by Joshua Zeitz
When the renowned designer Jacques Doucet invited him to join his firm, Poiret jumped at the chance. Poiret learned his craft from the master, and the product in these early years was decidedly conventional. His first model was a red cloak with cloth lining around the neck, a lapel made of crepe de chine, and six enamel buttons that lined up along the side. Not too flashy, but with enough pizzazz to capture the imagination of customers. Four hundred copies sold within just a few weeks.5
In an eerie foreshadowing of his future rivalry with Coco Chanel, one of Poiret’s early clients was Emilienne d’Alençon.
Between 1897 and 1900, Poiret churned out dozens of new models for the House of Doucet. Consisting mostly of jacket-and-skirt combinations, his designs were perfectly in step with the currents of the day. “The women wore them over corsets that were real corselets, sheaths in which they were imprisoned from the throat to the knees,” he wrote.6 “Thence the skirts fell to the ground in a number of pans.”
These were happy days for Paul Poiret. Doucet was a congenial personality—very much like Charles Dickens’s character Mr. Fezziwig, who cheerfully prods his young employee Ebenezer Scrooge to lighten up from time to time. Doucet paid his brooding young protégé a handsome salary and encouraged him to go to the theater, take in an occasional show at Moulin Rouge—even find a girlfriend. But Poiret rarely took the advice. He was driven by a singular goal—to dominate the competitive world of women’s fashion.
His career was interrupted by an unhappy year of compulsory military service sometime around 1900. Upon his discharge, he returned to the fashion world as a designer for the House of Worth, the venerable firm established in the mid–nineteenth century by the Englishman Charles Worth. The old man, who had more or less invented couture, was long dead, but his label lived on under the able direction of his two sons, Gaston and Jean.
From the start, the brothers made crystal-clear their expectations of Poiret’s employment. “Young man, you know the Maison Worth … has always dressed the Courts of the whole world,” Gaston began.7 “It possesses the most exalted and richest clientele, but today that clientele does not dress exclusively in robes of State. Sometimes Princesses take the omnibus, and go on foot in the streets. My brother Jean has always refused to make a certain order of dresses, for which he feels no inclination: simple and practical dresses which, none the less, we are asked for. We are like a great restaurant, which would refuse to serve aught but truffles. It is, therefore, necessary for us to create a department for fried potatoes.”
Poiret took to the idea instantly. He believed that the modern woman needed a modern frock, and he instantly set about creating simple models that appealed to well-to-do Parisians who had money to spend on his bold and unusually minimalist creations.
Predictably, Jean Worth hated his designs. “You call that a dress?8” he scoffed. “It is a louse.” Maybe so, Poiret answered. But it was a louse that sold. And anyway, he had been brought on board to cook up fried potatoes.
In 1904, tired of being caught in the middle of the Worth brothers’ unremitting feud over the artistic direction of their firm, Paul Poiret opened his own house. Capitalizing on his reputation for simple but elegant designs, he set about revolutionizing women’s fashion. His clothing for the New Woman featured a high waistline, a long, straight silhouette, V-shaped necklines, and, in the place of those lackluster dark shades that dominated Victorian-era fashion, a bold palette of red, gold, and yellow that betrayed the influence of Eastern themes—particularly Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which took Paris by storm in 1909.9 Above all, Poiret’s “look” banished the dreaded corset from women’s wardrobes. Starting in 1906, his designs consciously rejected the S-curve—bust pushed out, waist sucked in, derriere jammed back—that had dominated women’s fashion since the 1890s.
“I waged war upon it,” he said of the corset.10 “It divided its wearer into two distinct masses: on one side there was the bust and bosom, on the other, the whole behindward aspect, so that the lady looked as if she was hauling a trailer.”
In true character, Poiret was extraordinarily modest about his accomplishment. “Like all great revolutions,” he opined, his triumph over the S-curve “had been made in the name of Liberty.… I proclaimed the fall of the corset and the adoption of the brassiere which, since then, has won the day.”
