Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [129]
Wearing the new fashions—copies of Gabrielle’s fashions—kept the idea of female identity in the forefront of people’s minds. While the debate in France was intensely political, women’s short hair and short dresses became central to the cultural mythology of the whole era. Provoking outrage, frustration, envy and admiration, the way Gabrielle and her followers looked provided a powerful visual language for the upheaval and change that everyone saw around them.13 And while, for most women, their clothes were as yet a fantasy of liberation, fashion itself was a powerful language of signs, heralding the arrival of a new world.
While Gabrielle’s dresses may have been decorated, they were also not much more than sheaths, where any sign of the waist was long gone. Hips and busts were effectively banished, and those corsets must indeed have been in demand. Waists were firmly tethered to the hip; at the most, women’s designs were only semifitted, and Gabrielle’s particularly versatile sporty looks were ever more popular and much copied. Vogue would write that her “dresses, which met the needs of the time so well and which made those who were wearing them look so young, earned their creator worldwide fame.”14
Perhaps the most legendary of Gabrielle’s designs was the one known as the little black dress. It was described as “little” because it was discreet. Quite how it came about is unclear, but Gabrielle’s own version of events was told later. One evening in 1920 she was at the theater. Looking at the women all around her in their flashy, gaudy colors, she said she was driven to say to her companion, “These colors are impossible. These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black! So I imposed black . . . Black wipes out everything else around it. I used to tolerate colors, but I treated them as monochrome masses. The French don’t have a sense of blocks of color.”15
Forestalling the criticism of these ideas, Gabrielle said that it was wrong to think that dressing women in black removed all originality from them. Rather, she believed that dressing alike apparently helped reveal women’s individuality. While wearing black earlier herself, in her 1926 collections Gabrielle introduced a number of utterly simple day dresses, all in black. A color traditionally used for uniforms of various kinds, or during periods of mourning, black was on the whole considered unseemly if worn by women on other occasions. But Gabrielle had already made long and beautiful black evening dresses at least as early as 1917.
Now she reinterpreted and restyled the color in the most elegantly spare shapes. She was the first to show black dresses to be worn at any time of day or night, and later said, “Before me no one would have dared to dress in black.” For daytime, the dresses were in wool or Moroccan crepe; for evening, they were in luxurious materials, such as silk crepe, satin and velvet. While their basic structure remained deceptively simple, they were counterbalanced by decoration, such as jeweled and rhinestone-decorated belts or white collars, cuffs and much jewelry. Sometimes Gabrielle used the striking flourish of a white camellia—made from various materials—pinned against a black dress. (Eventually, she loved to have them pinned in the hair.)
While Gabrielle’s black designs were to become universally adopted, the initial response to their elegant economy of line was not unanimously positive. American Vogue, however, correctly predicted that the little black dress would become “a sort of uniform for all modern women of taste.” Its very “simplicity” would overcome the fear women had hitherto labored under, of being seen in the same dress as another woman, reflecting an essential