Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [203]
Another proof of this hidden power is the way women took the Chanel look to their hearts and bodies. It is true that the press, particularly Vogue, spread the word . . . that Chanel was back designing after fifteen years, but left to the press, the rebirth of the Chanel look would have lasted at the very most two seasons. By the very laws of change, the press, the manufacturers, and the stores, would not have dared to go on promoting this look season after season, if women hadn’t found Chanel completely to their taste and stubbornly demanded more of her type of clothes.11
Meanwhile, Gabrielle continued beguiling the New Yorker reporter with her undimmed allure. Flicking the ash off the last drags of her cigarette, she said:
As for myself, I am not interested any more in 1957. It is gone for me. I am more interested in 1958, 1959, 1960. Women have always been the strong ones in the world. Men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them in her arms as an infant. Women must tell them always they are the ones. They are the big, the strong, and the wonderful. In truth, women are the strong ones . . . It is the truth for me.12
Having first said she was “too tired, too bored,” Gabrielle agreed to attend a dinner given for her by the famously suave and yet eccentric Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, whom she had known since the thirties. Gabrielle would only attend on condition that the evening would be intimate and she wouldn’t feel obliged to speak. Accompanied by someone Vreeland described as a “very charming Frenchman,” once there, Gabrielle spoke without ceasing. Halfway through the evening, she asked if “Helena” could join them. When Helena Rubinstein arrived, she and Chanel withdrew to Vreeland’s husband’s study. After some time, their hostess went in to see if they were all right:
They hadn’t moved . . . and stayed in there the rest of the evening talking about God knows what . . . They never sat down. They stood—like men—and talked for hours. I’d never been in the presence of such strength of personality . . . Neither of them was a real beauty. They both came from nothing. They both were much richer than most of the men we talk about today being rich.13
While saying that Gabrielle had “an utterly malicious tongue,” Vreeland also had great admiration for her, and added, “But that was Coco—she said a lot of things. So many things are said . . . and in the end it makes no difference. Coco was never a kind woman . . . but she was the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”14 Vreeland mixed with some of the most interesting people of her day.
Gabrielle had told the New Yorker reporter, “I am not young, but I feel young. The day I feel old, I will go to bed and stay there. J’aime la vie! I feel that to live is a wonderful thing.” And over the coming seasons, this youthful septuagenarian made strapless evening dresses of embroidered organdy and quantities of others in satins, chiffons, brocades, velvets, lamés and some of the most avant-garde, man-made fabrics, plain and printed Then there was the lace Gabrielle used to such effect for effortlessly chic and alluring below-the-knee cocktail dresses, or a longer, black-lace, boned, strapless sheath, with a trumpet-shaped skirt over stiffened, black-net petticoats.
As the fifties wore on, and her success continued, in each collection there were always the variations on the suit: these were soon selling more than seven thousand a year. More than twenty years later, Diana Vreeland would say, “These post-war suits of Chanel were designed God knows when, but the tailoring, the line, the shoulders, the underarms, the jupe—never too short . . . is even today the right thing to wear.”15
And a new generation of the best-dressed women in the world was wearing Chanel Nº 5, once more the most popular perfume in the world. Not only Gabrielle’s old friend Marlene Dietrich and other luminaries, such as Diana Vreeland, but also younger celebrities wanted to become her clients.