Chanel biographies, and also one of the most readable. There have been musicals, most incongruously a Broadway one starring Katharine Hepburn, whose bony frame and patrician outspokeness appealed to Chanel, but failed to engage with audiences. In the autumn, another book will add to the Chanel canon.
Written by Justine Picardie, a former features editor at Vogue, it tantalisingly promises hitherto undiscovered details of her eventful life. In the meantime, there is Coco Before Chanel, the first of several promised Chanel biopics, this one with Audrey Tautou as a — physically at least — convincing Gabrielle.
Actually Anne Fontaine, the writer and director of Coco Before Chanel, stressed that she didn’t want to produce a standard biopic. Since most biopics are plodding, one can sympathise. Presumably that’s why Fontaine focuses on a relatively small chunk of Chanel’s long (1883 to 1971) and extraordinarily eventful life — the years before she became Chanel the celebrity, grand couturier, socialite and one of the 20th century’s first successful businesswomen.
So what we get is little Gabrielle in a moodily chiaroscuro convent-orphanage where her itinerant market trader father had dumped her and her sister (the nuns’ habits imbued her with an enduring love of black minimalism); Chanel as an ambitious but not notably talented showgirl (her soubriquet Coco came from a vaudeville song about a lost dog) whose day job was working as a seamstress in Moulins, a garrison town in the middle of France; Chanel as the mistress of Étienne Balsan, a local toff who opens a door on to a gentler, more refined life.
No wonder Chanel refused to be shaken off after he’d had his way with her, following Balsan back to his château and staying there long after the two-day invitation he had reluctantly issued expired. Balsan made her hide out of sight (as she later did with her brothers) when his fashionable friends visited.
At Balsan’s Chanel learnt to ride horses like a man, eschewing the uncomfortable precariousness of the side-saddle (cue a life-long passion for androgynous, equestrian tailoring); to despise the overblown, elaborately garnished clothes of fin de siècle society with their constricting whalebone corset and feather-smothered, headache-inducing picture hats. “How can you think in one of those?” she inquires of one of Balsan’s ex-mistresses.
Cue Chanel’s uncorseted, bone-simple sack-dresses and unadorned boaters. She learnt, too, how to hold her own with the smart set, and that she needed to be independent (Balsan, having initially viewed her as a rather embarrassing leech, came to admire, adore and eventually propose to her).
But independence was a way off. In the meantime, the surest route for a poor but pretty girl intent on making her way was to sleep with men. Chanel was too modern to become a grande horizontale (the wonderful French euphemism for high-class kept women); too classy to be an out-and-out hooker. She settled for something in between.
While still with Balsan, she met Arthur (Boy) Capel, a charming Englishman who came from a wealthy coal-mining family and spoke fluent French and, for a while, she probably slept with both. Boy, however, was the one who became the love of her life, even though he married a wealthy society Englishwoman halfway through their love affair. Boy, according to the film, sparks an infatuation with jersey. “I can only get those in England,” he remonstrated with her, half-amused, half-exasperated, as she cuts up another of his shirts to make one of her increasingly commented upon, understated dresses.
Another time Boy whisks her off to a chic coastal resort — probably Deauville where, thanks to Boy’s money, in 1915 she was to open the second of her shops — for a romantic tryst. Cue scene on the beach with Chanel looking almost comically under-dressed in one of her ankle-length, checked shift dresses while the grandes horizontales have to be practically wheeled along the sand in their galleon-like costumes. Cue next scene where Chanel and Boy watch the fishermen in their Breton stripy T-shirts hauling in the morning catch. And lo, another Chanel trope is born.
If the film’s fashion-history interludes sound heavy handed that’s because they often are. Fontaine says that she didn’t want to make a film about fashion, and it’s true for a film about one of the most stylish women of the last century, the clothes, give or take the odd breathtaking black evening gown, are a little on the dour side. By ending the film shortly after Boy is killed in a motoring accident, in 1919, we don’t get to see the bouclé suits, the little black dresses, the suntans, the fake pearls and all the other wardrobe revolutionising stuff that came in the 1920s. Mind you, Chanel is wearing piped satin pyjamas when she waves Boy off on that fatal journey — you’ll want a pair.
