A Fashion Icon’s Rise From Poverty Into Haute Couture: The Story Behind the Chanel Legend

Inside the House of Chanel at 31, Rue Cambon in Paris.

Inside the shop, where dazzling visions of Chanel-clothed selves are refracted from mirrors and videos played on a screen, the message is clear. This is a brand that leverages an enduring legacy – of familiar symbols and myths and a certain iconography – but also signals change. Such permanence married with movement and transience is perhaps inevitable in the fashion business. As Coco Chanel herself once declared, “A dress is neither a tragedy, nor a painting; it is a charming and ephemeral creation, not an everlasting work of art. Fashion should die and die quickly in order that commerce may survive…”

Beyond the ground floor shop, on the higher floor, inside another exclusive space custom couture are designed for premium customers. Moving onward and upward on the mirrored spiral staircase – that seems to magnify the dismembering of one’s limbs as one ascends the surreal structure – lies Chanel’s own office space, surrounded by Chinese screens and leather-bound books and walls with gold-rimmed borders. Though Chanel died in 1971, the place has been preserved mausoleum-like, revealing aspects of the formidable founder to curious visitors.

“There is evidence of great wealth, and perhaps of great love…” writes Justine Picardie, in her biography of the fashion icon. Chanel’s first lover, Boy Capel, was reputed have induced her fondness for screens. Chanel’s own life was shrouded in layers and mysteries. As Picardie observes this is perhaps unsurprising for a woman who helped other women sculpt new versions and new conceptions of themselves.

Chanel’s Childhood in an Orphanage

Chanel was born “Gabrielle” in 1883, in a poorhouse in Saumur, a “town on the Loire.” Her parents were not yet married, but they already had one child, born a year earlier. Her parents were traders, wandering merchants who sold “buttons and bonnets, aprons and overalls.”

Chanel herself often spoke of trains and sometimes claimed to have been born in one. But records indicate that her birth occurred in a poorhouse, amidst a group of nuns. She spent much of her childhood in a graveyard, playing among tombstones, that she decorated with flowers. She brought her own ragdolls to the tombstones and spent much time conversing with the dead.

She also recalls her mother being sick and coughing blood on white hankies, and a room filled with red wallpaper in an uncle’s home, where she might have felt somewhat imprisoned. Chanel was only 11, when her mother died. Her father drove her and her two sisters to an orphanage run by an abbey. She pretty much hated her time in the cloistered orphanage, where she spent 7 years, till she turned 18.

Inside that abbey, which Picardie revisits, you encounter the monastic sparseness of Chanel’s childhood, spent on iron cots with crucifixes dangling over them, surrounded by pristine white walls. In the distance, one can glimpse forests and mountains. The famous “knots and loops” hurled by the light through the window pane “look eerily like the double C of Chanel’s logo.”

There also seemed strictures inside the convent about not loving one’s body too much. Hence the girls were made wear white shifts while bathing. They used to be spanked by the nuns for any misdemeanors. Even in those confined years, she recalled some of her dresses – the white chiffon she wore at her Communion, a flouncy mauve dress the nuns permitted her to get stitched but not wear, seeding perhaps a deep yearning to clothe herself and eventually the world, on her own terms.

Learning to Sew As a Young Adult

At 18, she left Aubazine and moved to the Notre Dame School at Mouline, where she was treated as a “little peasant.” She wasn’t cultured – for instance, she wasn’t trained to play the piano or to dress as well as the others. She was “a girl who wore a plain pauper’s uniform with second-hand shoes rather than the expensive outfits of fee-paying students.”

But she also learned to sew here. Later at Moulins, Gabrielle and her younger aunt Adrienne were employed as “assistants” at a draper’s shop – which sold wedding trousseaux and mourning outfits, among other clothes. The work involved the production of new clothes as well assisting with the running of the store. In addition to this job, they also helped at another tailor’s enterprise, outfitting soldiers’ breeches.

Gabrielle Chanel Becomes Coco Chanel

Since the town was often flooded with military folks, the men often asked Gabrielle and her aunt out. Such dates involved forays to a neighborhood park that also hosted a performance space – the La Rotonde. Here Chanel, discovering a love for wooing audiences, often took to the stage to sing two songs, one of which was titled “Qui qu’a vu Coco?” The song was about a girl and her lost dog, Coco and soon Gabrielle was teasingly nicknamed “Coco” by the audience.

So Gabrielle morphed into Coco. As Picardie puts it, it was a “a metamorphosis that might have been humiliating rather than liberating, but nevertheless led to the birth of a legend.”

Chanel Forays into High Society

Later, in the town of Vichy, she met a man called Etienne Balsan, who invited her to his father’s chateau and broke her away from a rather desultory life till then.

Balsan lived in an estate in the vicinity of large forests called Royallieu. As perhaps one among Balsan’s several women, Coco was quick to stand out from the others by dressing herself differently. Donning “simple riding breeches and equestrian jackets,” donning a functional, masculine approach when it was perhaps considered revolutionary for a woman. Besides, she often hung about the horses, with riding being one of her ways of inhabiting freedom.

Yet her memories of that period often revolve around anguish at how young she was when Balsan courted her, at how imprisoned she felt at the chateau. She spent six years there, during which she further embellished her sewing skills. Moreover, she observed the mannerisms and ploys of Balsan’s courtesans, and the false superiority of the society women.

