Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  While André was cared for in England, Chanel’s business flourished, even in the shadow of the First World War. She had opened her first shop in Deauville in 1913; the following summer, after the outbreak of hostilities, Capel (by then a captain in a British army division in France) suggested that she withdraw from Paris to the safety of the seaside resort. There, according to the story she told Paul Morand, Boy ‘rented a villa for his ponies’. Along with the polo ponies, there were legions of fashionable women who had retreated to Deauville that year, all of whom needed new clothes. Chanel had brought several milliners with her, rather than dressmakers, but soon adapted to the wartime restrictions, and set her employees to work. ‘There was a shortage of material,’ she explained to Morand. ‘I cut jerseys for them from the sweaters the stable lads wore and from the knitted training garments that I wore myself. By the end of the first summer of the war, I had earned two hundred thousand gold francs!’

  A less romantic version of the story is that jersey was the only fabric she was able to buy in sufficient quantity from textile manufacturers; but in any case, Chanel rose to the occasion, even as France seemed to fall around her. Royallieu had been taken by the German forces, reclaimed by the French and then turned into a front-line hospital; Antoinette and Adrienne left Paris, along with thousands of other women, and came to join Coco in Deauville. Meanwhile, a letter arrived from her brother, Alphonse, saying that both he and their younger brother, Lucien, had joined up – Lucien in the infantry, and Alphonse as a mechanic repairing army tanks. Coco wrote back to Alphonse, sending money and encouragement, in a letter that appears to suggest that he had been injured or sick: ‘I am happy to hear that you have a month of convalescence to get better. Rest and take good care of yourself. I am busy with lots of things and have practically no time for myself. I will write to your wife – don’t be too anxious – perhaps everything will finish sooner than we think …’

  Despite the horrors of the Front Line, her sales continued to increase in Paris and Deauville, and a new boutique, which she had established in Biarritz in 1915. For Chanel’s simple jersey jackets, straight skirts and unadorned sailor blouses looked more and more like the only appropriate fashion to be seen in amid the sombre anxieties of war. They were chic, but not showy; monochrome, in keeping with the mood of the times; clothes that could be worn to drive an ambulance or an army car, as relevant to women’s wartime work as to a seaside promenade. ‘Fashion should express the place, the moment,’ Chanel would later observe to Paul Morand, and even if her words were spoken with the benefit of hindsight, she had seized her moment just as old certainties seemed to be giving way. ‘I was witnessing the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century, the end of an era.’

  She watched its demise without sympathy, knowing that her time was coming, that the grandeur she had witnessed would soon crumble, choking on its own excess. Chanel had come of age in a period of magnificence, but also of decadence; in her words, ‘the last reflections of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body’s architecture, just as parasites smother trees in tropical forests. Woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for sable, for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious. Complicated patterns, an excess of lace, of embroidery, of gauze, of flounces and over-layers had transformed what women wore into a monument of belated and flamboyant art. The trains of dresses swept up the dust, all the pastel shades reflected every colour in the rainbow in a thousand tints with a subtlety that faded into insipidness.’

  But Coco was going to change all that; Chanel was going to impose black.

  THE LITTLE BLACK DRESS

  In July 1918, an aristocratic beauty named Diana Wyndham wrote a letter to her friend Duff Cooper, from Beaufort Castle in Scotland, where she was visiting her sister Laura and enjoying balmy days in ‘a sea of bluebells, gorse and broom’. The youngest daughter of the fourth Lord Ribblesdale (a former government chief whip in the House of Lords), Diana Wyndham was possessed of connections that placed her at the heart of upper class society. Her father’s portrait by John Singer Sargent reveals why King Edward VII admired him for his courtly stateliness (the king referred to Ribblesdale as ‘The Ancestor’, because of the impression he gave of having stepped out of an oil painting). Diana was 25, ten years younger than Coco Chanel, but she had already been married, in 1913, and widowed the following year. Her first husband, often described as one of the handsomest men in London, was Percy Wyndham, half-brother to the Duke of Westminster. An officer in the Coldstream Guards at the time of their wedding, he was killed in action in France on 14th September 1914; his death was followed less than a year later by that of Diana’s brother.

