The posthumous vengeance of Chanel
Melbourne, an enemy of coherent style, plays host to a new exhibition at the NGV commemorating the revolutionary output of fashion icon and Nazi sympathiser, Gabrielle Chanel
Click here to listen to an audio version of this piece, read by the author.
Melbourne is a city whose relationship to beauty remains ambiguous. Here, most fields which aspire to the beautiful must contend with an obscuring shroud of ugliness. Architecture, cinema, visual art – in all of these areas, outstanding work can only become so by transcending the context of stylistic banality in which they’re created.
Fashion, too, fits this description. When you walk around Camberwell or the CBD – where people actively try to glam up – or Albion and Thomastown – where they don’t – you’d be hard pressed to draw any conclusion other than one of pessimism. As in: it all comes to the same ugliness, so why bother? And yet you may be surprised to hear that Melbourne is, apparently, an important fashion city. Or, to use the more amorphous yet potent terminology, we’re fashionable. This, of course, is an argument made with very little reference to history; the heyday of Australian fashion icons, like writer Madge Garland and model June Dally-Watkins, has long since passed.
Nor is it an argument based upon a sound stylistic sense. Rather, reference is often made to our pioneering sustainable practices, our ethical (or not so ethical) production standards – in other words, the fact that we don’t have sweatshops, or that if we do we don’t know about them, or that our companies don’t use cheap overseas labour, or that if they do they’re good enough at greenwashing to hide the bloodstains. And it all makes sense. Ours is a culture more swayed by narrative exigencies than by cold hard data – style over substance, spin over fact, ideology over deed. Fashion, not immune from this trend, is therefore no longer a game of beautification. It has abstracted itself into the realms of politics and socioculture. The result is that sustainability and materiality are instrumentalised as marketing concepts, so as to lend an attractive allure to brands and designers otherwise utterly bereft of aesthetic sense.
I saw this first-hand when, two weeks ago, I attended the Rialto Melbourne Dining Runway, an event held for this year’s Melbourne Fashion Week. Amidst all the loud music and the bluster, it was clear that, for these designers, beauty simply didn’t matter that much, and where it did, the only beauty they were able to harness was a beauty co-opted from the past. In other words, a nostalgia play. Of the brands showcased on that day, the most successful purveyors of the nostalgia style were Vow Studio and Torannce, who, though riffing on a 60s aesthetic, at least deploy a winning combination of taste, self-assurance, and craftsmanship. Their garments are tactful, patterned à la Sixties, interchanging between tight lines and lively, organic looser fits.
The rest of the show, however, was a sequence of more or less uninspired design. Joslin trotted out a number of bland Baroque Provençal nightgowns. Kuwaii did their usual Gorman impersonation. And then came the back to back of Coreprêt and Micky in the Van, two brands who combined to present an exquisite distillation of all the worst elements of fashion’s modern epoch. Quoting from the past without any sense of restraint or tact. Slapping on some gizmos and trinkets to make it sufficiently à la mode. The result? A tour de force of ugly; something arbitrary, belonging neither to the past nor to the present, nor, hopefully, to the future. And as the final model waltzed by, looking like a court jester on LSD, I thought to myself: something about the word “fashion” doesn’t quite belong here, in a place so affected, so incoherent, so unsure of itself. A place so lacking in stylistic vision.
The woman born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was, in some senses, occupied with the same problem. She looked at women in turn-of-the-century France and saw a chilling lack of vision and control which presided over their lives. Her thought, of course, was to redress this issue not through an arbitrary activism, but through the path of beauty. Her success in this endeavour can hardly be understated. Not only was she instrumental in liberating her sisters from their corsets and petticoats – and, for that matter, liberating certain enlightened men from enforcing their rigid expectations of dress – but she was also a pioneering aesthete. Such is perhaps why Christian Dior, in his autobiography Dior on Dior, refers to Chanel and Madeleine Vionnet as “the creators of modern fashion.”
Interestingly, Chanel’s first success was not made of fabric. It was made of aldehydes, bergamot, lemons, ylang-ylang, and about 76 other ingredients. When Chanel, sometime in 1921, selected the fifth of 24 fragrance samples her perfumer had created for her, she could hardly have anticipated exactly what that choice would effect. Nor could she have known that, thirty years later, the only thing Marilyn Monroe would be wearing to bed was the very stuff in that fifth vial. No clothes, no eye-mask – just Chanel N°.5.