He may have been overstating the case just a little. Like many great men, Poiret was a complicated personality. True, he “liberated” women from the agony of tight-lacing—or, at the very least, he made that liberation trendy and chic. But he wasn’t exactly a poster boy for modern feminism.
“Yes, I freed the bust,” he crowed many years later, “but I shackled the legs.”11
Poiret was referring to the hobble skirt, his original design that narrowed toward the ankles and made it exceedingly difficult for women to walk in anything more ambitious than baby steps.
“You will remember the tears, the cries, the gnashings of teeth caused by this ukase of fashion,” he sneered. “Women complained of being no longer able to walk, not get into a carriage. All their jeremiads pleaded in favor of my innovation. Are their protestations still heard? Did they not utter the same groans when they returned to fullness? Have their complaints or grumblings ever arrested the movement of fashion, or have they not rather, on the contrary, helped it by advertising it?”
Indeed, for all his inconsistent braggadocio, Poiret didn’t banish the corset in order to promote women’s health, safety, or equality. He did it to shake things up. Fashions changed constantly, he argued. This was the very definition of fashion. Like the good “King of Fashion” he advertised himself as—it was a claim he made to the ladies of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and more or less every city he visited—Poiret enjoyed testing the loyalty of his subjects.
The “despotism of fashion,” he told a group of Chicago women, placed everyone “at its mercy, for you evolve unconsciously, and you come to the point of wishing the same thing as fashion wishes, but in truth you have no free will and it is fashion which, like some astral influence, sets its impress upon you, and commands and controls your decisions, a tyrant doubly despotic since it orders women, who direct the actions of men.”12
In Poiret’s mind, fashion was a mystic force that demanded constant change and innovation. People were in its service, not the other way around.
This wasn’t a particularly usable definition for the New Woman. In fact, it wasn’t even clear that Poiret liked the New Women who wore his designs. One of the first couturiers to use live “mannequins” (or models), he spoke with supreme derision of those tall, arresting beauties.13 One of them was “as stupid as a goose, but as beautiful as a peacock.” Another had a “voice like a penny whistle. Fortunately her duties did not oblige her to speak.” His favorite of the whole bunch, Paulette, was a “vaporous blonde” with pale blue eyes beneath which “there was hidden a malice, perhaps a viciousness, whose depths I never learned.”
No, Paul Poiret wasn’t the New Woman’s best friend. He was in the game for reasons entirely his own.
It would be left to someone else to offer women a shot at self-definition and freedom through their clothes. And who better to meet this challenge than someone already accustomed to wearing men’s jersey and tweed, who rode horses for sport, whose adult life was a study in vigor and athleticism? Coco Chanel was the ideal architect of this new fashion—the right woman, at the right time, in the right place.
From Etienne Balsan’s apartment on the boulevard Malesherbes, Coco opened her millinery operation, Chanel Modes, around 1909. Within less than two years, she earned enough money to lease her own shop at 21, rue Cambon, a narrow lane that bordered the Ministry of Justice.
The back door of the Hotel Ritz, where Scott Fitzgerald, living in Paris, would later spend many a weekday afternoon getting plastered with his old Princeton chums, opened virtually onto the doorstep of Chanel’s new workshop. In fact, the great writer and the great couturiere almost certainly brushed s
houlders in the lobby from time to time, since Coco kept a private set of rooms at the hotel.
Coco’s relationship with Boy Capel grew stronger even as Coco’s millinery operation demanded more of her time and attention. “We were made for each other,” she remarked many years later.14 “That he was there and that he loved me, and that he knew I loved him was all that mattered.”
It might even have been Boy who suggested that Coco branch out and venture into the world of couture. In 1913, the couple rented an exquisite suite of rooms at the Normandy Hotel in Deauville, a popular resort town where many of their friends gathered each summer for weeks of quiet repose along the choppy, deep blue waters of the English Channel. Possibly at Boy’s instigation, and certainly with his financial backing, Coco opened a boutique on rue Gontaut-Biron. Situated between the shore and the casino and set against a sharp horizon of imposing granite cliffs and Norman-style brick-and-stone houses, Coco’s shop welcomed wealthy patrons with a striped awning that boldly announced: CHANEL.
