The Designer: Coco Chanel
Armed with silhouettes, fabrics and colour, Coco Chanel gave women their physical freedom. No wonder the once-humble seamstress decided that she embodied fashion.
At the beginning of the 20th century you knew you had made your mark when powerhouse publications like Harper’s Bazaar tipped the capuchon in your direction. For Coco Chanel it was not so much a case of muted approval but a dizzying gush of infatuation. As early as 1915, the publication declared that, “The woman who hasn’t at least one Chanel is hopelessly out of fashion”. By the end of the 20th century, being name-checked in The Simpsons was a more accurate barometer of cultural cachet. Chanel spanned both.
The nexus of the 1996 episode Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield is a pink and black Chanel suit in the mode of Jackie Kennedy. Bought by Marge on sale for $90, it impresses an acquaintance to such a degree that the Simpsons are invited to join the rarefied and effete Springfield Country Club. To this day, few two-piece ensembles carry more clout. Particularly at country clubs.
You know the Chanel legend: the scrappy seamstress born in a provincial French poorhouse hospital in 1883. One of six impoverished siblings, who went on to redefine 20th century fashion and fragrance. The hardscrabble survivor whose moral flexibility had her at one turn cosying up to the Vichy regime during world war II and at another being pardoned by no less a figure than Winston Churchill.
Six years in a convent school taught her the mandatories of sewing, and she supplemented her income by singing cabaret for cavalry offices. This is just one of the theories behind how Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel shed her birth name and took on the moniker by which she would become known. One of her most popular numbers was Who Has Seen Coco?, and, depending on whom you ask, the name stuck. Others reckon it came from the French word for a kept woman: ‘cocotte’. Still another theory — and most probably the most apocryphal — was that the quality and quantity of cocaine at her gatherings was so superior that it become a ‘coco party’.
One of her strategic dalliances was with the British captain Arthur Edward Capel — one of “two gentlemen”, according to her own account, who “were outbidding for my hot little body”. It was Capel who won out for a time — he fell in love with her in 1908 and hung about for nine years, then financed her first store.
Although she’d been a licensed milliner since 1910, working out of premises at 21 rue Cambon in Paris, it was in 1913 that she opened her first fully fledged boutique in Deauville. From the off she seized on a spectacular idea: upmarket casual clothing for the monied classes who could afford to be sportif, as they didn’t have to work. Yes, mon ami, she pretty much invented athleisure, then gave it a burnished kick along by teaming it with what was once the déclassé calling card of the manual classes: a suntan.
Two years later she opened a Biarritz outpost, and a year after the Great War ended she hung out her shingle as a maison de couture at 31 rue Cambon. Within five years she owned numbers 23 to 31.
This era was the foundation for a body of art wrought in fabric and thread. A style legacy so profound it becomes a case of bouclé and after.
Bursting onto the fashion timeline bookended by enigmatic male icons such as Frederick Worth and then, to a lesser extent, Dior and Saint Laurent, Chanel was a demitasse of febrile energy. Yet according to Colette, one of the great chroniclers of Chanel’s heyday, the fashion designer had something of the bovine about her. In Prisons et Paradis, she wrote: “If every human face bears a resemblance to some animal, then Mademoiselle Chanel is a small black bull. That tuft of curly black hair, the attribute of bull-calves, falls over her brow all the way to the eyelids and dances with every manoeuvre of her head.”
Before we move on to detail some of the key innovations that still inform fashion in the 21st century, it should be pointed out that all of it was achieved with a raging drug habit. And we’re not just talking a well-earned spliff over petit fours. By 1935 the designer was finding veins daily for morphine injections, a habit — all possible meanings intended — she maintained until the end of her life.
Glynis Traill-Nash, the fashion journalist and the host of the In Fashion podcast, says Chanel’s most prescient design innovations came down to three factors: silhouettes, fabrics and colour.
On the first score, it was a case of corsets begone. “Chanel was a literal shape-shifter, freeing women from those waist-nipping torture devices of the Belle Époque silhouette to give them their physical freedom — and look chic at the same time,” Traill-Nash says. “She offered a relaxed, androgynous silhouette and also co-opted men’s clothing items, including trousers and striped Breton sailors’ tops, popularising them for women.”
Borrowing from the garçons was extended to her choice of materials, too. “One of Chanel’s great innovations was co-opting fabrics from the male wardrobe and applying it to that of women,” Traill-Nash notes. “She transformed jersey, traditionally used for men’s underwear, into comfortably chic dresses and separates with some sportif sass. So enamoured was she of the nubbly tweed coats worn by her lover the Duke of Westminster, Chanel later applied the fabric to chic boxy jackets and skirts.”
If that wasn’t enough, Chanel’s coup de grâce was the introduction of the Little Black Dress in 1926. It is surely one of the most enduring fashion staples of all time — endlessly embraced and reworked yet irrevocably entwined with the French designer.
Chanel went to the great maison in the sky on January 10, 1971, breathing her last at The Ritz in Paris. She was working on a new collection that was shown a fortnight later. But perhaps what made her so fascinating was the swagger and venom that accompanied her work like so many pearl chokers. After all, she let it be known that, “I don’t do fashion — I am fashion”. Few would argue that point.
