Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [207]
Editing the interview, Chazot was in a torment of indecision, until eventually he decided he would cut nothing. Bringing along his friend, the rebellious and already iconic writer Françoise Sagan, they watched it with Gabrielle. Her trust in Chazot had been well placed; she pronounced it “very good.” Having been rather slow off the mark, the French television service now realized the interview’s potential and readjusted their programming schedule with it in a prime slot.
The response was tremendous. Chazot received all kinds of filming offers, and Gabrielle was gratified to receive a huge quantity of approving mail.
Meanwhile, the younger designers, irritated by Gabrielle’s lack of indulgence over their work, were unable to see that much of their “rebellious decade” was simply a mass-culture version of the cataclysmic changes Gabrielle had experienced with that small and extraordinarily creative group of people either side of the First World War. And while her complaints were not all justified, essentially they were more farsighted. And at the heart of her complaints was something more significant than an irritable old woman’s aversion to change.
Gabrielle had not been uniquely responsible for changing women’s appearance during the first decades of the century. While undoubtedly one of only a handful of initiators of a new, easy kind of female glamour, Gabrielle was different in that she herself lived the emancipated life her clothes were made for. Talking of having “liberated the body,” she had “made fashion honest.” More than any other designer, Gabrielle had been responsible for the democratization of fashion, making it more accessible to the majority than ever before. Her own radical life and work had gone hand in hand with the rise of political democracy, yet as a fashion designer, she had overcome the dilemma this created for the couturier: how to be exclusive. An American’s compliment, that she had “spent so much money without it showing,” delighted her.26 Of all the couturiers, Gabrielle had walked the finest line in dressing the rich as the poor, in other words, with simplicity.
While often contradictory, the source of Gabrielle’s reaction to the sixties was that she had never been interested in attacking culture. She had espoused a different—and in some ways more serious—kind of liberation for women. Gabrielle was now old, and critical, but she also understood that jeans (originally workwear) were subtly different from her appropriation of fishermen’s tops or her lover’s polo shirt for women. Their new glamour was based upon living more emancipated, modern lives. In Chazot’s interview, for example, her point was serious when she said, “I do not approve of the Mao style; I think it’s disgraceful and idiotic . . . the idea of amusing oneself with such games, with such formidable countries, I think it’s dreadful.”27
When it came to miniskirts, while Gabrielle’s objections revealed her age, she was also capable of saying, “I have no right to criticize, because [the time] isn’t mine. Mine is over . . . Frequently I feel so alien to everything around me. What do people live for now? I don’t understand them.”28 And then she made one of those typical comments, requiring a moment’s trouble and reflection to understand, and revealing her comprehension of those tumultuous times : “I’m very well aware that everyone is out of date.”29
Age had some time ago crept up on the woman who had remained so perennially youthful, and her arthritis and rheumatism now grew more painful. To counteract the pain, and “inconvenience,” she swallowed quantities of vitamins, painkillers and sedatives. Then, despite her doubts and apprehension about the sixties, and while she had enough self-knowledge to be able to say, “Sometimes I realize I’m ridiculous,” she continued, driven by work. Gabrielle had understood long ago that work is vital to who we are. However, setting aside the striving involved in creativity, work consumed her, was her raison d’être. In the process, it had become