Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [131]
Now that some of the most distinguished and trendsetting European and American women were Gabrielle’s clients, the socially prominent, utterly fashionable and supremely self-important writer Princess Marthe Bibesco was regularly to be seen wearing Chanel couture. She even had Gabrielle design a wardrobe especially for her airplane travel. Gabrielle may have “worked” for Marthe Bibesco, but her own renown was now such that Bibesco gave a thinly veiled portrait of Gabrielle—albeit ironic and patronizing—in one of her fashionable novels. The couturier became Tote, an autocrat of fashion who
drains the wealth of about ten capitals and of at least three continents . . . All the women who wear Tote sweaters, her flower [the gardenia], her dress or her striped scarf, have twins and would recognize their lookalikes in New York, London, Rome or Buenos Aires . . . Tote’s bicolor scarf had made them coreligionists . . .
One could say that civilization starts and ends with Tote’s customers. Isn’t the product that she exchanges for the most solid currencies in the world quite simply her intelligence? The precious matter, the imponderable, inexhaustible, and forever renewed, with which she floods the world’s markets every six months .21
Gabrielle was a master of the developing art of advertising, and she capitalized on an updated form of self-promotion initiated by the sharper couturiers before the war. The great courtesans and actresses, then the leaders of fashion, had sported both their charms and the couturiers’ new clothes at the races, that most prominent of social platforms. But with the demise of the great courtesans, society women were now fashion’s foremost promoters.
Once again bearing in mind the inordinate vanity of most of her clients, Gabrielle presented a dress here, another one there, to a financially reduced young woman of good family. This publicity was multiplied when Gabrielle invited some of these same young women to act as her mannequins. At one time or another, a number of Gabrielle’s friends—for example, Misia Sert—were also to be found on the list of employees at the rue Cambon. Among her other duties, Misia was a saleswoman—Gabrielle had often witnessed her formidable efforts as agent on her husband’s behalf. Misia was also sometimes a Chanel model, her name good for publicity.
While Cocteau’s con man friend Maurice Sachs would never work in Gabrielle’s salon, she gave him ample funds to assemble her a library at the Hôtel de Lauzan. Sachs misused the large monthly sum she paid him, took a hotel suite, a secretary, a chauffeur, and launched himself on a spree of dissipation. At the same time, he bought less than first-class examples of all that Gabrielle should read. For someone as astute as Gabrielle was, she had allowed herself, untypically, to be duped by this charming and insinuating young parasite.
Europe appeared as if it was moving toward ever more frenzied escape, and the voices of protest were drowned out by those intent on experiencing, at all costs, every possible personal “adventure.” In the vanguard, Paris had the first black jazz musicians; it was in Paris that the blues first became the rage; impromptu parties and clubs were the vogue, and revelers energetically flung themselves into narcotic euphoria and the ecstasy of vigorous dancing until they could barely stand up. And at the heart of Paris was the shimmering Coco Chanel. Georges Auric, of Les Six, recalled that “of course she led a luxurious life, the kind it is difficult to imagine today. There was nothing but the best with her. She received a great deal and lavishly, and