France was occupied by the Nazis. Gabrielle Chanel continued to live in her quarters at the Paris Ritz. She took up with a handsome, tall blond German who had been an attaché at the German embassy, Hans Günther von Dincklage, known as Spatz. Their liaison was public knowledge.
At the liberation, Spatz was already back in Germany. Chanel’s position as a collaborator with the enemy could not have been more perilous.
Two weeks after de Gaulle’s triumphant return to Paris, in 1944, Chanel was arrested. Two young men with the armbands of the FFI (a French resistance movement), revolvers at the ready, called at the Ritz to escort her to police headquarters.
Exactly what happened, under what circumstances, has never been revealed. The fact is that after only three hours, Chanel was released.
Her lawyers advised her to get out of the country immediately. She left for neutral Switzerland. Eventually, Spatz joined her there.
Rumors began circulating in 1950 that Chanel wanted to reopen her house. It seemed preposterous. But aside from her restlessness after years of inactivity, there was a practical reason why her business associates, who owned the perfume business, needed a jolt to spur sales of No. 5. It is the perfume business that supports the couture houses.
And she was piqued to hear of the triumphs of new people in the couture, especially of her bête noire, Christian Dior.
She decided, at seventy, to make a comeback. The date was set for February 5, 1954.
My interview with Chanel ran in the February 1954 issues of American and British Vogue.
LISTENING TO CHANEL
Eric [Vogue’s star fashion illustrator] and I went to see Chanel on the rue Cambon, where she lives over her salon and ateliers: vast premises, until recently empty, dormant. We went through the boutique with perfumes, soaps, sweaters, and scarves, into the mirrored hall of a mirrored staircase, strips of mirror breaking space, into a cloudless Cubist maze beyond time and space, hushed with carpets. Past massive dull gold Spanish arabesques, past the darkened showroom sliced with lacquered screens, up the famous staircase where Chanel’s openings had crowded her high-titled employees and the most brilliant personalities of the day. “It’s like a dream,” said Eric, “nothing has changed.”
Now an entrance hall dark with paneled Oriental screens; pushing through the looking glass (more mirrored doors) into a small, dim study to find—not Sleeping Beauty—but a small, brown idol hung with jewels, perched on the edge of an outsized brown sofa. A spare, taut, compressed figure; widely spaced large dark eyes, so alive that they deny the lines around them; a broad, shrewd face; wide mouth pulled straight across the face, turning down at the corners; determinedly penciled eyebrows. Black wisps of hair break from the navy blue felt hat spreading a little protective shade. A knot of diamonds and a great unblinking emerald pendant at the throat of a white crepe collarless blouse, the cuffs turned back with art, caught with jewels; brief navy sweater; a plaque of jewels at the waist; earrings, pearls caught in a swarm of diamonds; short gray jersey skirt—the legendary unchanged Chanel elegance. Her extraordinary hands, monumental on a small scale: powerful, broad knuckled, the hands of a sculptor, strong long fingers, short unpolished nails, massive emerald ring.
She leans forward as she talks, the angular jaw thrust forward like a Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph of Yvette Guilbert. Without prelude the talk flows endlessly in rapid-fire, dry, intense monotone. No full stops, no rhetorical effects, an uninterrupted long-playing record, no change of tempo or volume. A first-person-singular whirlpool, flinging off interpolations or questions, following its own course …
“What is Fashion? La mode est un métier and not an art—it is a don and not du génie. We keep hearing this word génie—everything has genius—a handbag, a pair of shoes. I tell you there is no génie to this business but don and taste—I happen to have both. I make my dresses like a watch—if one tiny little wheel doesn’t work, I remake the dress. A dress isn’t right if it is uncomfortable, if it doesn’t ‘walk’ properly. A dress must function or on n’y tient pas. Elegance in clothes means being able to move freely, to do anything with ease.
“I shall show a collection on the fifth of February—maybe it will not be what is expected of me. Sometimes, j’ai le trac. I make everything in my collection, from bathing suits to evening dresses, one personality all the way through. Not like those houses where modelistes do some things, the designer another, there is no unity—with me I do everything down to the last button. And on the subject of buttons: no button without a buttonhole.
