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By Root 543 0

” grisettes were often highly artistic craftswomen. It had always been convenient to see their traditional poverty and appallingly long hours as “dignified for wanting little,” something Gabrielle had experienced and left behind. Although the sporadic prostitution to which many of these “all-powerful” women were forced to turn meant that they were seen as girls of easy virtue, their clients romanticized their hardworking lives and applauded their “charming respectability.” Noted for frequenting bohemian artistic venues and forming relationships with artists or poets, the grisettes were glamorized by men as pretty, lighthearted things with hearts made of gold.16

When hats were still an indispensable element of any fashionable ensemble, preeminent among the grisettes were the milliners. With their clever modification of old styles and constant invention of new ones, they had always been seen as the acme of the working girls. The indefatigable commentator on Parisian women Octave Uzanne lovingly described them as “the aristocracy of the work-women of Paris; the most elegant and distinguished. They are artists. Their ingenuity in design seems limitless.”17 A remarkably accurate description of Gabrielle’s own credentials characterizes the grisette as “a poor girl, perhaps an orphan too well raised to be a simple worker and too little instructed to be a teacher.”18

Meanwhile, in order to achieve real success in the fiercely competitive Parisian millinery trade, Gabrielle was going to need all her doggedness and determination. As she labored, and slowly began to comprehend some of the essentials of running a business, her work began to satisfy her and feed her pride. The actresses and courtesans whom she knew from Royallieu had sometimes brought others to take a look at Gabrielle’s hats at Etienne Balsan’s garçonnière on the boulevard Malesherbes. The demimonde and the stage had been curious to take a look at Etienne’s mistress at work, but now that she lived with Arthur Capel, overcoming their prejudices, some of the more daring young society women, who were dressed by the great couturiers of the day, began to drop in too.

Whatever has been written about Gabrielle’s meteoric rise to fame, in fact, she neither took Paris by storm once launched nor was she a born socialite only waiting to be scooped up and “brought out” by someone sympathetic to her, such as Arthur Capel. Notwithstanding Gabrielle’s precociously advanced character, she did not possess a precocious ability for self-expression, nor was she quick to develop her innate abilities. Indeed, the period in which she learned how to become a designer, a businesswoman and the person she wanted to be had a lengthy gestation. While her life at Royallieu had been her first major step, the time Gabrielle spent working in boulevard Malesherbes and her move to live with Arthur Capel were two of the crucial periods in which she was, effectively, serving her apprenticeship. Through Etienne Balsan and his friends at Royallieu, and then Arthur Capel and his connections, she was growing beyond the limitations of her background and assimilating much about the art of self-presentation. In keeping with the most renowned courtesans, however, Gabrielle would travel beyond these ideas and experiment with the more complex art of reinvention.

But while this young milliner was never short of ideas, as business grew, her ignorance of technique was beginning to hold her back, and when told by Etienne of someone who might help, she quickly made an approach. Young Lucienne Rabaté was a rising star who worked for one of Paris’s most prestigious milliners, Maison Lewis. Seduced by the liveliness of the little Chanel salon, Lucienne brought with her two more of the Maison Lewis’s best assistants. 19 Gabrielle’s designs, her assistants’ skill, and their word-of-mouth promotion meant that business continued gaining pace.

Gabrielle had remained close to her aunt Adrienne, who was still living quietly in Vichy with her lover, the Baron de Nexon. Adrienne was inclusive and generous spirited in her concerns