The new operation offered a perfect opportunity for Coco to break into the exclusive world of high-end dresses, skirts, chemises, and accessories—in effect, to offer up clothing designs for the New Woman whose day now combined work, sport, and public leisure.
That summer, Chanel made a small fortune selling original models that blurred the line between masculine and feminine. Her store did a brisk business in navy blue blazers and turtleneck sweaters of the variety that English sailors wore, as well as other loose-fitting concoctions of knit and flannel materials. She proved especially deft at crafting models out of jersey, a heavy material that no dressmaker had ever dared to enlist in the cause of haute couture. This was the fabric of school uniforms and work clothes—maybe even golf outfits and tennis pants—but Chanel made it chic for all occasions.
All of this was peculiar and innovative, but, if Coco was to be believed, the rough silhouette of flapper fashion was born more of chance than design. “One day I put on a man’s sweater,” she told an interviewer, “ … because I was cold. It was in Deauville. I tied it with a handkerchief at the waist.” The fellow vacationers she met socially on the beach and at the polo grounds accosted her for information. “Where did you find that dress,” they asked her. “If you like it,” she replied, “I’ll sell it to you.” Ten dresses later, the signature Chanel frock was born.15
If Paul Poiret had unloosed women from the tight grasp of the corset, Chanel drove the revolution forward in leaps and bounds, eliminating altogether the frills and excesses of women’s couture in favor of styles that offered comfort, maneuverability, and practical use. In place of the three-dimensional ruffles, edges, and leg-of-mutton sleeves, she used complicated beadwork and colored swirls that evoked some of the trends in modern art then very much in favor in Paris.
It was a style that took hold quickly. Though World War I proved the undoing of many Parisian designers, including Paul Poiret, who closed down his firm to join the war effort and never quite figured out how to jump-start it after the armistice of 1918, Chanel thrived. She expanded her operations in Paris and Deauville and added a larger work space and store at Biarritz, a resort town in the south of France.
The war accelerated precisely those trends that made Coco’s signature style so appealing. As hundreds of thousands of American, British, and French women entered the workforce to help sustain war production—these were the unsung heroines whose daughters would earn greater renown during World War II as “Rosie the Riveter”—they needed more practical clothes. They couldn’t build munitions or man typewriters and telephone lines while wearing crinolines and corsets. Strict wartime rationing of raw materials like silk and cotton also inspired a move toward minimalism and simplicity. Out with the pagoda hips and tapered hems and in with the slender, elegant outline that was favored at the House of Chanel.
In her personal life, Coco had been dressing for sport and maneuverability since her earliest days with Etienne Balsan. She knew exactly how to clothe the New Woman of 1914 because she was that woman.
Coco’s wartime designs featured hems that rose a few inches above the ankles and a long, sleek outline—all the more comfortable for the hospital volunteer or war production worker. By eliminating once and for all the corset and achieving continuity between the torso and chest, Chanel “let go of the waistline”—in her own words—“and came up with a new silhouette.16 To get into it, and with the war’s connivance, all my clients lost weight, to ‘become skinny like Coco.’ ”
Chanel was hardly alone in embracing these designs. But she was at the front of the pack—so much so that by 1915, Harper’s Bazaar had announced that “the woman who hasn’t at least one Chanel is hopelessly out of the running in fashion.”17 Even as far away as New York, couture aficionados learned from The New York Times that the firm of Chanel was “leading the way” in the field of women’s fashion.18
By the following year, Coco was fully out of debt to Boy Capel and employed three hundred women at her various factories and stores. By the early 1920s, that figure grew to upward of three thousand workers. She was well poised to dominate feminine fashion for the coming decade.
Coco proved a demanding, sometimes autocratic boss. Moderately talented as a seamstress and completely unschooled in standard draftsmanship, she was nevertheless a master artist and perfectionist. She worked with live mannequins rather than paper patterns and often required as many as thirty fittings—each lasting hours on end—to complete just one muslin design. Then it was left to her small army of workers to replicate her model with total precision.