  ‘Dearest Duff,’ she wrote to a man as well connected as herself, who had joined the Foreign Office after Eton and Oxford, and was currently serving in the Grenadier Guards, ‘Lots of things have happened since I saw you – I’ve been ill, we’ve nearly lost the war, and I think I’m going to marry Capel after all – so next time I see you, you’ll be staying with me in my luxurious apartment in the Avenue du Bois.’

  Diana had had a brief flirtation with Duff Cooper three months previously, and so had no need to explain the family references that followed in her letter – to her sister Laura, who had married Simon Fraser, the 14th Lord Lovat, or to her aunt Margot Asquith, the wife of the former prime minister. But it appears she did want to justify her actions to Cooper, following the disapproving responses she had received from Margot Asquith and another of her aunts to her decision to marry Boy Capel. Diana had met the handsome captain while she was driving an ambulance for the Red Cross in France, close to the front line; and their relationship may have been more passionate than Coco Chanel preferred to admit. If Diana was not yet pregnant with Capel’s child when she wrote to Duff Cooper, she would have been soon afterwards, given the birth of her first baby the following April.

  Not that an unplanned pregnancy was the cause of her aunts’ condemnation: they already had other grounds on which to object to Capel, which emerge in Diana’s letter to Cooper: ‘I wrote, the other day, to Lucy and Margot, breaking [to] them the news and have today received masterpieces from them – Lucy’s letter worse than a farewell dinner, saying her heart has never ceased aching since she received mine, that Paris did not lead to high ideals or morality, that it was selfish of me to marry and leave father, that he [Capel] was half French and not fond of country life, and Margot [wrote] much on the same lines, giving some well-aimed hits at the Versailles Council, since he [Capel] has become political secretary on the Council.’

  Yet as Duff Cooper knew, Boy was very much on the up. He had made a fortune out of coal during the war, expanded into shipping, and in between balancing the demands of various mistresses had somehow found the time to write a well-received book, Reflections on Victory, which proposed a formula for international peace. Captain Capel was also a highly regarded liaison officer between France and Britain, being a trusted friend of both Georges Clemenceau, the elder statesman of French politics and prime minister from 1917, and Lloyd George, munitions minister in Asquith’s cabinet and his successor as prime minister. (Hence Capel’s appointment as political secretary to the Allies’ War Council, based in Versailles.)

  ‘I suppose you will take much the same line,’ continued Diana in her letter, reflecting on her aunts’ disapproval, ‘knowing your feelings on the subject – and I look for nothing but abuse from the world, but I prefer this sort of marriage to the humdrum “manage de convenance” and feel quite certain that this one is fraught with great possibilities and charm. My one regret is that I’m not marrying you, Duffie dear, but I don’t think you ever asked me, or did you? It might anyway have been more popular with the “aunties” but we could never have afforded a flat in Paris, not even a “bed-sitter”. Do write to me and say you’re pleased about it, and that you like my “darkie”. I adore him!’

  As it turned out, the next time Duff and Diana met, in O
ctober 1918, she had already married Boy Capel (a late summer wedding at Beaufort Castle in Lord Lovat’s private chapel), and Cooper was less than impressed. His diary for 8th October records a rather busy day in Paris – cocktails at the Crillon, lunch at the Ritz with Diana, tea at Les Ambassadeurs, a visit to her flat at 88 Avenue du Bois, dinner at Maxim’s, followed by a revue, and finally a trip to a brothel. Somewhere within this packed itinerary, Cooper took against Capel, ‘whom I don’t like the look of’. Two days later, he liked him even less. ‘I had arranged to go down to Versailles with Diana and lunch there. I hired a motor from the Ritz and went to her about midday. She met me with the news that Capel forbade our lunching at Versailles on account of the number of officers who would see her lunching there. It seemed silly He and Diana duly ate elsewhere, and then went for a walk around Versailles; walking having not yet been forbidden by Capel. ‘She is a delightful companion. How beautiful was Versailles with its native melancholy enhanced by the yellowing branches and fallen leaves.’

