Mary Pickford wearing Chanel’s little black dress in a scene from the silent movie My Best Girl costarring Buddy Rogers, 1927
Upon arriving in New York in 1931, Coco was mobbed by reporters. In Hollywood she and Misia met the greatest stars of the day: Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Gloria Swanson. Coco toured the studios and learned how films were shot. Her assignment was to design clothes in Paris that would be made by fitters in Hollywood and then completed according to her instructions.
Back home at rue Cambon, Coco began making costumes for Gloria Swanson’s movie Tonight or Never, the story of an opera singer. Swanson came to Paris for a fitting of her black bias-cut satin gown. Coco thought Swanson was chubby and suggested that she lose a few pounds. When Swanson returned for a final fitting, she had gained weight. Coco “glared furiously at me,” recalled Swanson. “I said I would try [the gown] with a girdle,” but the line of the undergarment showed.
“Take off the girdle and lose five pounds,” snapped Coco. The next day Swanson showed up with a roll of surgical elastic and begged Coco to have it made into “a rubberized under-garment” to make her look slim.
Coco refused. “Lose five pounds!” she commanded.
“Maybe I can’t,” said Swanson.
“Why not?”
“Reasons of health, maybe. Look, just try it.”
Coco went along with the solution. “It took three people to get me into it,” remembered Swanson, but it worked. Swanson looked stunning in the gown. It turned out that she had had a good reason for putting on weight: She was pregnant.
Swanson left with a whole wardrobe designed by Coco. But the movie was a flop, and it ended Coco’s career in Hollywood. The movie moguls told her that “her dresses weren’t sensational enough. She made a lady look like a lady.” Many actresses stayed with her for their offscreen wardrobes, though, until a new competitor stole them away. Her name was Elsa Schiaparelli.
Schiaparelli’s silk butterfly dress for evening, summer 1937
THAT ITALIAN
Schiap (pronounced skap), as she was called, came from a prosperous, intellectual, Italian family. In Paris she had risen to fame with her sporty separates (sweaters and skirts) and imaginative innovations. Schiap introduced a bold new color, shocking pink. She too was friends with Dalí and Cocteau and collaborated with them on zany surrealist designs: a gown printed with a life-size lobster, a hat shaped like an upside-down high-heeled pump. In 1935 Schiap opened her couture house on Place Vendôme, just down the street from the Ritz hotel. The Ritz was one of the most luxurious hotels in the world, with a superb dining room downstairs. Coco lived at the Ritz, and in the morning she left for work at her salon on rue Cambon, the street behind the hotel. So Schiap quipped, “Poor Chanel, I use the front door of the Ritz, she must use the back.”
Coco detested Schiap and bitterly referred to her as “that Italian who’s making clothes.”
Schiap called Coco “that dreary little bourgeoise” (a middle-class woman).
Coco thought that Schiap would soon be finished, with her outrageous styles. Yet in 1934 Time claimed that Coco was no longer the leader in fashion. Instead they wrote, “Mme. Schiaparelli is the one to whom the word ‘genius’ is applied most often.”
One evening the archrivals attended the same costume ball. The theme was an enchanted forest. Coco went dressed as herself, but Schiap disguised herself as a surrealist tree. “There was a near disaster,” recalled Bettina Ballard, the Paris editor for Vogue, “when Chanel . . . dared Schiaparelli . . . to dance with her, and, with purposeful innocence, steered her into the candles.” Schiap’s costume caught fire. “The fire was put out—and so was Schiaparelli—by delighted guests squirting her with soda water,” reported Ballard.
Schiap posed a serious threat to Coco throughout the ’30s. She built her collections around themes such as music and the circus. Celebrities, socialites, and royalty vied for front-row seats at her exciting runway shows.
Coco’s shows were “terribly sedate and a little bit dull,” wrote Danish journalist Ragna Fischer. Coco stayed hidden at the top of her famous mirrored staircase as the models glided down. But she won rave reviews for her sleek, elegant dresses.
