Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [205]
After Gabrielle’s long hiatus, despite her seventy-one years, in 1954, her thirst for work seemed as unquenchable as ever. And as had been her custom, she drove her models and her staff as much as she drove herself almost to distraction. If those who worked for her were not strong enough, or didn’t have enough respect for her, they left. It would be said that Gabrielle ruled by intimidation: “As to really contradicting her . . . only her friend Maggie [van Zuylen] . . . dared to throw a glass of beer in her face; for the rest, her employees were too afraid of her.”19 Gabrielle’s small court—that kind that typically grows up around a couturier—of course had its sycophants, but all those who worked for her did not fear her. Like her friends, several had made the decision to accept her for what she was.
When the French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes wrote his essays on the language of fashion,20 he nailed Gabrielle as a classic rather than an innovator. While also declaring her a rebel, he described her recent declaration of war on the other designers: “It is said Chanel keeps fashion from falling into barbarism and endows it with all the classical virtues: reason, naturalness, permanency, and a taste for pleasing rather than a taste for shocking.” Barthes described Gabrielle’s unwillingness to take part in the annual fashion “vendetta,” where what has gone before is now dead. However, while his critique of Gabrielle is a good one, in the past she had been an innovator, and “reason, permanency, [and] a taste for pleasing rather than shocking” are not the attributes of a rebel.
By 1964, with the advent of a new designer, Gabrielle did indeed feel that barbarism was walking the streets. André Courrèges was a former cutter at Balenciaga and had created a sensation with his “modernist” clothes. Breaking with tradition, both in his styles and his use of fabric, such as plastic, he called his 1964 collection Space Age and had his mannequins dancing “the jerk” as they moved down the runway. In 1965, Courrèges, along with Mary Quant in Britain, would claim to be the inventor of the miniskirt. Soon Gabrielle’s favorite bête noire, Courrèges, refused to accept her criticisms and said, “I am the Matra, the Ferrari, Chanel is the Rolls-Royce: functional but static.” Courrèges’s challenge to Gabrielle’s notion of dress was genuinely original. And she sensed that his style was closer to the new spirit of the age than her own was.
Gabrielle felt further threatened when young Jeanne Moreau first “defected” to Pierre Cardin, whose work Gabrielle loathed; she even went so far as to live with him. Gabrielle broke with her young friend.
In May 1968, when student protest swept the world, for a month Paris was in chaos. And, just as de Gaulle had sounded out of touch to those political reformists, so Gabrielle now sounded out of date to many of her fellow couturiers, intent on their own rebellion. They were young and couldn’t help but be affected by the antiestablishment youth culture of the late sixties. Raw, immature, naive, self-absorbed and idealistic as it was, their rebellion was also expressed in the new street style of the young, deliberately breaking the old rules of elegance and luxuriating in a kind of theatrical “antidressing.”
Gabrielle cried out in protest, “They like the street. They want to shock. They try to be amusing. For me fashion is not amusing,” and she repeated her mantra: “The eccentricity should be in the woman not the dress.” Gabrielle’s own obsession with youth—she hated growing older—as a vital, creative thing was in opposition to what she saw as the destructive force abroad in the late sixties. But no matter how much the old lady thundered, the young were set against their elders and their elegance; it was anathema.
As Gabrielle grew more defensive about her competition from the young, she didn’t confine herself to pouring scorn on Courrèges alone. In 1969, for example,