Marie-Louise Deray was twenty-one years old when Coco tapped her to be chief seamstress for her fashion house.19 “We worked with jersey, a fabric that no one had used before to make dresses,” she remembered. “The ‘diagonals’ went every which way and we had to start over again several times. Mademoiselle was very demanding. If a fitting went wrong she exploded. She loved to pester people. I cried a lot, believe me. She was tough, unrelenting with the staff. But what she came up with was sensational, both chic and exceedingly simple, so different from Poiret.…”
Coco paid her mannequins the paltry sum of 100 francs per month, scarcely enough to live on and certainly a mere fraction of what it cost wealthy clients to purchase just one Chanel dress. When associates urged her to pay a living wage, Coco just shrugged. “They’re beautiful girls. Let them take lovers.”20
Arriving at work each day in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, she conducted most of her business from a lavishly decorated private apartment above her couture house and adamantly refused to make appearances even for the wealthiest of customers. It was a calculated trick that the narcissistic Paul Poiret could never have pulled off, but it worked for Coco. Her inaccessibility lent an aura of mystique to the whole Chanel operation. The dresses kept selling.
Chanel’s signature style culminated sometime around 1923 in what commentators called the “garçonne look”—a nod to the 1921 best-selling novel La Garçonne, about a young woman who rebels against prevailing feminine roles to strike out on her own and earn an independent living. The book was so scandalous that its author was stripped of his Légion d’honneur.
The garçonne look—called simply the “flapper look” in England and America—dominated women’s fashion for the better part of the decade. It featured tubular dresses with dropped or invisible waistlines, high hemlines that crawled up toward the knees, tank tops, straight vertical lines, and intricate decorative beading, topped off with bell-shaped cloche hats. Though its color schemes changed from year to year, and though it gradually incorporated new fabrics like tweed and new design elements like geometric patterns, the flapper style remained fairly constant throughout the decade—so much so that Bruce Bliven, editor of The New Republic, felt confident in speaking of a quintessential “flapper uniform”—“the style, Summer of 1925, Eastern Seaboard.”21
Lois Long, who expanded her coverage for The New Yorker to include fashion as well as nightlife in 1925, summed up Chane
l’s lasting imprint on women’s wear in 1926 by observing that “when sports clothes first came into vogue for every type of day wear, a few years ago, the general opinion was that England, land of the hearty sportswoman, would provide fashions in this line, and that Paris would continue content with her supremacy over afternoon and evening frocks. Such was not the case.”
On the contrary, designers like Chanel “got busy, immediately feminized tweeds and flannels.”22 The New Woman, Long observed, now enjoyed a selection of comfortable, durable, yet elegant clothing that carried the added bonus of being “suitable for participation in all, save the very strenuous, sports, such as mountain climbing, lion hunting, and the exploration of the arctic.”
Those who knew Coco before she became world famous would easily have recognized the masculine influences in her clothing line.23 Her jerseys, sweaters, and dresses incorporated subtle elements of sailors’ uniforms, stonemasons’ handkerchiefs, reefer jackets, and mechanics’ dungarees. Paul Poiret scoffed at her designs and called them misérabilisme de luxe—poverty of luxury.24 A somewhat more impartial observer noted that “women no longer exist; all that’s left are the boys created by Chanel.”
The androgyny in Chanel’s design—and its physical redefinition of feminine sexuality—suggested that men’s and women’s roles were bleeding into each other. A Parisian law student underscored this point well when he asked, “Can one define la jeune fille moderne?25 No, no more than the waist on the dress she wears. These beings—without breasts, without hips, without ‘underwear,’ who smoke, work, argue, and fight exactly like boys, and who, during the night at the Bois de Boulogne, with their heads swimming under several cocktails, seek out savory and acrobatic pleasures on the plush seats of 5 horsepower Citroëns—these aren’t young girls! There aren’t any more young girls! No more women either!”