Not that Chanel wasn’t making clothes. After beginning her career as a milliner, she moved into sporting and leisure wear in the late 1910s. This is when she began experimenting with jersey, a rather ordinary material commonly employed for men’s underwear. Considered so unrefined, in fact, was jersey that Chanel was really the first designer to notice its rather remarkable features – its comfort, and the lovely way it drapes. For her early garments – rather austere, influenced heavily by menswear – jersey was a perfect option.
But it was the success of Chanel N°.5 which really instigated the process by which Chanel would end up the most famous fashion designer of all time. The next ten years saw her release an ever more stunning sequence of ever more iconic pieces. The Chanel suit in wool bouclé. The first Chanel handbag. And, of course, the little black dress, which provided one of fashion history’s most exquisite examples of what Madge Garland called turning a “feeler” into a fashion. Presented in a mix of fabrics – wool for day dresses, crêpe and silk and velvet for the evening – Chanel’s simple chemise dress in black would, according to Garland and US Vogue, almost single-handedly put women into uniform to an extent unseen outside of a government department. Couture would have to wait another 24 years, when Dior’s New Look arrived on the scene, for another line of designs to produce such seismic reverberations on public style.
In this short period, women had gone from having to apply to the local police office just to wear trousers, to dressing themselves up in clothes that were at once comfortable, fit for purpose, and undeniably chic. Needless to say, it was also a highpoint in Chanel’s career. The output of the atelier on Rue Cambon between 1920 and 1929 was the sort of concentrated phase of prodigious quality which only comes to artists of great genius. Artists like Miles Davis, Joan Didion, Caravaggio, Bashō. They all had their golden periods. So too did Gabrielle Chanel, the girl from Saumur, the illegitimate child orphaned at 11 – she who would one day become the woman nicknamed Coco.
That there have been an unfathomable number of books written about the woman nicknamed Coco is not, however, simply a product of her stylistic legacy. Since her death in 1971, the mystery and aura surrounding the Chanel life has become just as intoxicating to the broader public as the beguiling quality of her designs. Indeed, there are certain aspects of the Chanel life that lend themselves to any involved discussion of the Chanel fashion, for the distinction between the two realms is, predictably, a rather nebulous one. An example: her relationship to her fellow designers. Being the headstrong visionary that she was, Chanel always presumed an interpersonal competition with her rivals – even if it didn’t exist – if only to goad herself into outdoing them all. The first of these was Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian designer who was, if not more formally experimental than Chanel, then certainly more attuned to incorporating novel and somewhat tentative affects into her work. Schiaparelli was heavily influenced by the modern art movement and tried to funnel the artistic potential of surrealism into her designs. Chanel, on the other hand, was mildly misanthropic and mistrusted ephemeral influences. Now we perhaps see why: where Schiaparelli grabbed headlines in her era, her work has been subsumed by the timeless style of her rival. In other words, history has vindicated Coco.
Chanel’s return to the world of couture in 1953, after her shop was closed for the prior 14 years, was again motivated by an accentuated desire to outmode the mode. Except, where her rivalry with Schiaparelli was perhaps a touch semantic, her revolt against the dominant male designers of the post-war era – Christian Dior, Jacques Fath, Cristobal Balenciaga, Hubert de Givenchy – struck closer to the bone. The New Look had ushered in a renewed interest in reaffirming the old strictures on female dress; petticoats and corsets and bodices were back in a big way, as were gay colours and extravagant billows. Looking upon the world of couture and watching her gains of the twenties being undone by a series of classicist male designers, Chanel simply couldn’t hold back.
The question of how things got to that point – i.e., why the New Look was allowed to reign supreme – begs another question. In those long years from 1939 to 1953, during which the cultural centrality of the Chanel elegance was transplanted by the behemoth of classicist couture, where, exactly, was Coco?
Okay, reader – we need to pause here for a moment, because this is where we discover why there are a hundred books written about Coco Chanel. With this in mind, I won’t belabour the point with all the gory details – there are, as I said, a hundred books which do exactly that. So let me eschew my journalistic responsibilities for a second and lay it all out cleanly and neatly, in broad strokes, ignoring the minutiae. In 1939, with war approaching, Chanel closes the atelier. The Germans begin their occupation of Paris in June 1940. Chanel, opting to remain in the city, hides out in the Hotel Ritz with her lover, Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a German aristocrat. Using the diplomatic connections she’d forged during her early years of fame – exemplified by her close relationship with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill – Chanel becomes an interstate envoy between warring groups. But the word soon gets around that Coco is a collabo. An Allied dossier on Chanel is written, labelling her an indicatrice(informant). The occupation ends, then the war soon after. Churchill pulls off a feat of political baksheesh so that Chanel, by now heavily suspect to her own people, can flee to Switzerland with von Dincklage. She remains there for eight years. Yes, reader – the books almost write themselves.
