Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [68]
Parade wasn’t a great ballet, but it was a seminal artistic work. As the first to push modernism to center stage, it made it part of mainstream artistic culture. Parade’s creators were not only intent on dragging art down from its high-culture pedestal; they believed they had revealed the essential, simple artistic beauty of the mundane and the everyday.13
Once again, Gabrielle’s presence at an avant-garde event was appropriate: Cocteau’s ballet was at one with her own path. (Their friendship was almost inevitable.) Borrowing from workaday wardrobes and using modest materials, Gabrielle was the designer then showing that a democratization of fashion was possible. And while her daring hints at classlessness were at first taken up only by a wealthy clientele, as time went on, her simple designs and “modest” materials would be transferred from the salons to the streets. All over France, and abroad, women would be able to copy Gabrielle’s styles, allowing more of them than ever before to take part in the game of fashion.
13
Remember That You’re a Woman
A few days after the premiere of Parade, the woman then regarded as France’s finest classical actress, Cécile Sorel, gave a dinner to celebrate the ballet, and to which she invited a novel mix of guests, which included Arthur and Gabrielle. Cécile Sorel understood that while Arthur was one of Paris’s most eligible bachelors, Gabrielle’s presence as an avant-garde designer gave her evening greater cachet.
Sorel’s dinner party would be long forgotten if it hadn’t been recorded by that urbane future novelist the diplomat Paul Morand, who made it his business to attend the numerous Parisian social events during those strange war years. Sorel’s unorthodox guest list included Morand’s boss, Philippe Berthelot, one of the highest-ranking French diplomats; a fashionable artist, the immensely rich and mad Spanish painter José Maria Sert; Sert’s twice-divorced and most unconventional mistress, the Slav patroness and artist’s muse Misia Edwards; the literary gadfly and artist Jean Cocteau; a playboy businessman, Arthur Capel; and his mistress, Gabrielle, a lower-class couturier.
While Morand’s snobberies had him imply he wasn’t at the dinner and refer to Sorel’s unconventional social mix as “preposterous,” he also noted with interest Gabrielle’s presence. Her achievement of a most unusual thing—the advancement of a couturier from “mere” dress-designer status to the drawing rooms of the Parisian elite—fascinated the novelist in Morand. And while he noted that Gabrielle was the least socially significant person at that dinner, he referred to her as “Coco Chanel, who is definitely becoming quite a personage.”
The second matter of note about that evening at Cécile Sorel’s recorded by Morand was that both Cécile and Gabrielle had done an outrageous thing: they had cut off their hair. “In the last few days it has become the fashion for women to wear their hair short. They’re all doing it, Madame Letellier [a mistress to the late Edward VII] and Coco Chanel in the lead, then Madeleine de Foucault, Jeanne de Salverte, etc.”1
Jean Cocteau told Morand that “this fashion was launched for charitable purposes—that all the cut hair is put together . . . and sold for the benefit of the wounded.” One can only say that this reveals nothing more than how far removed Cocteau was from what these women were thinking. (This we will come to in a later chapter.)
It has always been said that it was at Sorel’s dinner, in mid-1917, that Gabrielle first met Misia Edwards.2 The two women had actually met a year earlier, in 1916. This meeting would develop into a lifelong friendship, becoming infamously rich in complexity and conflict.
Misia Edwards is traditionally credited as the person who cultivated Gabrielle, the person who expanded her horizons beyond sportsmen and business. This, however, underestimates Gabrielle herself and the position she had already come to inhabit