“Look at today’s dresses: strapless evening dresses cutting across a woman’s front like this [she cut an angry finger across her own]. Nothing is uglier for a woman: boned horrors, that’s what they are. As soon as a woman is over twenty, she can’t show all her upper arm that way; she needs the grace of a little something over the shoulders, or over the top of the arms. Nothing shows age more than the upper arms, the arms in general, and the hands, then the neck, then the face. I wouldn’t want to sit in a sleeveless dress next to a girl of twenty. I introduced the strapless dress, it’s true; but gracefully done, with 1830 feminine charm. And these heavy dresses that won’t pack into airplane luggage, ridiculous. All those boned and corseted bodices—out with them. What’s the good of going back to the rigidity of the corset? A woman in an evening dress like that has to hold herself like this [and she ramrodded, chin thrust forward].
“Now women go in for simpler lives—the big receptions are gone, the way of living has changed—small apartments, no servants. No good having dresses that must be ironed by a maid each time you put them on. No good des robes a grand tralala.
“My collection won’t be a punch on the nose, it is not to disconcert. It will not be too simple—women don’t want to dress like their concierges. Changes must not be brutal, be made all of a sudden—the eye must be given time to adapt itself to a new thought. It will be a collection made by a woman, with love. I want to make women look pretty and young.
“I once made a sudden change in fashion. Working on the collection, in 1929, I believe, I first lengthened evening skirts to below the knee, then I gradually brought them down to the ankles. My vendeuses wept when they saw what was happening; my people were in despair on the day of the presentation. I had been seeing it for two months, so it no longer looked strange to me. Afterward everyone had to follow me. As Monsieur Bendel used to say to me, I made the wholesale dress trade—because, before Chanel, dresses were too complicated to be copied en gros.
“I am no longer interested in dressing a few hundred women, private clients; I shall dress thousands of women. But [and this seemed the core of her fashion philosophy] a widely repeated fashion, seen everywhere, cheaply produced, must start from luxury. At the top of the pinnacle—le point de départ must be luxe.
“I have always been copied by others. Half the women one sees today are wearing Chanel (inspired) dresses. If a fashion isn’t taken up and worn by everybody, it’s not a fashion but an eccentricity, a fancy dress. An eccentric dress doesn’t make an eccentric—a woman is just as dull in an eccentric dress if she is dull without it.
“I want mannequins with bosoms and hips, with a real shape. I don’t care about their faces, they must have elegance. Today’s look [she struck a pose characterizing hollow-cheeked fashion models], c’est l’élégance des cimetières. They aren’t women, ce sont des ombres. [Here she confirmed that her mannequins at one time wore hideous white cotton stockings: plain faces and those stockings kept attention riveted on the dresses.]
“The most important things are health and joie de vivre. To diet and be underfed in order to lose weight—then one looks sad! What difference do a few kilos make? To be goodtempered and young in spirit is what counts. I tell these women who only gossip and say unpleasant things, ‘Nothing makes you uglier than being malicious.’ And if one wears ridiculous clothes or a silly-looking hat, it makes one bad humored.
“Women’s clothes must be more glamorous, even Romanesque. Dres
ses are never gracious and flattering enough. My dresses make women look young. Women must do anything not to age, in their appearance and outlook. Aging is a state of mind, one must keep enthusiasm and curiosity. I said to a twenty-five-year-old friend of mine, ‘My poor girl, how very old you are!’ She wasn’t interested in anything. Americans are wrong to overestimate very young girls—these are not the only beautiful women; for me, women become interesting after forty.
“Real elegance means elegance in manners, too. Look at women at table—how they take out boxes and things between courses, put them on the table—they are not even pretty most of the time, these objects [and she screwed up her face, dabbing at it with an imaginary powder puff, then scrubbed her lips with a nonexistent lipstick]. How can one be elegant doing that? And all those women who leave lipstick all over table napkins and on glasses. I tell them, when you come to my house, I will provide you with paper napkins, my table linen is too fine to be spoiled by you. Yes, elegance in living is very important.