There’s an odd little scene at the end where an aged Chanel, perched on the famous staircase in her salon on the Rue Cambon, watches a procession of contemporary models waft past her in the label’s greatest hits (many of them designed by her successor, Karl Lagerfeld) but you need some fashion knowledge to pick up on this. Arguably the film is more interested in Chanel the plucky, ultimately tragic, little anti-Edwardian than it is in Chanel the great symbol of 20th-century modernism.
After Boy, though grief stricken, she began an affair with Stravinsky. Her business, which had begun as an unassuming millinery shop, went from strength to strength. Her witty, sometimes coruscating aphorisms, impeccable, utterly original sense of chic turned her into a celebrity. A stint in Hollywood where Sam Goldwyn paid her, in the depths of the Depression, $1 million a year to make each of his stars — Ina Claire, Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson — look like a lady (whereas, The New York Times dryly observed, most Hollywood costume designers made them look like two ladies) turned her into a very wealthy woman. She was at the heart of an artistic coterie (Cocteau, Diaghilev and Picasso were all friends) and, unprecedented for a “seamstress”, courted by society. A long affair with “Bendor”, the Duke of Westminster, had the gossip pages speculating that she would become the next Duchess of Westminster. She would have too, probably, if she had been able to have a child. Bendor was certainly keen — one night, having waved off all the other guests from his yacht, he had the anchor raised and sailed off with Chanel while a 40-strong orchestra serenaded her. But now in her forties and with a possible botched abortion or two behind her, motherhood — to her eternal chagrin — was not to be.
Through Bendor she ascended the summit of society, learnt fluent English and more importantly — in light of what later happened — befriended Winston Churchill and his wife Clemmie. By the time the Second World War broke out, Chanel had peaked. Elsa Schiaparelli, her great rival and espouser of everything she despised, was fashion’s new lodestar. The deal Chanel had struck with the Wertheimer family in the 1920s to sell perfume under her name left her feeling, as she put it, screwed. In turn, they referred to her as “that bloody woman” and had an in-house lawyer to deal exclusively with the writs that she issued against them. A strike in 1936 (by then she employed 3,000 workers) had embittered her (even though she was notoriously stingy with her models and seamstresses — she expected them to be as dedicated as she was) and in 1940 she closed the door of her salon. “At least I did that,” she would say later, when accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Schiaparelli, meanwhile, carried on selling couture throughout the war — along with Lanvin, Vionnet and the rest of the Parisdesigners. And the Wertheimers, despite being Jewish, managed to transfer their business, for the duration of the war, to an Aryan (not Chanel) and carried on making money selling flacons of Chanel No 5 to the Nazis (who, when the scent ran out, bought the display bottles).
None of Chanel’s rivals however — to public knowledge — had an affair with an SS officer. Hans Gunther von Dinklage’s mother was English, as Chanel would later point out in mitigation. And she was nearly 60 when their affair began. “At that age do you expect me to check a potential lover’s passport?” In Chanel’s mind there was nothing treacherous about their affair: indeed, incredibly, at one point she was dispatched to broker peace talks with her old friend Churchill. She failed. After the war she was arrested, released and narrowly escaped being tarred and feathered. No doubt about it, she was in disgrace and spent the rest of the decade with Von Dinklage in Switzerland.
Her comeback in 1951, wasn’t an unadulterated success either. Dior’s New Look in 1947 had changed everything, not least women’s taste for Chanel’s brand of luxurious, understated sportswear. Admirers with long memories were hopeful that Chanel, who had been off the fashion scene for 15 years, would bring about another style revolution akin to the one that she’d ignited during the First World War. What she gave them was a refined version of what she’d already done. It was a slow burn. But if the reaction to her comeback show was a politely muted indifference, within 12 months her styles were being copied around the world. This time she pioneered a form of ready-to-wear — selling patterns of her couture pieces to American department stores that allowed them to be made for more accessible prices in the US.
None of this is told in Coco Before Chanel — perhaps because the film was made with the collaboration of the house of Chanel, Fontaine was wary of going near the Nazi stuff. So it only partially shows how pivotal a part Chanel played in the liberation of women. This was a woman who spanned one era that included the tail-end of the bustle and another in which the miniskirt came and went. In between she elegantly cleared a path for women to succeed vertically, not just as horizontales. Fontaine didn’t want to make a film about fashion. Instead she’s made one about a love affair. For once, the fashion would have been more interesting.
Story: TImesOnline
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