Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [196]
Gabrielle’s faith—perhaps credo is a better word—that only she knew how to dress women nowadays sounds like bombastic exaggeration. But while the couture of the contemporary stars—Dior, Givenchy, Fath—had made women look and feel beautiful in clothes that were sensational, opulent and romantic, it was also primarily about escape: escape from the realities of modern life. For some time after the war, that was exactly what the world had wanted. Male designers now dressed women either as exquisite archetypes or as experiments in geometry and color, sometimes with little thought for the body underneath. The sheath, the tent, the trumpet, the A line and the H line were executed in lemon yellows, pumpkin oranges and bright sky blue. Buyers began to complain that there was no decisive lead.
However radical and modern these styles appeared, essentially they alluded to a past where woman was simply decorative. Subtly disempowering her, they implied that the realities of the modern life she actually had to maneuver in just didn’t exist. Skirts were sometimes so tight she could hardly walk, and corsets, jackets and dresses had returned to the underlying whalebone structure of woman’s grandmother, squeezing her into the desirable hourglass shape. These clothes were not about comfort. They transformed woman into a beautiful kind of make-believe. Good dressing was dressing up; it was once again about theater. Against this, Gabrielle’s lament “Dressing women is not a man’s job. They dress them badly because they scorn them” at first sounded a dull disgruntled note.
Meanwhile, hearing of her projected return, one of these men, Balenciaga, a gentle and gifted man who was also a great admirer of Gabrielle’s work, declared, “Chanel is an eternal bomb. None of us can defuse her,” and sent her a heart-shaped bouquet. She was unable to let down her defensive shield; sadly, she diminished herself by scoffing at this distinguished admirer.
Gabrielle had spent her early professional life trying to dispel the notion that dress should be a disguise. Her success had enabled her to supplant the great creator of what she called costume, of make-believe—Poiret—as the Parisian couturier par excellence. But this great coup had come about for far more interesting reasons than simply because Gabrielle was a practical realist who didn’t like “costume.” In her own life and designs she was constantly telling her contemporaries that they lived in a “practical” era. This meant fewer servants, more machines, a more urban life for the majority, and all at a faster pace.
Out of this, Gabrielle’s great feat had been to encourage her contemporaries to accept the times in which they lived. Helping to dispel nostalgia and escapist fantasy about the past, she wanted them to accept, embrace and embellish this machine age, which, for all its faults and problems, was the only one they’d got. At their best, Gabrielle’s clothes made women feel enabled and exhilarated about taking part in this new world, while at the same time looking sleek, seductive and elegant in an entirely new way. Many of the elements she introduced and made fashionable have become indispensable to a modern female wardrobe: women with short hair; in raincoats; in trousers both day and night; in swimsuits, with costume jewelry and sunglasses; handbags with shoulder straps; and the rightly ubiquitous “little black dress.”
Gabrielle had promulgated the idea that if a fashion wasn’t taken up and worn by everybody, it wasn’t a fashion but an eccentricity. This had helped bring about her greatest