The Scissors Queen

 

Without horses, English and a pair of scissors, Coco Chanel (1883-1971) would never have been the successful entrepreneur and the fashion icon she is hailed today. 

In her early life in Auvergne, she dated a rich cavalry officer and learned to ride and love horses.  As a matter of fact, the French “mettre le pied à l’étrier (put one’s foot on the stirrup) means winning one’s spurs and getting started in life.  She was also a committed Anglophile, she opened her business horizon by learning to speak and write English, an uncommon feat for a female orphan from central France.  Last but not least, Coco had always a pair of scissors hanging from her neck.  She neither sketched nor designed her clothes (she could not draw), instead, a model was made based on her recommendations.  Since it seldom pleased her, she took her scissors to remodel it to her taste in an act of destructive fitting.  She also enjoyed to cut down to size her rivals in the fashion business, Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior being her favorite targets.

As a fellow Auvergnate, Chanel has long fascinated me: her puzzling personality and fashion longevity attracted my curiosity.  Importantly, many women I admired at the time wore Chanel.  I obviously refer to her post comeback period (1954). I was living in Australia when she passed away in 1971.  Between WW1 and WW2, Chanel revolutionized woman’s fashion by designing chic, comfortable and easy to wear garments; she popularized slacks for women, jersey for dresses, skirts and sweaters.  Coincidentally, one woman before Chanel had tried to free women from corset.  It was Queen Marie Antoinette who donned loose, white muslin dresses in the Trianon, a scandalous style at the time.  It didn’t end well.  Marie Antoinette’s little white dress was precursor to Chanel’s little black dress.

                                                            Lee Miller wearing Chanel

In the 1950s, I was too young to be aware of the notorious rivalry between the House of Dior and Chanel.  Retrospectively, I can side with Chanel.  Christian Dior’s New Look collection (1947) brought back into fashion the 19^th century woman, albeit with a modernized version of the corset and the crinoline.  Chanel condemned The New Look as a backward “male” move to restore the frivolous, seductive and ultra feminine Parisian.  The French public, always keen to revere its past glory, loved The New Look, and later on, criticized Chanel’s comeback collection (1954) as being plain and déjà vu.  Conversely, Chanel’s chic and comfortable clothes were instant hits in the American department stores.  Now, the rest is history.

Countless books, films and mini-series have attempted to crack open Coco Chanel’s personality, and probably more are in the making.  She was a master of reinvention, so hard to figure out who she truly was.  She masterfully controlled her image by covering her tracks.  Chanel’s life is a tale of rag-to-rich.  After the death of her mother, her deadbeat father disappeared.  With her sister, she was dumped into an orphanage run by nuns.  With her survivor grit and pragmatism, she made most of the hardship to learn the seamstress trade.  To bury her destitute and unloved childhood, she kept reinventing it to the point of believing the fantasy.  Her fashion trade mark, the genre pauvre was influenced by her impoverished youth.  

Soon out of the orphanage, she dated wealthy men, sugar daddies including an English duke to move up and get into the fashion business.  Later on, when she could afford to financially sustain her lovers, a succession of colorful kept men including a Russian Archduke and a Nazi spy shared her life.  Coco was the canny cougar woman of the Paris jungle.  As an enthusiastic art lover, she was besieged by a coterie of freeloaders, notably Russian artists.  Igor Stravinsky and his family lived off her generosity.  Chanel remained single all her life.

                                 Coco with Sugar Daddy "Boy" Capel. She paid him back.

During the Nazi occupation of France, she cozies up with the occupants.  Ideological conviction? Opportunism? Expediency? The jury is still out.  She sought their help to get her nephew (or hidden son?) out a German stalag and use the so-called Nazi Aryan laws to snatch the majority stake of her successful perfume business from her Jewish partner.  After the war she paid the medical treatment and funeral of a convicted war criminal.  Her legacy was tarnished forever.  Before dying, she had made peace with Pierre Wertheimer, her secretive Jewish partner.  She ended up her fascinating business journey with scissors in hand. The eve of death she was still clipping garments.  She died with an asset worth $ 5 million (about $40m today).  Pierre’s sons own 100% of the Chanel brand and their combined net worth is estimated between $90-100 billion.

 

Apple TV, The New Look, 2014.

Janet Flanner, 31, Rue Cambon, The New Yorker, Marsh 14, 1931.

Justine Picardie, Coco Chanel, The Legend and The Life. HarperCollins, London 2017.