Chanel’s understated navy blue linen day suit with ribbed knit trim, 1937, in contrast to Schiaparelli’s whimsical print dress
“The couture is swinging back to the great age of Chanel simplicity,” announced Vogue in 1937. The magazine described her spring collection as “dignified elegance” and applauded her short-jacket suits as “un-sensational, subtle, wearable—[with] no tricks.” Coco introduced silk linings for her suit jackets and sewed fine gilt chains into the bottoms of the jackets and the hemlines of the skirts to keep them weighted and in place. Her designs were timeless. One of her suits with ribbed knit trim at the collar, cuffs, and pockets would look stylish today.
Meanwhile, Schiap adopted the surrealist theme of metamorphosis for her spring collection that year and featured butterflies. Her designs appealed to women who wanted to have fun with fashion. Those who feared ridicule went with Chanel.
I DETEST GIVING IN
But Coco had another worry aside from competition from Schiap. The political situation in France had changed drastically. In April 1936 a Jewish socialist, Léon Blum, was elected premier (prime minister). Coco and her elitist, anti-Semitic peers feared having a Jewish premier. Blum’s left-wing government represented the working class and sought reforms such as paid vacations and unemployment insurance. Wealthy conservatives like Coco were terrified about how their businesses selling luxury goods would be affected by the promised changes. If they were forced to pay higher wages to their workers, they, the owners, would make less money. And if factories that produced fabrics stopped production during strikes, Coco would not have the materials necessary for making clothing.
Textile manufacturers did go on strike. Other strikers included railway workers, waiters in restaurants, bakers, and salespeople in department stores. The country was in turmoil. Demonstrators marched in the streets. Throughout France, thousands of workers went on strike to protect the new benefits enacted by Blum’s government.
It was a strike for love, a strike of the yearning heart.
On June 2, 1936, Coco’s entire staff at rue Cambon walked out. They demanded shorter hours and higher wages in the form of weekly salaries instead of payment for piecework. Coco’s loyal private accountant, Madame Renard, slipped away to the Ritz and told her boss what had happened. She urged Coco to leave Paris for her own safety.
Coco wondered if her workers had gone crazy. “I decided to go and talk to the rebels,” she said. Dressed in a navy blue suit and her real pearls, a visual contrast to her workers’ condition, she hurried over to rue Cambon. But the workers barred the entrance and wouldn’t let her in. The sight of them enraged Coco. They argued. Coco refused to negotiate. “I detest giving in, bending over, humiliating myself,” she told a friend.
Workers prepare the 1931 fall/winter collection in one of Chanel’s tailoring workshops
From her point of view, her employees owed her nothing but gratitude. She maintained that she gave them “perfectly proper” wages. “My staff are always better paid than anyone else’s,” she said, “because I know what work is.” She even provided vacations for certain employees. Every year she sent her “most delicate apprentices” to stay at a “workers’ holiday camp” she had built in Mimizan in the Landes, a resort area on the Atlantic coast of France. Manon Ligeour, one of her top seamstresses, had gone there and appreciated the trip. Manon said, “The first time I saw the sea was at Mimizan.”
Chanel workers on strike, June 1936
Nevertheless, the three hundred strikers held fast. Most of them were not rewarded with trips to the seaside. They expected increased wages and paid vacations. Coco immediately fired all of them. But they stayed and organized a sit-in with music and dancing in the workrooms.
Later Coco reinvented the episode as “cheerful and delightful. T
he accordion could be heard playing all over the house,” she recalled. According to her story, she asked the strikers what they wanted, and they replied, “We don’t see enough of Mademoiselle. Only the models see her.”
“It was a strike for love,” she lied, “a strike of the yearning heart.”
In reality, she denounced her employees and said, “Imagine women . . . staging a sit-down strike. . . . Very pretty. What idiots those girls were!”
