Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [192]
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Return: 1954
In the spring of 1953, Gabrielle traveled to the United States. For three months, she was the guest of Maggie and Egmont van Zuylen in New York. On weekends, they mostly socialized with people Gabrielle already knew. Out on Long Island, for example, she spent time with the photographer Horst. Then there was Mona Williams, later von Bismarck.
Mona had been named by several designers, including Gabrielle, the best-dressed woman in the world; her fame had triggered Cole Porter’s lines “What do I care if Mrs. Harrison Williams is the best-dressed woman in town?” Her husband (who would die that year) was reputedly the wealthiest man in America. Gabrielle had often been a visitor at the Harrisons’ villa on Capri, originally belonging to the emperor Tiberius. Before the war, she and Harrison had had a brief liaison. He had told Gabrielle that his beautiful socialite wife—most famously photographed by Cecil Beaton in Chanel—“is a fashion model, just a model,” and had attempted to capture Gabrielle for himself. She said if he’d asked her a year earlier she would have gone. As it was, “It felt too late.”
Gabrielle’s visit to the States was in part motivated by the prospect of work. Chanel Parfums New York had asked for her assistance in redesigning their new offices. Gabrielle relished the challenge and created a luxurious yet restrained interior. To accompany the group of signature Coromandel screens she had brought with her from France, Gabrielle included another signature: her beige carpets. These worked as soothing background to the honey-colored straw-cloth walls and the warm wood of the antique pink-beige leather-covered French chairs. Around the rooms was a mixture of African bronzes and paintings by Renoir and Henri Rousseau.
In Gabrielle’s years without designing, she almost never spoke of it. Events, however, were leading her toward it once again. While she was in New York, she made a point of being introduced to Alex and Tatiana Liberman, who had escaped France to safety in America in 1940. Liberman was both talented and tremendously ambitious, and had risen to become the art director of Vogue. He recalled how Gabrielle’s business manager, Count Koutouzof, introduced to her by Dmitri Pavlovich, had “brought Chanel to our house, and we became great friends.” This was that same Alex Liberman who had charged his Parisian friends to break off their friendship with von Dincklage, shortly before the war.
Liberman enjoyed Gabrielle’s company: “I loved the Proustian aspect . . . the stories, the legends, and her involvement with Diaghilev and Picasso and Cocteau and Reverdy. She was a constant lesson in refinement . . . Tatiana and Chanel got along well on the surface, although I don’t think there was ever much warmth between them.”1 Quite possibly this was because of Gabrielle’s liaison with von Dincklage, who had deceived Tatiana’s close friend Hélène Dessoffy so badly.
In 1950, Schiaparelli’s sensational style had run its course, and she was obliged to close down her house. Between the First and Second World Wars, some of the most distinguished and influential Parisian couture houses had been directed by women, but several were now gone. Jeanne Lanvin died in 1946; the great Madeleine Vionnet had closed her house in 1939. Admired by Gabrielle, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo, Vionnet had described herself as “an enemy of fashion,” stating that her interest was in expressing a timeless vision of woman.
The postwar designer Christian Dior, who had shot to overnight fame in 1947, would write