Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [152]
During the thirties, women’s bodies had gradually reemerged, and the angular tyranny of la garçonne—the flat-chested, Eton-cropped figure of the twenties—was banished. Clothes remained slim line, but had rediscovered the curves of women’s bodies and now followed the line of the bust, the waist and the hips. Smooth, sultry fabrics such as satin were much in vogue, and cutting cloth on the bias, so as to accentuate the curves of the body, became popular. The bodice was often slightly bloused and waists were emphasized with tight belts, while below the fitted hips, skirts were very feminine and billowed out and flowed. Bias-cut clothes were the invention of Madeleine Vionnet, a couturier admired by Gabrielle for her simplified “architectural” styles. She disliked anything distorting the curves of a woman’s body, and her clothes were sought after for accentuating the natural female form. Influenced by Greek sculpture, the apparent simplicity of Vionnet’s styles belied their lengthy process of creation: cutting and draping fabric designs onto miniature dolls before re-creating them on life-sized models.
Gabrielle began using big bows at the neck, and shoulder pads (Schiaparelli is supposed to have introduced them) to exaggerate the smallness of the waist. The hemline had dropped significantly to approximately six inches above the ground, while full-length evening dresses were once again the mode. As an escape from the challenging financial climate of the period, evening wear became more luxurious and sometimes exaggeratedly feminine. Pale satins were the rage throughout the thirties, and Gabrielle succumbed, too, making her own versions of the fashionable white, cream and peachy pinks.
At this time, her suits were made of gently fitting tweeds with contrasting open-necked white shirts, showing cuffs or crisp frills around the neck. Gabrielle’s signature look for the time became these same white collars and cuffs as the contrast on a black dress. Black and white had become the underlying theme of many of her day clothes, with hints of green, red, brown, purple and mustard. From the midthirties, she used the new patterned elasticized fabric Lastex, afterward called latex, an up-to-date version of her favorite, jersey.
Schiaparelli was now making jackets with tightly pulled-in waists and stiffly jutting peplums set over narrow skirts of pin-thin pleats. Gabrielle had come to be regarded by some as the designer for unassertive, self-conscious women whose elegant reserve made them fear, above all else, the epithet “bad taste.” Schiaparelli’s increasingly avant-garde designs were for the woman who saw herself as daring, and who was acquiring a new kind of notice with the designer’s intentional “bad taste.” This group of Schiaparelli devotees were self-assured exhibitionists who loved the attention caused by their red eyelashes, black gloves with red fingernails, pancake hats and blue satin leggings, revealed under the lifted hem of a black evening dress.
The magazines and newspapers luxuriated in the rivalry of these two very different designers, and Vogue reported that the new mode “is neither streamlined nor sentimental, it is casual, bold and chunky.” In 1934, Time put Schiaparelli on its cover and made a definitive statement, saying that Chanel was no longer the leader in fashion. Instead, Schiaparelli was one of “a handful of houses now at or near the peak of their power as arbiters of the ultramodern haute couture . . . Madder and more original than most of her contemporaries, Mme Schiaparelli is the one to whom the word ‘genius’ is applied most often.” Schiaparelli’s surrealist clothes were challenging the notion of good taste,