Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [127]
How could the skilled craftsmen and women who had made buttons, braids, ribbons and lace, and woven beautiful textiles of all kinds by hand, and Gabrielle’s premières, who used these things in their painstaking handiwork, compete with the speed and the cheapness of the mechanization of almost every conceivable task? Gabrielle’s was an empire that, by the time she died, would have become a corporate one, and that, in the years since her death, has developed into something representative of truly modern times: a global corporation. Gabrielle’s name has become a corporate identity.
In the course of 1924, Ernest Beaux developed another perfume for Gabrielle. They called it Cuir de Russie. Two years later, this was followed by Bois des Iles and, in 1927, another one, Gardénia, was being promoted. Yet despite the Wertheimers’ publicity department promotions, the success of these perfumes would be nothing compared to Chanel N° 5. Even taking into account the fact that the lion’s share of the profits went to the Wertheimers, by far the largest part of Gabrielle’s wealth would soon depend upon this one perfume. Over the years, the company the Wertheimers named Les Parfums Chanel would promote Gabrielle’s perfume with a publicity campaign of increasing sophistication. Here, like Gabrielle, the prodigy Raymond Radiguet had shown his flair for the spirit of the age when he prophesied, “I speak of advertising . . . In publicity, more than anywhere else, I see the future of the sublime, so threatened in modern poetry.”
During the war, the material damage sustained by France had been staggering. But afterward, while there wasn’t an economic revolution, new activities, such as car production, helped boost the economy, and during the twenties, life for many carried on improving. At the same time, the structure of mainstream French society, and its attitudes, remained effectively the same. What needed to change? There was a boom. And as part of postwar “reconstruction,” a traditionalist and government drive called for the preservation of home and hearth, and for women to have more babies.
The New Woman, however, was becoming more conspicuous, spent less time by the French hearth and was producing alarmingly fewer babies. Not only was she infiltrating previously male preserves, but by the midtwenties, at least, she was also wearing versions of Gabrielle’s straight-up-and-down dresses, camouflaging bosom and hips and cutting off her hair. This way she earned for herself the sobriquet la garçonne; in the English-speaking world, she became the “flapper.”
In 1922, Victor Margueritte’s racy, bestselling novel La garçonne, from which the above name derived—introduced a modern young woman personifying the social, intellectual and technological changes now beginning to shape bourgeois urban life. Projected in the mass media leading an entirely altered life, the “emancipated” woman drove motor cars, flew planes and was a dashing young thing entirely in control of her life. Attractive, self-assured, often quite aggressive, she was also independent and out for adventure. Always on the move, she traveled unescorted and succeeded in some newly invented career. Slicking down her short hair, she smoked, wore trousers, and even men’s suits. And while ambiguity of all kinds became a highly visible aspect of society, the majority of those women dressing in confrontational ways were actually only practicing a “visual language of liberation” rather than the real thing.
For most, “emancipation” meant little more than what they did with their appearance. It was only a small number of women, like Gabrielle, whose lives really were entirely altered. In Paris, these included Colette;