• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 712 0

way outside any classical definition of ballet, whose traditional siting had been in the unreal worlds of myth or fairy tale. It wasn’t simply that these two agents provocateurs, Diaghilev and Cocteau, had freed ballet and produced a spectacle based on “the powerful charm of the pavement.” As in Parade, they had once again created a new and entirely modern kind of theatrical performance. They had made another firm step in the development of modernist art, based above all on aspects of contemporary life. In this context, it was entirely appropriate that the couturier Coco Chanel, who was synonymous with modernity, should be the person who designed the ballet’s costumes.

Integral to Diaghilev’s obsession with every aspect of his company’s performances was his fierce perfectionism about his dancers’ costumes. As a result, during the twenties, Gabrielle and Misia Sert became his extra “eyes.” Acting in a sense as superintendents of taste, they had the last word on the “correctness” of colors, lengths, decoration and the general design of the costumes. And following Gabrielle’s first mistakes, most important, they asked the question, did the costumes “work” in movement?

Between 1922 and 1937, Gabrielle designed the costumes for several more Cocteau productions, including Orpheus, Oedipus Rex and The Knights of the Round Table. She was also invited to make the costumes for several films, such as Jean Renoir’s famed La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) in 1939. Renoir’s biting satire of French upper-class society, evoking the country’s disjointedness in the lead-up to the Second World War, is regarded by many as one of the greatest films ever made. Gabrielle could present herself as opinionated in the extreme, yet she spoke very little of the work she carried out for the theater and films. Over the years, interviewers would ask about some of the remarkable performances for which she had made the costumes, an activity so different from her accustomed working life. But Gabrielle remained frustratingly unforthcoming, hardly referring to the illustrious company present at opening nights or to her involvement in these important works of art. When asked later about the first night of Le Train Bleu, for example, she wanted only to recall the artists. By implication, when it came to art, for Gabrielle, high society didn’t matter.

21

At the Center

For Gabrielle there was an absolute distinction between the skills and technique of the artisan, as opposed to the workings of an artist. While she herself was always staunchly opposed to calling herself an artist, one also remembers she was a woman of paradox.

As the twentieth century wore on and the distinction between artist and craftsman became ever more blurred, Gabrielle found this mistaken and pretentious, insisting ever more vehemently that she was only an artisan, a dressmaker and not an artist. She declared that fashion should be discussed “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.”1 She insisted that while couture may have an awareness of art, it is only a technique, a business. Whatever the success of their creations, Gabrielle believed that did not “justify couturiers persuading themselves or thinking of themselves—or dressing or posing—as artists.”2

She drew a clear distinction between craft and art. And while, paradoxically, Gabrielle had a good deal of the artist in her, she singled out the couturier’s instinct for their times:

Creation is an artistic gift, a collaboration of the couturier with his or her own 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 . . .

Fashion should express the place, the moment. This is where the commercial