Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [90]
This ability involved a tension at the heart of Gabrielle’s creativity, and was something she would have to negotiate for the rest of her life. Like all true artists, Gabrielle was obsessed with reality and functionality and, in turn, the peculiar relation of these to beauty. This was the unique position she was forging for herself in fashion: an unobtrusive functionality.
The artist in Gabrielle intuited that if an artist associates too much with power, the creative spirit can be sterilized. And yet luxury, which was an essential part of what she was promoting, is about exclusivity, itself inextricably associated with power. As a couturier, Gabrielle was dressing the rich and powerful, who used their luxury to exhibit their wealth and power. As an artist of simplicity and minimalism, Gabrielle was running into implicit conflict and confrontation all the time. She worked in the midst of a paradox. Yet unlike many of her artist friends, Gabrielle was not a rebel whose actions were based on destruction. Her fascination, even obsession, with youth and youthfulness emerged from a different motivation. For Gabrielle, youth was a vital, creative force, not a destructive one. In dressing the rich as if they were poor—in frustration, Poiret described this as her pauvre de luxe—she was forever walking a tightrope. A tightrope from which, nonetheless, she didn’t fall because, unlike the rebel, Gabrielle was not attacking culture.
An image of her has grown up over the years, originating in this period. It evokes a picture of an ignorant, socially meek woman whose powerful personality helped her rise to prominence as a designer because she had an instinct for the right clothes. Apparently, through Misia Sert’s tutelage and introductions, Gabrielle was able to meet and understand how to communicate with the artistic community. This picture is the one painted by Misia Sert for her own aggrandizement. It is an image perpetuated by all subsequent writers on Gabrielle. And it is nonsense. It implies that Gabrielle’s association with artists was simply a diverting pastime. In fact, her friendship with these people was crucial both to who she was and to the cultural influence she was already wielding.
Gabrielle did not become a person of artistic significance because Misia made her one. Misia wanted to know Gabrielle because Misia’s unerring sense of the creative possibilities in other people picked up on something in Gabrielle that was already there, something whose great force Misia described in her memoirs. The image of a slightly pathetic Gabrielle is one based on a veiled snobbery that subtly discounts both her tremendous intelligence and her remarkable character. With that unsettling capacity for self-knowledge, Gabrielle herself signaled how it was that her qualities had made her quite equal to the challenge of formidable success: “I was self-taught; I learned badly, haphazardly. And yet, when life put me in touch with those who were the most delightful and brilliant people of my age, a Stravinsky, or a Picasso, I neither felt stupid, nor embarrassed.”12 She went on to say that this was because “I had worked out on my own that which cannot be taught... It is with this that one succeeds.”13
When Stravinsky met Gabrielle, she already had achievements behind her that, for the times, must have appeared astounding. Although her modernity was expressed with great finesse, it would, nonetheless, have been seen by many as quite shocking. With a very few exceptions, the only women who were financially independent were those with inherited wealth. Among the most prominent of these exceptions were