Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [45]
In all the commentary on Gabrielle the designer, one is told that it was her astounding simplicity that was so radical. However, while bearing in mind that our own perception of past fashion must differ from that of its contemporaries, looking through a cross section of old magazines, Gabrielle’s hats do not stand out as entirely radical. In the elite magazines, one comes across a handful of other designers who were also throwing out the complexity and grandiosity of much contemporary fashion in favor of simplicity. Gabrielle was not alone in thinking “the women I saw at the races wore enormous loaves on their heads; constructions made of feathers and improved with fruits and plumes.”6 The difference was that her designs were more conspicuous because they reflected her own unconventional lifestyle. The other designers were not the live-in mistress of one of the most up-to-date young men in Paris. Gabrielle would say, “In the grandstands they were talking about my amazing, unusual hats, so neat and so austere, which were somehow a foretaste of things to come.”7
Meanwhile, she had stiff competition in quality from the big names in Parisian millinery. The atelier system involved apprentices slowly working their way up under the severe and demanding premières. These years of training equipped the best milliners with great craftsmanship, subtlety of design and an inside knowledge of the trade, none of which Gabrielle possessed. The ambitious young woman Gabrielle had filched from the Maison Lewis, Lucienne Rabaté, grew impatient with Gabrielle’s refusal to take her advice (to make sure, for example, that a woman and her husband’s mistress never met at the Chanel atelier). Instead, Gabrielle squandered attention on a famous courtesan, the kind of undesirable whom Lucienne disdained. Society clients were the prize. Perhaps Gabrielle wasn’t so unaware of the nuances, and simply chose to ignore them. She was defiantly comfortable with the courtesans; she admired them, spoke the same language. At least they “worked” for their living and were not out to make her feel socially inadequate.
Lucienne eventually left the Chanel atelier, a story to be repeated many times with Gabrielle’s employees. No matter how much more knowledgeable than Gabrielle they might be, they accepted her way or they left. Gabrielle’s own unorthodox instincts were, however, to serve her very well. But her intense dislike of selling, or of ingratiating herself with her clients—“The more people came to call on me the more I hid away . . . And I didn’t know how to sell; I’ve never known how to sell. When a customer insisted on seeing me, I went and hid in a cupboard”8—led to her sister Antoinette’s assuming most of this role.
Combining disingenuousness and the capacity for searing truth, Gabrielle was always a bag of contradictions, including the possession of extraordinary confidence and driving fear. Knowing, for example, that if a client found a hat too expensive, she might well reduce it, she kept herself in the background. Her most significant intuition here was the courtesanlike understanding that being enigmatic only made one more fascinating, and she coined the axiom: “A customer seen is a customer surely lost.” Despite the numerous mistakes and the slowness of it all, Gabrielle’s determination and growing sense of priorities were assuring her reputation.
There were also lighter moments. When the salon was empty of clients, for example, she and Antoinette could often be heard singing their hearts out in risqué numbers from