Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [56]
When Paris had almost been cut off by the encircling German army, Joseph Joffre was unable to ensure the safety of the capital and advised the government to retreat to Bordeaux. At that point, up to a third of Paris fled too, and Deauville was once again packed with people as the haut monde flocked to the safety of the hotels and their villas. A number of country properties had been occupied or destroyed in the wake of the advancing German army. One of these was Etienne Balsan’s château, Royallieu, occupied by German staff officers. Retaken during the Battle of the Marne, the Royallieu barracks was then converted into a frontline hospital.
Before Arthur left for the front, he had instructed Gabrielle to remain in Deauville; his instinct was that she should keep her boutique open. Meanwhile, luxury, extravagance, conspicuous consumption of any kind suddenly didn’t seem appropriate, and practicality became the order of the day. A number of the socialites remaining in Deauville volunteered at the hospital, and a pared-down, unostentatious wardrobe became a practical necessity. Yet while many of the socialites claimed they had “lost everything,” they also spent that strange summer living a life as luxurious as the great resort was able to provide. Unaware that this season was the last of an époque, intimations of change nonetheless led many a wealthy woman to Gabrielle’s door to equip herself with those unfussy clothes she had originally designed with sport and leisure in mind.
And in spite of shortages of material, Gabrielle continued using her initiative and quickly reaped the rewards: her salon was always busy. Mustering her growing number of assistants, she had them sew and sew, and later said, “I was in the right place, an opportunity beckoned. I took it . . . What was needed was simplicity, comfort, neatness: unwittingly I offered all of that.”7 Elisabeth de Gramont, whose stylish unconventionality made her one of Gabrielle’s early devotees, remembered the tremendous activity in the boutique and the new somberness of women’s wardrobes. Gabrielle recalled the races, just before the war, and said she hadn’t realized that
I was witnessing the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century; the end of an era. An age of magnificence but of decadence, the last reflection of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body’s architecture . . . woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for lace, for sable for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious.8
She decried the Belle Epoque tendency to transform women into “monuments of belated and flamboyant art,” and deplored the trains of insipid pastel dresses dragging in the dust. Referring to the decadence of those years, she remembered how there was so much wealth that it had become “as ordinary as poverty.” And that little had changed since the 1870s, “with its frenzy of easy money, of habits of straying from one style to another, of romantically taking its inspiration from every country and all periods, for it lacked a way of expressing itself honestly.”9
One of those Gabrielle had in mind here was Paul Poiret. His hugely simplified designs had signaled a fundamental redirection of women’s clothing, so that now it was cut along straight lines and constructed from rectangles of fabric. Nonetheless, there were significant aspects of Poiret’s work that Gabrielle would resolutely eschew. First, Poiret looked with nostalgia to the past. Second, he was seduced by the romance of the exotic, at that moment involving the fantasy of Russia, central to the vogue for all things oriental. Gabrielle recognized that what both these strands of thought—the exotic and indulgence in the past—were doing was hiding from aspects of the present. While Poiret had embraced his radical times and believed he was intent upon liberating women, in his costume “fantasies,” they still played out a version