“You ask what I feel to be my most important contribution to fashion history? Perhaps the suppression of many things … no, the ensemble of what I did, not one thing. I began by making sweaters because I didn’t know how to make other things; I began my career not knowing how even to sew on a button. Then I discovered I could do everything. I worked with enthusiasm, with love. Nothing distracted me from my work, or does now. I am implacable. I do everything myself. I won’t fit a client, but I’ll spend hours on my knees in front of a mannequin perfecting a dress. I give sketches to my ateliers, showing exactly how I want a dress to be put together; then I work on the figure, it is really sculpture. I always respect the body, and let it move freely under my clothes. No false bosoms, making breasts like bombs [she plucked her blue sweater into two points]. My men friends say it is no pleasure to dance with a woman wearing armor, they want to feel a living body.
“It is deplorable that women all dress alike—to please each other rather than to please men. Look at them, playing canasta, all dressed in the identical ‘little black,’ screwing up their faces over their cards. Why waste all that time over massage, pedicures, depilations, hairdressers, to reach this uniform result? Anyhow, I find that men have better taste and judgment about clothes than women. When I want an opinion about what I have done, I ask some men friends to come in and tell me what they think: not professionals in the couture, just friends. I value their reactions much more than women’s. Women should always bring a man with them when choosing dresses. A woman friend will probably give them an insincere opinion; the man can be trusted.
“About this collection: I am starting with the most difficult, des petites robes de sport. They are the basis of a collection, but they are not what is suitable for photographs, or drawings, or descriptions. I am making many cocktail dresses—this category didn’t exist before, I never made any before. And, of course, dresses for les belles soirées de printemps, many of these. A woman can never be overdressed in my clothes; nothing is worse than being overdressed, and that goes for the mind too. A woman showing off intellectually is as bad as a woman wearing satin for breakfast. Now women have started showing naked shoulders at five o’clock, even at the races; that never existed before. It must come from all the nakedness on beaches; people lose their sense of the appropriate.”
The telephone rang; someone suggesting a mannequin for Chanel. “Elle n’a plus ses vingt-cinq ans?” Coco echoed her interlocutor. “Alors, moi je les lui donnerai!”
This break, the only one since we arrived, made it possible for the first time to look fleetingly at the surroundings. (Not a pause ever, she didn’t even light a cigarette.) For she projects the tentacles of her talk with such intensity, riveting one with her black tragic gaze, that for over an hour I saw nothing but herself. Only now did I take in a fabulous Louis XIV clock—a wonderful baroque pile of bronze—a sober, imposing mirror, Louis XIV too, in a gold frame with double coat of arms on top, flanked with exuberant Italian baroque gilded wood scrolls and cherubs, in an entirely different tempo. On a low table in front of the sofa, the clear cool surfaces of Chinese rock crystal, rose quartz, jade animals: “I always arrange them in couples, somehow it seems plus gentil.”
In her four-room apartment, Chanel lives, has meals, and receives friends, but she actually sleeps at the Ritz. “If I didn’t have to go out to sleep, I would never get out at all, and I don’t like to sleep in a room where I’ve been during the day, filled with objects—just white walls, empty space, and quiet for real rest.”
The apartment is dimly lit and filled with treasures of the most diversified periods—all of superb quality. Throughout her famous collection of Coromandel screens. She likes moving her objects around and buying new ones. She is impatient with the idea of decorating in one style. (“How ridiculous to say ‘this Louis XV chair won’t go in my Empire room.’ If the elements are beautiful, that’s all that matters.”) She enjoys ruling out architectural demands in a room by a lavish use of mirrors (“I’ve made small rooms large and large rooms small by my mirrors”). She loves large pieces of furniture in a small room—note the outsized sofa in her living room.
