Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [163]
Despite the occupation, ten or so of Gabrielle’s fellow couturiers had remained open to carry on their work. Shortages of all materials, which would continue throughout the war, meant they were struggling to bring out their new collections. Schiaparelli and Mainbocher would go to America; Edward Molyneux fled to London. For those who stayed, the shows were attended by some French women, German embassy staff and some of the German command. They escorted their wives, including Emma Goering and Suzanne Abetz, wife to the man the Reich called the German ambassador. Following lengthy and delicate negotiations, Lucien Lelong, president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, dissuaded the German command from moving the entire Parisian couture business to Vienna and Berlin. He argued that Parisian fashion could be made only in Paris. He also succeeded in keeping 80 percent of couture’s workforce, against constant demands for extra labor from German war industries intent on rapid expansion. Lelong even obtained special dispensations for the couturiers to buy costly fabrics without using their ration tickets. But a change in their clients was quickly noticed by all the fashion houses. Lelong would say:
A new class of rich person, black marketeers and collaborators, thanks to their wives, provoked a sudden change in the dress world. The old wealthy and aristocratic clientele was . . . replaced by the butter, egg and cheese people [the BOEF], the spoiled darlings of the war. These nouveaux riches caused a deluxe ready-to-wear, unknown to the public before 1939 . . . and the new clientele brought an enormous success to this fashion, which was not high fashion but imitated it very well and was cheaper into the bargain.1
Gabrielle would describe this period as “singularly lacking in dignity” it was “a filthy mess.”2
The races at Longchamp opened again, and German officers, who had free entry to the enclosure, mixed with Parisian society. A good section of this society chose to “believe” in the propaganda regarding Franco-German cultural exchange. Much was made by those Germans and the Germanophile French of the fellowship of all artists and the meaninglessness of national boundaries. And the “gentlemanly” German officers began to be welcomed into the reemerging salons. The socialite Marie-Louise Bousquet, for example, maintained her renowned Wednesday lunches, keeping her traditionally good table well furnished with black-market provisions. To her Wednesdays, she invited a variety of the German command, including the propaganda director, Gerhard Heller, and the equally cultivated novelist officer Ernst Jünger. (After the war, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were happy to be found at Marie-Louise Bousquet’s lunches.)
Ernst Jünger found Hitler and the Jews equally distasteful, and socialized with Vichy-sympathizing Parisians, including the writer Paul Morand, who had wasted no time in offering his services to the Vichy government. He was for a time the film censor and, later, Vichy’s ambassador to Romania. Misia Sert’s ex-husband, José Maria, had returned to her after his young wife’s death, but on his visits to Madrid, was conducting an affair with the wife of the German ambassador. Throughout the war, Sert’s connections were unclear, but he always managed to have good food, entertained well and was untroubled by the inclusion of Germans at his gatherings. Another salon where conquerors and Parisians mixed freely was that of the American heiress Florence Gould.
While several writers, such as André Gide, André Malraux and Colette, chose to remain in the south, beyond the occupied zone, Cocteau had hurried back to Paris, saying that “Miracles are happening everywhere, and I am intensely curious.” He wrote to his fellow opium-addict artist friend Christian Bérard, “I find these