Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [124]
She would add that “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.”4
If one is searching for what made Gabrielle stand out from her contemporaries, the source of her originality won’t be found by looking for any one particular thing. It lay in a combination of elements, at the heart of which was Gabrielle’s profound instinct for her own period. Her powers of observation, her intuitiveness, her inherited shrewdness as the trader’s daughter—these gave her an unusually alert sense of “what was in the air.” In combination with her intelligence, these qualities made her a remarkable adept at interpreting and presenting their own epoch to her contemporaries.
Gabrielle’s great gift lay in paying ruthless attention to the texture of the moment. If fashion can be said to illuminate or articulate that, then that was Gabrielle. Acting as a barometer, she gave her world what it wanted, just before it recognized the need. Her work was always just that one step ahead because she intuited her times better than most of those around her.
For Gabrielle, the genius of the couturier lay in that quality that kept her so vibrantly alive. This was the ability to anticipate: “More than a great statesman the great couturier is a man who has the future in his mind . . . Fashion is not an art, it is a job. If art makes use of fashion, then that is sufficient praise.” And then she justifies the necessity to follow fashion, the necessity to follow one’s own times: “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.”5
These intelligent pronouncements, some of the best ever made about fashion, also reveal much about Gabrielle’s motivation. They arose from a certain modesty about her own work, and a deep respect for what she believed was the work of the real artist. At the same time, she was never in awe of the great artists of her day. Associating happily with them, she was correct in her belief that in some important sense, she was their peer.
Gabrielle’s sense of invention now led her to develop a rich new seam of creativity. In 1924, she set up her own jewelry workshops, and Comte Etienne de Beaumont—who for some time had had jewelry made to his design by the best artisans, as presents for friends—became her manager. Gabrielle also asked François Hugo, already the director of her jersey factory at Asnières, to make her some jewelry designs. As there was already an extensive demand for replica jewelry, Gabrielle could turn to a wide range of highly skilled artisans, such as Madame Gripoix and her husband, famous costume jewelers, originally for Poiret. Gabrielle’s inspiration was diverse. For all her austerity of design, she loved the exotic, and was also fascinated by Renaissance and Byzantine designs. During the twenties, she added many strings of fake pearls—and great colored stones in the form of necklaces, brooches and pendants—to her understated clothes. And in the late twenties, she even sparked a fashion for asymmetrical earrings: one black and one white pearl. (One of the ways she signaled that her jewelry was imitation was by the unnatural size of some of her stones.)
Carmel Snow, who would become the highly influential editor of Harper’s Bazaar, wrote of her sister Christine’s return from Paris in that decade. When she showed the female members of the family her Parisian wardrobe, her mother was appalled at the Chanel dress made of jersey and decorated with some dubious fur:
Worse than that, Christine festooned her dress with ropes and ropes of artificial pearls. In the first place, no lady wore anything but a single strand of pearls before eight o’clock in the evening.