Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [216]
For many years, the Wertheimers have been well served by a number of gifted employees, the most distinguished of whom have remained with the company for long periods, sometimes for most of their working lives. These include “the eye behind the image,” the late Jacques Helleu, Chanel’s artistic director, who oversaw the changing image of Chanel. While the most famous advertisement for Chanel was Marilyn Monroe’s quip “What do I wear in bed? Why, Chanel N° 5 of course,” Helleu used some of the world’s best photographers, such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, David Bailey, Luc Besson and Ridley Scott, to photograph and film some of the world’s most glamorous women—these included Catherine Deneuve, Candice Bergen, Carole Bouquet, Nicole Kidman, Audrey Tatou and Keira Knightley—in expensive and influential advertising campaigns. With their underlying theme of luxury and mystique, these highly successful promotions fulfilled Alain Wertheimer’s maxim: “The secret of advertising is to make it real and a dream at the same time.”
By the end of the twenties, Gabrielle and Beaux’s first perfume, N° 5, had been so successful it became Gabrielle’s chief source of revenue. In more recent times, Chanel’s chief parfumeur, Jacques Polge, has ensured the continuing quality of this, the fragrance the company understandably refers to as its “treasure.” In his long years at Chanel, Jacques Polge—a gracious and abstracted man, who speaks of the “poetry of fragrance”—has admirably extended the company’s repertoire, with several renowned perfumes of his own. Among them are: Coco Mademoiselle, Chanel N° 19 and Beige.
When Gabrielle told Beaux not to hold back on the costly ingredients for N° 5, she instructed him to make it the most exclusive in the world. Sixty years later, Alain Wertheimer was determined to follow the same principle, and he set out to improve on what had become the perfume’s slightly flagging image of exclusivity. In time, this goal was to prove successful for the perfumes, jewelry and accessories. But for several years after Gabrielle’s death, the dress designers employed to take up her baton made the mistake of trying to emulate her. Admittedly, their task was a daunting one; a friend of Gabrielle’s remarked on the fact that “in the House of Chanel everything went through her, nothing could be conceived, let alone carried out, without her.”2 As it was, Chanel couture appeared to have lost its way.
Since before the Second World War, prêt-à-porter had been a growing challenge to the far greater but more time-consuming skills of haute couture, and after the war, a growing number of couture houses would be forced to close their doors. Following Gabrielle’s return in 1954, she herself had held out, but in 1977, Chanel took on a designer, Philippe Guyborget, to design prêt-à-porter. In 1983, the Parisian-trained couturier Karl Lagerfeld, then at the fashion house Chloé, was persuaded to take over this role. His rapid success led to an invitation from Chanel to design both their haute couture and prêt-à-porter. Speaking of the Wertheimers’ brief, that he “make something of Chanel,” Lagerfeld recalls their telling him that if he couldn’t, they would sell the company.
Young Lagerfeld had arrived in Paris from Germany in 1953 or 1954, intent on a career in fashion. He worked first as an illustrator for fashion houses, was taken on as an apprentice at Pierre Balmain, and then became a couturier at the house of Jean