Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [197]
The period before the war was groping its way toward two related thoughts: an increasing disenchantment with authority and the dystopias created, ultimately, as a result of the machine. Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis had depicted this disenchantment as long ago as 1927. Emerging out of this disillusionment with the modern world, it had been feeling, emotion and the unconscious, as opposed to the rational and the nonfeeling machine, that were explored as never before.
Before the First World War, Gabrielle had intuited that this would be the dilemma at the heart of her era. And rather than shying away from it via nostalgia, she faced it, “saw” it for what it was, and designed clothes accordingly. On into the period of tumult between the two world wars, her devastatingly simple clothes had sometimes seemed a little too grown up. And though she would never have admitted it, it was very difficult not to be seduced by the powerfully escapist climate of thought in the later thirties and, for a while, she lost her way. Her chief première would later say, “When she re-started, it’s really then that she invented, re-invented her style. From my point of view, in 1935 she didn’t have a precise style. It’s when she came back she invented le petit Chanel.”9
Gabrielle had had fifteen years to think things over. Times had changed, but she affirmed what she called “the integrity” of her clothes. Living most of her life at the heart of the narcissistic world of fashion, her puritanical streak led her to say, “I am against fashion that doesn’t last.” While understanding its ephemeral nature better than almost anyone, she had come to the radical belief that fashion’s real purpose was not to redefine the way we look, but to tell us who we are. This was how she believed that it was a lasting, recognizable style that made women look beautiful and was the bedrock of the best fashion.
Meanwhile, Gabrielle had no intention of being left behind in her elegance, and was fascinated by much of what was new. An underlying shift taking place in her trade was reflected in one of the remarkable new synthetic fabrics, easy-care nylon. Gabrielle had foreseen that the days of haute couture were numbered, that the effects were related to the cost of labor and an age that had little interest in the artisan. An instant effect now mattered more to women than how something was made.
Since the war, every couture house had been preoccupied with how to balance its costs. The collections—meaning the sales of models to a wealthy private clientele of a few thousand women—no longer covered anything like the huge costs of running the couture house. (All labor costs had gone up, in particular the traditionally appalling wages of those at the artisanal level of couture, those who actually made the clothes.) Using the cachet of their labels, selling prêt-à-porter was the only path down which the couturiers believed they could go. Both a dilemma and contradiction for Gabrielle, like the rest, she saw that prêt-à-porter was an inevitable part of the future.
Accordingly, through Marie-Louise Bousquet in Paris and Carmel Snow in the States, she cunningly set up a most innovative deal that would fund her new collection. To coincide with its launch, she negotiated “Coco Chanel” ready-to-wear originals in New York’s fashion district, Seventh Avenue. Gabrielle calculated—correctly—that this would stimulate considerable interest around the world. Not only that, when Pierre Wertheimer got wind of her crafty plan,