Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [50]
As the very first mournful notes of the bassoon melody rose up, some in the audience began to whistle. But by the time the weirdly dressed dancers appeared, with their shivering and shaking and jumping up and down in ugly and angular poses, there were cries of disapproval. Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s staunch followers loyally cheered, but many others booed at this “grotesque caricature.” People began to argue. Some apparently exchanged punches, a society woman spat in a man’s face and it is said that a duel was fought the next morning. It was reported that there was pandemonium.
Over the years, many told their memories of that heady night. Comparing several of the “memories,” however, one finds a mass of contradictions. It turns out that not only did almost everyone remember inaccurately, some of those who “recalled” the hysteria of that night weren’t even there. But the audience had become as significant a part of the performance as the dancers and the musicians. They were part of its “living elements,” and their response was as important to the meaning of this art as the intentions of those who introduced it. This new art had indeed “transcended reason, didacticism, and a moral purpose” and become “provocation and event.”7
While Gabrielle would later admit that she hadn’t understood much of The Rite’s first performance as a “living element” of the ballet, one of those who would contribute to the overthrow of much in life and art seen as outmoded, it seems most fitting that she was present.
Meanwhile, her own so far modest contribution to the avant-garde was about to become more prominent. For some time, Gabrielle had interspersed her wardrobe with her own designs, but by 1912, she was consolidating her style. This is reflected in the earliest known dress probably designed by her: an utterly simple sheath of dark velvet set off by a collar of delicate white petals. It was made in 1913 for Gabrielle’s friend Suzanne Orlandi, mistress to Etienne Balsan’s friend Baron Foy. Gabrielle would become fiercely protective of her reputation for originality and was neither to leave any record of her earliest ideas about clothes nor speak about her influences. What she did talk about was motivation, and she famously said, “My work came about as a reaction to my times.” But while admitting her admiration for the designer Vionnet, Gabrielle would play down the influence of another designer, Paul Poiret. Perhaps more even than the clothes, Gabrielle observed his example in self-presentation and the way one ran a business. Yet she would also understand her century better than Poiret and consequently go far beyond him.
In 1911, Poiret was a charismatic young couturier (just four years older than Gabrielle) who had provoked outrage with the introduction of his harem pants. Seen as a perilous development, they were thought to challenge male supremacy and encourage the women’s movement. Nonetheless, by 1914, Poiret would hold sway as one of the most radical designers in Paris.
He had trained with the great Jacques Doucet, himself a product of the extravagant nineteenth-century Second Empire and a fierce advocate of taste and discrimination. Doucet’s rue de la Paix atelier was only a few doors away from that of his own mentor, Charles Frederick Worth, the first couturier of them all and still the dominant figure in the fashion industry at the end of the nineteenth century. Like Worth, Doucet amassed a large library and works of art, including Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, bought directly from the artist. Doucet believed the watchwords for couture were luxury and distinction rather than practicality and function. Young Poiret had set out to emulate his master.
At first, Poiret gained notoriety with dresses and costumes for famous