  In later life, Chanel did not discuss her lover’s marriage to Diana; in fact, she barely acknowledged that it had taken place. Perhaps this is how she dealt with it at the time. She already knew that he had other women, other mistresses, and perhaps she understood that nothing would come of his earlier promises that she would be his wife. Capel was ambitious, and an aristocratic wife would consolidate his social standing and possibly dispel the speculation about his origins in a way that Coco Chanel could not. (Whether or not he was illegitimate, Diana’s reference to him as ‘half French’ might suggest that the circumstances of his birth were still a talking point.) Of course, Chanel was also ambitious – as was evident in her ascent through Parisian society. She had gone from milliner to dressmaker to couturiere, and was now admired by baronesses and princesses; she had climbed from the half-light of the demimondaine to the spotlight of worldly acclaim.

  But for all her commercial and social success, Chanel did not yet understand the unwritten code of the British upper classes, nor Boy’s adherence to its conventions and etiquette, despite his apparently carefree enjoyment of Paris. Many years later, Chanel told Bettina Ballard that during her affair with Boy she had yearned for the romance of the ‘sticky French sentimental’ novels she read, but he thought it demonstrably absurd; making this clear by subverting the rituals of an adoring love affair. After she complained that he never gave her jewellery, he bought her a tiara from Cartier, but she didn’t understand what it was or how to wear it. ‘He knew so much more than I did. I jumped at him furiously, pounding my fists on his chest and crying, “What is it, why do you tease me, why do you make me feel ridiculous?”’ She gave a similar account to Paul Morand, and of the consequences of asking Boy to send her flowers. ‘Half-an-hour later, I received a bouquet. I was delighted. Half-an-hour later, a second bouquet. I was pleased. Half-an-hour later, another bouquet. This was becoming monotonous. Every half-hour the bouquets kept arriving in this way for two days. Boy Capel wanted to train me. I understood the lesson. He trained me for happiness.’

  And yet she was not happy. When Chanel sought advice from a friend about the tiara, she discovered that it should be worn to the opera, but this was not possible, as Capel rarely took her out with him in public. ‘Thus did our happy days pass at Avenue Gabriel,’ she told Morand. ‘I hardly ever went out. I dressed in the evening to please Capel, knowing full well that there would shortly be a moment when he would say: “why go out, after all, we’re very comfortable here.”’ So there they stayed, surrounded by the Coromandel screens he had introduced her to and which she came to adore, in part because, like medieval tapestries, they allowed her to re-create her home wherever she might move to. ‘He liked me among my surroundings, and there’s a girl-from-the-harem side of me which suited this seclusion very well.’

  But the girl from the harem is unlikely to wear a white wedding dress, or a bridal veil over her long hair. And while Arthur Capel was searching for a suitably aristocratic wife, Coco Chanel made herself look like a boy: breastless and hipless and shorn of the conventions of womanhood. ‘In 1917 I slashed my thick hair,’ she said to Morand; ‘to begin with I trimmed it bit by bit. Finally, I wore it short.’ When people asked her why she had cut it short, she answered, ‘Because it annoys me.’ ‘And everyone went into raptures, saying that I looked like “a young boy, a little shepherd”. (That was beginning to become a compliment, for a woman.)’

