Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [128]
If in reality, however, the scope for most French women had expanded little, in essence, what they wore was announcing to their menfolk, “I am your equal.” A popular song from the twenties articulates well the anxieties these loosened boundaries were provoking:
Hey, hey, women are going mad today;
Hey, hey, fellers are just as bad, I’ll say.
Masculine women, feminine men,
Which is the rooster, which is the hen?
It’s hard to tell ’em apart today, hey, hey.
Victor Margueritte described the heroine of his La garçonne, Monique Lerbier, as the incarnation of “woman’s right to sexual equality in love,” and her premarital erotic encounters, including those with women, provoked a public outcry. Margueritte saw bobbed hair as “a symbol of independence, if not power.”10 Meanwhile, Antoine, the Parisian hairdresser who was a pioneer of the short haircut, joked that in creating the bob, he had avenged Samson by depriving Delilah of her hair and hence her power to charm men. Discussion and argument raged back and forth, fathers disowned short-haired daughters, and there was more than one case of murder. The socialite Boni de Castellane complained that “women no longer exist; all that’s left are the boys created by Chanel.”
Yet in this age of confusion, Gabrielle herself believed she was in less doubt about what it was she was doing. Confident in her femininity, she didn’t feel she was in competition with men. What she wanted was scope to act equally. This of course involved competition but, for her, it didn’t mean trying to become the same. In years to come, she would make one of her breathtakingly dismissive statements reinforcing this attitude: “Women who want to look like men, men who want to look like women are both failures.”
The stereotype of the flapper was that of an apolitical consumer, hell-bent on having a good time. A number of recent historians have seen Gabrielle and her kind as part of an emergent modern consumerism exploiting women in the pursuit of profit.11 Although this is far too simplistic, “emancipation” was indeed at times rather illusory. In 1923, Vogue described the hours “one poor woman” spent at the gym and the masseuse, and the pills and “rubber girdles” used to attain “an ideal shape.” Another article would say “how seductive is the straight line of our winter dresses, how revealing of the sveltnesse of the female silhouette,” but then admitted that this was pretty much impossible to acquire without some kind of corset: “There was no other way of achieving the desired silhouette.”
One honest contemporary writer declared that there was a “tyranny of liberty in current fashion” because of the desperate measures to which women were driven, and that “the effect of extreme elegance . . . hardly leads someone to suspect it took two hours to achieve, so much is dependent on the triumphant appearance of simplicity.” 12 This could well be a description of the amount of time we know Gabrielle took over her own preparations to dress. Our commentator did, however, also say that if contemporary dress was an “illusion of freedom,” freedom was in fact the objective of the new look. But if a woman’s bobbed hair and short dresses were not as “liberating” as they were made out to be, and many women’s lives were most unliberated, why did young women take to these fashions with such enthusiasm?
Perhaps the answer lies in the idea that in appearing liberated through what one wore, it gradually became a genuine aspect of personal emancipation. Wearing short hair and short dresses, women were able to project a fantasy of their ideal, liberated