Chanel was back again (the small boy’s figure, furrowed face, flat shoes). The web of words began again, this time to be interrupted by knocks on the door. Chanel sprang to her feet. “Je viens, je viens,” and to us, “Now you must go—but you must come back. Yes. I’ll show you my dresses, and look, I’m arranging a new room.” She opened a door, a glimpse of dark Coromandel screens with fan designs. “Come back and I’ll show you everything, and we’ll talk!”
At first, the new Chanel collection seemed dead on arrival. The neat little suits, the easy-to-wear black dresses, looked déjà vu. Where was the explosion of the new that was expected?
Karl Lagerfeld, that canny seismograph who was to take over the Chanel house in 1983, summed up, many years later, his reactions: “You had a feeling you were seeing something prehistoric, but I loved this look that harked back to a prewar world I hadn’t known but found more intoxicating than any current fashion.
“Chanel was so alive and intuitive, and she found the right compromise between her style and the 1950s look.”
The press was damning. “A fiasco” was the verdict of London’s Daily Express. But her American fans, including Carmel Snow at Harper’s Bazaar, beat the drums for her. And it worked. She had done it again. By January 1971, when she died, sales were zooming. She had made a positive of retro designs that evoked what people had loved decades earlier—but always with a witty twist. She had tapped into the zeitgeist and given the look they wanted.
Visiting Karl Lagerfeld
Almost forty years after my visit to Chanel, Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, sent me to Paris to interview Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s present mastermind.
Unlike some of us who might wish to change our physical appearance and take on a new persona, Karl Lagerfeld has actually done it. The original model, whom I met in 1991, was a thick-set, solid man in a dark suit (made in Japan), a white shirt, black tie, a discreet cameo for a tiepin, gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, black glasses de rigueur.
The dark glasses are still there, but the image has dwindled: an unforgiving diet and an iron will—no alcohol, a low, low no-cal drink—have honed Lagerfeld to a Giacometti look-alike, ninety-two pounds gone, and they stay gone.
The hair is bleached snow-white. There is a stiff white collar as wide as a hand, the skinniest of jeans, various metallic hand embellishments, fingerless gloves.
If there had been a Shakespearean stage direction for our first meeting, it would have been “Enter, talking.”
What has not changed is the rapid-fire, flat staccato voice. It greeted me on my arrival and continued with nary a largo. French and English moved seamlessly in and out of the talk. Had I been proficient in German and Danish, no doubt those languages would have come into play. Karl is of German and Danish extraction.
He told me, “If I had not been in fashion, I would have
studied languages. My big regret is that I don’t speak more languages. I have French, English, German, and vaguely Italian. I’d like to know Russian, Spanish, Swedish (which I can understand), and Danish because I come from that area.”
He told me, “I love your English.” I learned that before meeting me, he had acquired some of my tapes and played them. It shows how thoroughly he watches his publicity. He commented on my name: “Rosamond. That’s the English spelling. Not like Schubert’s Rosamunde. It’s like Rosamond Lehmann.” And it is, of course. But I wondered how many people in Paris still remembered the author of a once ubiquitous novel, Dusty Answer.
He said, “I can never have enough dictionaries. I want to know everything. Life is a continuing lesson. There is not a stupid subject.”
And “I want to have everything” might be added to the mantra. That includes houses, clothes, works of art, books, people.
He has owned a number of houses in a number of places and disposed of them all. When I first met him, he occupied, and had restored at vast expense, a splendid eighteenth-century Paris mansion, of the kind referred to in French as an hôtel particulier. It was furnished in the grandest eighteenth-century style: all the furniture had pedigrees like racehorses. Of the stupendous Savonnerie carpet in magenta and clear yellow, he let drop, “Louis XV ordered it.”
At the time of my visit, he referred to an apartment he had had in Monte Carlo: “All Memphis furniture—I only went to Monte Carlo for the annual Grand Prix automobile races, so I got rid of it.” What he didn’t say is that he is a frequent visitor to Monte Carlo because of his close friendship with Princess Caroline (the daughter of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier). To his credit, he never name-drops.
Some of My Lives Page 21