Finally, Coco proposed selling her business to the workers, and they could pay themselves whatever they wished. She would remain as a consultant. Of course, the workers couldn’t afford to buy her out, and after three more weeks on strike they settled with her. She agreed to some of their demands, although she really wanted to fire them all. But she couldn’t shut down production any longer. Her lawyer and financial directors advised her to reach a solution by the end of June or she would be unable to present her fall collection. That would mean leaving the field wide open to her competitor, Elsa Schiaparelli, whose employees had never gone on strike because she had paid them well. The event left Coco’s staff tense and resentful. They never forgot her indifference to their struggles despite their having helped make her one of the richest women in the world.
A Chanel gypsy-style dress that appeared in British Vogue, February 22, 1939
A MISTAKE
By 1938, war was threatening to erupt in Europe. Once again as Paris faced catastrophe, the mood was defiantly festive at all levels of society. Workers had jobs, tourists filled expensive hotels, and wealthy socialites partied. “We flitted from ball to ball,” said a young designer, Christian Dior. “Fearing the inevitable cataclysm, we were determined to go down in a burst of splendor.”
Coco, age fifty-five, caught the spirit and designed evening clothes that were more romantic. Coco chose the word “gypsy” to suggest a carefree, artistic quality. Gypsies, or Roma, had come from Bohemia. They lived in lower-class neighborhoods, as did struggling artists and musicians, who were therefore called bohemians. The gypsy style reimagined a picturesque look. Chanel’s gypsy gowns reflected peasant dresses and had full gingham checked taffeta skirts and puff-sleeve embroidered blouses. Even her tailored day suits were decorated with colorful pom-poms and braids. Diana Vreeland, the future editor of Harper’s Bazaar, wrote, “Everyone thinks of suits when they think of Chanel. . . . If you could have seen my clothes from Chanel in the thirties—the dégagé [free and easy] gypsy skirts, the divine brocades, the little boleros, the roses in the hair. . . . And the ribbons were so pretty.”
We were determined to go down in a burst of splendor.
Vreeland had a gown from Coco’s romantic period that she described as “the most beautiful dress I’ve ever owned.” The skirt was made “of silver lamé, quilted in pearls . . . Then the bolero was lace entirely encrusted with pearls and diamanté; then, underneath the bolero was the most beautiful shirt of linen lace.”
During the summer of 1938, Coco spent as much time as she could at her villa, La Pausa. Houseguests included her twelve-year-old grandniece and namesake, Gabrielle Palasse. Gabrielle was the daughter of Coco’s nephew André. That summer, young Gabrielle remembered that they all “clustered around the radio, stupefied and petrified as they listened to the voice of Hitler.”
An illustration of Chanel’s “tricolor” evening dress with red, white, and blue floral embroidery, 1939
In spring 1939, as war with Germany loomed, Coco introduced a patriotic collection featuring the French tricolor flag. She repeated the flag’s bands of blue, white, and red in a charming organdy gown in one of her last collections before the outbreak of war.
This is not the time for making dresses.
“In those final, feverish weeks of freedom, the entire city seemed to be celebrating,” recalled Diana Vreeland.
“Business is close to having a little boom,” reported Janet Flanner, an American writer stationed in Paris. “It has taken the threat of war to make the French loosen up and have a really swell and civilized good time.”
On September 1, 1939, Germany bombed Poland, and on September 3, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany. Three weeks later, Coco closed down the House of Chanel. Without notice, she laid off her entire staff. Only the boutique at 31, rue Cambon stayed open to sell costume jewelry and perfume.
“This is not the time for making dresses,” she said, “nor for dressing the wives of husbands who are going to be killed.”
However, people said that Coco shut down her business out of spite toward her workers, who had gone on strike in 1936. Others whispered that she felt overshadowed by Elsa Schiaparelli and used the war as an excuse to drop out of the competition. Later Coco claimed that she thought all the fashion houses in Paris would close. “I thought no one would go on making dresses,” she said. “I was so stupid, such a dummy about life. . . . Well, I made a mistake. Some people sold dresses all through the war.”
