Coco Chanel - la dame aux camlias

BY LINDA GRANT | 29 JULY 2007

The little black dress, tweed suits, costume
jewellery and red lipstick - we owe them all to
Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel. As a new book celebrates
her signature style, Linda Grant assesses the
legacy of fashion's very arch modernist
In the autumn of 2005 I attended the launch party
for Justine Picardie's entrancing new book about
the history of all the clothes she had ever worn, My
Mother's Wedding Dress : the Life and Afterlife of
Clothes. Picardie's mother had, far back in the
1960s, got married in a little black dress, now
faithfully copied for her daughter to wear at the
party. The launch was held at the Chanel store in
Knightsbridge, and it was a tribute to the power of
a single word - Chanel - that almost every woman
in the room was wearing a little black dress. Black
had just made a comeback, but for many of us it
had simply never gone away. The LBD, so easy to
wear, so versatile in its possible interpretations as
fashions come and go, is probably the single most
enduring style statement of the 20th century,
already racing on into the 21st.

The moment you say the word Chanel a picture

comes to mind: of a square, stoppered perfume
bottle, a little suit, a white camellia. Coco Chanel,
credited with being the person who invented
modern clothes, stamped her adamant, distinctive
personality on everything she touched. An
addictive new book, Chanel: Collections and
Creations, by Danile Bott, explores five designs
that changed the world and asks what it was about
Chanel's visual statements that are so enduring
and alluring. Students of fashion can identify Dior's
New Look, Yves Saint Laurent's le Smoking,
Schiaparelli's skeleton dress or Jean Paul Gaultier's
conical bra, but such is the power of the Chanel
brand that if you showed those two intertwined Cs
to any woman in any city in the world she would
recognise them at once.
For Chanel style, someone who has never shopped
further upmarket than Marks & Spencer can still
buy a bottle of No 5 at duty-free, or a black powder
compact at the make-up department of John Lewis.
A man I know, who has been wearing the same
uniform of jeans and leather jacket since the
1960s, has as his one concession to fashion the
Chanel Homme aftershave he has loyally stuck to

for 30 years because he likes the simple classic

lines of its packaging.
It's hard to underestimate how much Chanel style
has changed us all. The black dress existed before
Chanel turned her attention to it, but it was
considered funereal and, in the years before the
First World War, buried under bows, pleats, lace,
bustles and leg-of-mutton sleeves. What Chanel
meant was a dress that was minimalist,
sophisticated, elegant, to be worn at any time of
day. Reacting against the sumptuous designs of her
immediate predecessor, Paul Poiret , she advocated
what she called 'austere luxury', the essence of
chic. Her revolutionary approach to design meant
that the black dress could be worn as day, cocktail
and evening wear. 'A woman dressed in black
draws attention to herself, not her dress,' observes
Bott.
The very first LBD, the Ford of dresses, she called
it, referring to the Model T car built on a production
line for the masses, was designed to be
democratic; any woman could wear one. The
original design shows a long-sleeved, slim-hipped
dress, gathered low at the waist and reaching to
just below the knee. Its only adornments are two
pleated Vs dropping from the shoulders and rising

from the hem, meeting in the middle to further

create the illusion of slimness. You could step out in
it today and no one would notice that you were
wearing something designed more than 80 years
ago. Chanel would develop this concept for the rest
of her life, altering the fabrics, adding sequins or
chiffon trains, but the underlying structure
remained. A black dress, with dropped waist and
schoolgirl white collars and cuffs, worn over leather
footless tights from 2003 reveals how radical her
thought was. 'A fashion that goes out of fashion
overnight is a distraction, not a fashion,' she said.
Chanel launched her career at the height of
modernism, in design, art, literature and music. By
returning to the essential form, the movement
showed radical simplicity. Modernism was the
thinking woman's fashion statement, and derived
its power from the idea that women were no longer
to be wholly decorative. They could act, and
needed clothes to wear while doing so. Chanel
herself designed things not as playful allusions to
what had gone before but to meet the demands of
her own life and body. When Karl Lagerfeld arrived
at Chanel in 1982, there seemed to be no more
unlikely a designer to lead the house. A master of
post-modernism, he was the opposite of everything

Chanel stood for, yet his greatest triumph was the

revival of the Chanel suit.
My mother, slim and only 5ft 2in, had a wardrobe
full of good-quality high-street copies of the Chanel
suit. She knew they were what suited her best and
she hung on to them long after they went out of
fashion. The Chanel suit dates from the reopening
of the fashion house in 1954 (it had closed during
the war), but it was Jackie Kennedy who made it
famous. In jersey and tweed, with its collarless
jacket and slim skirt, it was meant to be a kind of
second skin. Worn with a quilted chain-handle bag,
two-tone slingbacks and a camellia brooch, it was a
look as simple and sophisticated as the little back
dress, but less dressed-up. Chanel insisted that
every suit had pockets into which a woman's hand
could actually fit, the jacket hem was weighted to
ensure it hung properly, and the only concession to
embellishment was the gilt buttons embossed with
lion's head, stars, the sun or double C.
Lagerfeld radically reinterpreted the suit, making it
in pink tweed, fraying the hems and jacket edges
(a trend that worked its way to the Per Una range
at Marks & Spencer), and in the process turned it
into one of the most celebrated comebacks in the
history of fashion.

One thing Chanel was quite clear about was her

dislike of the unadorned face: 'I don't understand
how a woman can leave the house without fixing
herself up a little - if only out of politeness,' she
said. She regarded the lips as the primary weapons
of seduction and insisted on painting them a deep
vermillion. As far back as 1921 she made her first
stick of colour, protected in wax paper, the
precursor of the lipstick as we know it today. Next
she made for herself a mother-of-pearl tube, then a
push-up case in gunmetal grey. Pictures of her
early cosmetics show the designs to be startling
similar to today's. The No 5 bottle remains
unchanged since the 1920s. The black boxes she
used for her powder and eyeshadow go back as far
as 1932, and were made from Bakelite, then being
used in car manufacturing.
But Chanel did not entirely eschew adornment. She
was an inveterate wearer of necklaces, and the
lavish, even Byzantine luxury of her jewellery
contrasted with the minimalist lines of her clothing.
The spectacular Comte necklace of 1932 is a
diamond star from which a cascade trail of 649
diamonds drapes itself round the shoulder, arching
at the neck and ending at the base of the throat. It
is interesting that Chanel, who adored the

minimalist form, should have thrown pearls and

gold chains all over her severe canvas. Bott offers
some suggestions: in the 1930s Chanel had
accepted a commission from the International
Diamond Guild, which she took because she felt
that, in times of economic depression, too much
austerity was depressing. Another possibility is
that her lover, Paul Iribe, was a jewellery designer.
But perhaps there is a more material consideration:
before she was a major designer she was a
courtesan, the lover of wealthy men such as the
Duke of Westminster who, in the tradition of the
times, rewarded her affections with gifts of
diamonds.
Yet her originality would hit on one emblem, the
camellia, which in her hands became a necklace, a
watch, a hat, a chignon, a detail on a button, or
just a silk flower pinned to a dress. There was
something radically simple about its shape, what
Bott calls 'its perfect, almost geometric roundness'.
As far back as 1922 a stylised camellia is
embroidered on a blouse. Every season it appears
as a jewelled monogram on a toe or beaded outline
on the heel of a Chanel shoe. Like the lotus in
Buddhism, the camellia expressed for Chanel a
shape with infinite possibilities. And so she goes

on, the way she saw and thought affecting the lives
of millions unborn when she first discarded what
was known and set out on an adventure into the
future.