Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [144]
Something that impressed Gabrielle perhaps the most about the United States, and was to have a lasting effect on her attitudes, was the way she saw clothes sold in the great metropolis of New York. Taking a trip around the most elegant department stores, including Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Saks, she also visited the Seventh Avenue garment-making district, and was fascinated by S. Klein’s, the huge discount store on Union Square.
Samuel Klein had begun, in 1912, with six hundred dollars, and by 1931, he owned the world’s largest women’s-wear store, selling as much as twenty-five million dollars’ worth of clothes every year. This was then a vast sum. Klein made no attempt at aesthetics—the floors were bare, and there were no salespeople. Riffling through crude iron racks, customers selected dresses (all copies of one kind or another) without assistance and tried them on in crowded public dressing rooms. Klein didn’t advertise, relying on rapid turnover and a markup of around 10 percent. If something on the $7.95 racks was there for more than two weeks, it was marked down a dollar. At the end of another two weeks, its price was cut again. Sometimes, dresses were sold for as little as one dollar. Large signs in Yiddish, Armenian, Polish and English read: “Don’t try to steal, our detectives are everywhere.” Today, versions of this type of clothes shopping are common, but in 1933, Gabrielle was amazed.
S. Klein would become part of American mythology, and Gabrielle returned to France, confirmed in her prophesy to her fellow couturiers that copying was inevitable and Klein’s selling policy was a sign of things to come. Refusing to believe this, the couturiers exerted themselves each season to prevent the pilfering of their ideas. And Gabrielle would say, “Fashion does not exist unless it goes down into the streets. The fashion that remains in the salons has no more significance than a costume ball.”4 She said she wouldn’t have been able to realize all her ideas, that she liked seeing them used, and that copying was not the drama for her that it was for other couturiers: “What rigidity it shows, what laziness, what unimaginative taste, what lack of faith in creativity, to be frightened of imitations! The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.”5 (Gabrielle meant she had already moved on.)
By the twenties, Gabrielle had come to believe that haute couture would inevitably be translated “down into the streets.” And her increasingly unfitted and simple shapes could now be replicated relatively easily; they also required less yardage than previous dresses and could be copied in cheaper fabrics. New synthetics, such as rayon, were emulating much rarer textiles, such as silk, and the haute couture copies were being made up at a fraction of the cost. The line of descent began with the unofficial drawings taken—secretly—from the shows. Specialist copying houses made a living out of less costly versions of designer clothes. This idea went down through women’s personal dressmakers until it reached the cheaper, mass-market end of the garment trade and the “woman in the street.”
Following through her thought that she was quite willing for her clothes to be copied, in 1932 Gabrielle presented a fashion exhibition at the Duke of Westminster’s London house in aid of charity. (The two remained on close terms.) The idea was that dressmakers and manufacturers