Schiap kept her business open, as did other leading fashion designers. They realized the importance of maintaining the dressmaking industry as a source of income for remaining workers and for the nation’s morale. The French government approached Coco and begged her to reopen the House of Chanel for “the prestige of Paris.” She refused. Then they asked her to show a little patriotic spirit by inventing new uniforms for women officers and nurses. “Me!” she exclaimed. “You must be joking!” No one could force her to do work she considered beneath her. “I had the feeling that we had reached the end of an era,” said Coco, and she retired to her suite at the Ritz.
“The city had become, almost overnight, an empty city,” wrote Carmel Snow, editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar. “You can walk for miles without seeing a child. Even the dogs—and you know how Parisians love their dogs—have been sent away.”
In May 1940 Germany invaded France, and soldiers marched toward Paris. Coco packed some trunks and fled, as did Elsa Schiaparelli and millions of others. Coco and her maid drove to the Pyrenees to stay in the house that she had bought for her nephew André, who was now an officer in the army. Coco’s grandniece Gabrielle remembered her Auntie Coco’s grief when she heard of France’s surrender to Germany on June 22. “We listened to the news on the radio, and she wept bitterly,” recalled Gabrielle.
German troops marching into Paris with the Arc de Triomphe in the background, June 1940
HE ISN’T A GERMAN!
Yet Coco grew restless during the summer and made her way back to Paris. The Nazis had occupied the city, but Hitler had decided not to destroy it. In August Coco returned to the Ritz and found that high-ranking German officers had taken over the hotel, including her grand suite. But the commandant allowed her to stay and gave her a small room. Coco carried on by avoiding the Nazis. She knew from surviving her difficult childhood how to make the best of a bad situation. German soldiers stood in line in front of the House of Chanel in the hope of being able to buy a bottle of perfume. “Idiots!” she sneered.
However, around this time she began dating a German intelligence officer, Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, called Spatz (the Sparrow). Coco at age fifty-seven enjoyed the companionship of a charming younger man. She claimed she had met him before the war. Now Spatz visited her at her private apartment above the salon at rue Cambon. He wore civilian clothes, not a uniform, because he was a spy, a member of the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence agency. He may even have been a double agent working for both the Nazis and the British. “He often came to see Mademoiselle at rue Cambon but we never saw him in uniform,” wrote Coco’s maid, Germaine Domenger, after the war in a letter defending Coco. Coco had been accused of collaborating with the Germans.
Coco and Spatz in 1951 at Villars-sur-Ollon, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland
A friend warned Coco of the danger of having a relationship with a German, but Coco said of Spatz, “He isn’t a German. His mother is English!” She and Spatz spoke English to each other. Coco later said they both loathed the war for disrupting their lives. Spatz had lived in
Paris as a diplomat at the German embassy since 1928 and enjoyed dining in the best restaurants and yachting with his rich friends. During the war he and Coco didn’t go out in public but had dinner parties at the homes of an inner circle that included others who had remained in Paris, among them Picasso, Cocteau, Colette, and Misia. Misia disapproved of Coco socializing with a German. She hated the occupation and the anti-Jewish laws. At one gathering, Misia dared to confront an important German official.
In 1941 Jews in occupied France were forbidden to engage in business and professional activities. The Wertheimers, who managed Coco’s perfume and cosmetics business, were Jewish and had fled France in 1940. They made their way to New York City and continued producing Chanel No 5 in a factory in New Jersey. The Wertheimers sent a trusted American friend back to Paris to pick up the formula for the perfume from the company’s office and to Grasse to buy the necessary ingredients and smuggle the materials into the United States.
Coco felt she now had the opportunity to seize full control of the company. Like many French citizens, she resented Jewish refugees living in France during the 1930s. When Léon Blum, who was a Jew, had become premier in 1936, his accession to power had triggered a hate campaign against Jews, even though he and his ancestors were French born.
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