The Significance of the Double C

She then met Arthur Capel, who was also called “Boy.” She was 26 then, and claimed to be inexorably in love with a man she had hardly spoken to, but whose appearance charged her with excitement.

Yet her relationship with Capel, whom she lived with in Paris, seesawed “between freedom and subjugation, liberty and compulsion.” Capel, who also had other affairs, occasionally “corrected” or reprimanded her. But Coco also dwelt on how Capel refused to abandon her, despite others urging him to do so. He apparently said he’d rather chop off his leg rather than break away Coco.

There were too, at this point, wranglings between Balsan and Coco about possessing, or about sharing expenses for her upkeep. It was a period, too, when most women had to sustain themselves either as a man’s mistress or wife. But Coco also harbored a private ambition: “What she did want was to earn her own living.”

Chanel Starts A Hat Business

Since she had already been making hats for herself and her girlfriends, both Balsan and Capel agreed to co-sponsor her hat-making enterprise. Coco already had a clear sense of what kind of aesthetic she wanted. She wasn’t taken in by the overly decorated or complicated, opting instead for straw boat hats, stylishly fitted out with ribbons. She had foreseen that women might want to adorn themselves with a hitherto unseen sleekness – in a style exuding youthfulness, functionality and “chic”.

Soon, most Parisian beauties had started making a beeline to her hat store. Since the business was doing so well, she needed to move to a larger place. Coco herself often modeled her own hats at various events, drawing curious glances because of her petite frame and seeming demureness. But even as Capel funded her growing enterprise – which had now expanded into selling clothes, besides hats – he continued his flings with other women, leading Chanel to teeter between indifference and anguish.

The only anchor in her life seemed to be her flourishing business. Later, she had grown her business to a point, that she was truly financial freed from Capel’s tugs. But the “Double C” Chanel logo, which has two Cs looping into each other but also with their backs turned seems to signify her relationship with Capel. After all, as the first person to fund her enterprise, he was an angel investor or co-founder of sorts.

As the First World War erupted around them, Coco continued to build her business, moving her workers to Deauville, a seaside resort. Her clothes also seemed most appropriate for that period – being sleek and functional, the kind of clothes in which women could engage in more active work, including driving vehicles, or caring for the wounded. Chanel presaged the turn in history, moving away from the earlier eras of corsets and restrictive, lacy dresses that had confined women in domestic spaces or as social objects to be admired. Moreover, Chanel’s colours too were strikingly monochromatic – a bold change from the profusion of tints that had marked the past.

The Creation of The Little Black Dress

One evening, when Chanel was planning to go to the opera, she burnt parts of her hair because of the malfunctioning of a hot water tap. Her white dress was covered with soot. That evening, she took a pair of scissors and snipped off her three braids, and changed into a little black dress. With her boyish short hair and her distinctly bold black dress, she caught the attention of everyone at the opera.

Soon, she defiantly promoted “Black” as a new fashion trend – overtaking the siren reds or electric blues being introduced by other designers. With a Black that swallowed other colors and perhaps even overwhelmed them, Chanel continued to grow her business and engrave her distinct approach on women’s fashion.

The Making of Chanel Number Five

Like in everything else in Chanel’s life, there are many versions circulating about the origins her famed scent – Chanel N 5. In one account, the scent was created by the Russian chemist, Ernest Beaux, who had discovered how to preserve the scents of flowers with aldehydes. When he showed it to Chanel, among a bouquet of other scents, she picked it at once as her signature perfume.

In other stories, Chanel is reputed to have concocted it herself, while recovering from the grief of Capel’s death in an accident. Or of stumbling on it during a visit to a lab. But whatever its origins, it was Coco Chanel who devised a clever way of promoting the perfume – and attaching its mysterious allure to her brand. It was the enticement of that chemical mixture that turned Chanel into an irresistible global brand, with Coco, like the mischievous Pied Piper, leading the world’s customers by their noses.

Bouncing Back After Setbacks

Like most other founders of long-term enterprises, she had to withstand setbacks. Post World War II, the French Press scoffed at her attempts to revive her business. They dismissed her new collections as staid and repetitive. Moreover, there was some suspicions about her wartime loyalties, especially in the light of her ill-judged liaisons with German officers.

But in the 1950s, as Picardie puts it, “[it] was America that celebrated the comeback of Coco Chanel.”  Life magazine ran a four-page feature on her in 1954. Chanel was 71, but still hard at work, with a diligence and chic that evoked attention and admiration. Even as she aged, she continued to produce clothes that had a signature androgynous look, freeing women from the shapes and forms imposed by her competitors – most of whom were men. Celebrities like Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy took to wearing her clothes. Jackie Kennedy’s iconic pink suit, stained with the blood of her assassinated husband, was a Chanel suit.

At 74, when the New Yorker interviewed her, the writer Lillian Ross said, “At 74, Mlle Chanel is sensationally good-looking, with dark-brown eyes, a brilliant smile, and the unquenchable vitality of a twenty-year-old…” With her pair of scissors tied to a ribbon that was looped around her neck, Chanel continued to snip and cut till the end. She always had an eye for detail, and sometimes she would remake a single suit 35 times, till every arm hole  and hem line and pleat and sleeve was exactly as it should be.  

References

Justine Picardie, Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life, Harper Collins e-books, 2011