Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [151]
24
Schiap Had Lots of It but It Was Bad
Schiaparelli was a talented, eccentric Italian aristocrat who had begun by making sweaters and skirts. These were a great success. While also making clothes lauded for their understated elegance, Schiaparelli was soon to become better known for her witty and outrageous designs. From the mid-to late thirties, these were often done in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. (In this period, Dalí was also to work with Gabrielle, Cocteau and Balanchine on various stage projects.) As a mark of Schiaparelli’s success, her work graced the cover of British Vogue for Christmas 1935. The young British photographic star Cecil Beaton took pictures of the much-admired Indian princess Karam of Kapurthala wearing Schiaparelli evening saris, and shot a series of her clothes with surrealistic backdrops. Schiaparelli was flamboyant where Gabrielle was understated, and produced a series of pieces in a color she called “bright, impossible, impudent, becoming, life-giving, a shocking color, pure and undiluted.” This “shocking color” was the famous pink.
Anita Loos, of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes fame, Mae West and Daisy Fellowes were some of Schiaparelli’s best-known early clients. Having triumphed by establishing herself on the magnificent place Vendôme, just around the corner from Gabrielle at rue Cambon, Schiaparelli would say, “Chanel launched sailor sweaters, the short skirt, I took her sweater, changed the lines, and there, Chanel is finished!” Gabrielle believed the idea implicit in Schiaparelli’s most daring clothes—that the world is amusing, absurd and futile—would not last. But with Schiaparelli’s “fish-shaped buttons, monkey hats, fox-head gloves and skunk coats,” her outrageous, surreal nonsense was a perfect reflection of the times. Bettina Ballard perceptively observed that
She branched out into the couture to glorify the hard elegance of the ugly woman . . . Hard chic made her exactly right for those extravagant years before World War II. Shocking pink . . . was a symbol of her thinking. To be shocking was the snobbism of the moment and she was a leader in this art . . . Paris was in a mood for shocks, and Elsa Schiaparelli could present hers in well-cut forms and with an elegance no one could deny.1
Pre–First World War, shock tactics had already become part of the raison d’être of artistic modernism. For the postwar Dadaists and surrealists, to shock was virtually orthodoxy.
Schiaparelli not only surrounded herself with artists, just as Gabrielle had, she also persuaded them to work with her on her creations. (Gabrielle believed that art came before artisanship and, when working with artists, put herself very much in second place.) Schiaparelli was forever pushing her artists to experiment, the more suggestively and outrageously, the better. Bettina Ballard quoted the great couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga commenting wryly that Schiaparelli “was the only real artist in the couture,” which didn’t mean that he thought that art and dressmaking were good companions.2 These, of course, were Gabrielle’s sentiments exactly. Balenciaga was one of the only colleagues for whom she had real respect.
Gabrielle was on the defensive, but her understanding of fashion was profound. And she now declared that novelty was not necessarily modern. She went further, saying that superficial seasonal changes were not what she offered. What she offered was “style,” and that wasn’t the same as fashion. When Gabrielle objected to Schiaparelli’s work, she was accused of going against that very avant-garde couture she had led since before the First World War. She retorted that her own modernity derived from placing herself in the classic tradition and understanding something more fundamental about her times. At her best, Gabrielle had created a style that was almost “beyond fashion.” In creating clothes for a century whose art had lost much of its elitist character, her underlying theme had been inspired