  Chanel gave a different, and more detailed version of that radical haircut to Claude Delay, which suggested a number of intriguing associations: between shortening skirts and bobbing her hair; the power of wearing black instead of the conventions of white; between cleanliness and coquetry. Her story started with a trip to the opera with several friends. She was dressing for the evening at the apartment in the Avenue Gabriel (no mention of Boy Capel, who was often away, not only in the arms of other women, but also as an army officer undertaking clandestine missions for his friends in government). ‘I’d never been to the Opera before. I had a white dress made by my own modistes. My hair, which came down below my waist, was done up round my head in three braids – all that mass set straight upon that thin body.’ She had so much hair, she said, that it was ‘crushing me to death’; but fate intervened, and gave her freedom. ‘There was a gas burner in the bathroom. I turned on the hot tap to wash my hands again, the water wasn’t hot, so I fiddled with the pilot-light and the whole thing exploded. My white dress was covered in soot, my hair-the less said, the better. I only had to wash my face again – I didn’t use make-up. In those days only the cocottes used make-up and were elegant. The women of the bourgeoisie weren’t groomed – and they wore hats that flopped all over the place, with birds’ nests and butterflies.’

  But nothing was going to stop her from going out that night, not even her burnt hair. ‘I took a pair of scissors and cut one braid off. The hair sprang out at once all round my face. In those days I had hair like sable.’ Undaunted, she cut off the second braid, and then told her maid to cut off the third; the girl began to cry, but Chanel didn’t care – or at least, she said she didn’t care about the loss of her hair, or of the soot-stained white dress. ‘I slipped on a black dress I had, crossed over in front – what a marvellous thing, youth – and caught in at the waist, with a sort of minaret on top.’

  With bobbed hair and little black dress Chanel was neither slave girl nor wife, but something of her own making. Everyone at the opera was looking at her, she told Delay; they were all so impressed that ‘the darling of the English became the beauty of Paris.’ Afterwards, however, the flat in Avenue Gabriel contained something macabre within it. ‘When I got back that evening the maid had washed my hair and my braids were waiting for me in the bathroom like three dead bodies.’ Thereafter, whenever designing a new fashion collection, she cut off her own hair: ‘I’ve always plied the scissors.’

  There was no such clear schedule for the cut-off point in her relationship with Boy Capel, despite his marriage and the birth of his first child in April 1919 (a daughter named Ann). Chanel’s affair with him continued, partly conducted in a villa she had rented in Saint Cloud, just outside Paris. And by October 1919, Diana Capel was involved in a romance with Duff Cooper (who had himself married Lady Diana Manners, a famous society beauty and actress, less than four months previously). Duff Cooper’s diary offers some insight into the ensuing intrigue and entanglements. On 29th October, he wrote that he had met that evening with both Dianas at the Ritz in London, along with some other friends. Diana Capel ‘was looking most lovely. She has had her hair cut short but is letting it grow again. Dinner was not very successful. The two Dianas never harmonize – I don’t know why it is.’ Afterwards, it was raining, and he started walking Diana Capel home. ‘In Piccadilly we got a taxi and I drove with her to Curzon Street. I made love to her and kissed her and promised to meet her next day. I felt rather guilty when I got home.’ Despite his guilt, two days later he arranged a secret lunch with Diana Capel: ‘I had to lie terri
bly [to his wife].’ Even so, the lunch was ‘very agreeable. She was looking charming. Intrigue of this sort has a fatal fascination. I don’t care for her one thousandth part as much as I care for my own Diana, and when I got back to the latter and found her very low with a headache having been alone all day and wretched that I hadn’t lunched with her but believing all my lies, I felt a monster of wickedness and cruelty.’

  Cooper’s affair with Mrs Capel continued through November and December 1919, as did Captain Capel’s with Coco Chanel (the convergence of interlinked Cs once more forming a curious reflection of Chanel’s own logo). On 5th November, Cooper took his wife to the opera in London, ‘wheeled her into the Royal Box and then went off and dined with the other Diana … We had a pleasant evening, sitting by the fire and making love. She doesn’t care at all for me and I not really very much for her but it amuses us.’ On 11th November, Armistice Day, Cooper and his wife went to a Victory Ball, where he discovered Diana Capel ‘looking very well in gold trousers’. On 17th December he bought Diana Capel a Christmas present of jewellery from Boucheron.