So, too, do the conclusions. It’s only reasonable to draw, from the simplified version of the Chanel life which I’ve just laid out, that Coco Chanel was at best a Nazi sympathiser and at worst a collaborating agent. Edmonde Charles-Roux was the first to pen a lengthy account of Chanel’s wartime behaviours, in a book published in 1974, three years after Chanel’s death. Charles-Roux’s findings were then further concretised in Hal Vaughan’s 2011 book Sleeping with the Enemy, which incorporated the use of newly unclassified intelligence material. Sleeping with the Enemy was a bestseller, with an unyielding narrative power. It has rendered the Chanel-collabo narrative unavoidably commonplace, and has thus bequeathed to us one simple postulate: any discussion of Chanel’s legacy henceforth must perforce raise the thorny issue of her Nazi collaboration.
Part of the problem is that, if we opt for the layered version of the Chanel life, the picture gets even grimier. For example, there is the matter of Chanel’s lifelong anti-Semitism, the effects of which were arduously detailed by Hal Vaughan’s book. Her anti-Jewish fervour reached its culmination in the battle for control over Parfums Chanel, the perfume wing of the Chanel business empire and one of its most lucrative arms. Owned by the Wertheimer family since its inception in the early-20s, Chanel attempted to enforce wartime laws preventing Jewish ownership of business in German territory. That the Wertheimer brothers had cunningly foreseen Chanel’s play and temporarily sold off their share to a Frenchman is perhaps one of those strikes of secret ingenuity which Chanel would file under Jewish conspiratorialism.
In researching for this piece, the Wertheimer story reared its head over and over again. Why? Because we now live in Hal Vaughan’s world, where Coco Chanel, public figure, has superseded Gabrielle Chanel, designer. Sleeping with the Enemy has set in motion the evolving face of the Chanel legacy. Now, articles overly obsequious are derided in their comment sections as servile propaganda. The tide has turned. As I was reading one rather meandering Chanel lionisation, I decided to skip to the end of the page, where I came across a comment much longer than the rest. It went: “I hope in section 2, the author intends to tell us how this ‘icon’ sided with the Nazis during the war, turned in her friends, neighbors [sic] and would have turned in her own benefactors had they not already fled France and played spy and information gatherer for the Germans. Her contributions to fashion aside, Coco Chanel was no one to be idolized. She was in fact a pretty terrible person.”
Alors. It’s easy to see why Chanel remains an elusive figure for us: because she represents, in the way of many of history’s great artists, the fine line that separates the sacred and the profane, the divine and the demonic, the progressive and the transgressive. (Of course, in many ways, walking that fine line is the very essence of the artistic process.) For this reason, her legacy remains ambiguous. We simply cannot decide how we feel about her, nor whether we can separate art from artist, nor whether we should, nor whether we want to. On one hand, Gabrielle Chanel is an early feminist, an emancipator. The woman who freed her sisters from the tyranny of the corset, and put them into clothes. On the other, she’s a dirigible vessel of perverse moral standing, completely self-absorbed and utterly without interest in the concept of persecution.
Germaine Greer put it well when she wrote, in The Female Eunuch: “Womanpower means the self-determination of women, and that means that all the baggage of paternalist society will have to be thrown overboard. Woman must have room and scope to devise a morality which does not disqualify her from excellence, and a psychology which does not condemn her to the status of a spiritual cripple.” Except, in Chanel’s case, her agency was instrumentalised to ends both holy and horrid. Indeed, so ambiguous is Chanel’s legacy that, in the city whose reputation for chic and elegance was forged in part off the back of Coco, not a solitary major exhibition of her work had been held before last year.
Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto is that exhibition. It has made its way from the Palais Galleria in Paris’s 16tharrondissement, around the corner from the Museum of Modern Art and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, home to Kathmandu puffers and too much denim.
The trip across the continent has not, however, been accompanied by much fanfare. Indeed, in talking to people about the exhibition over the past few weeks, I have witnessed an almost unanimous misapprehension: everybody seems to believe that Coco Chanel and Gabrielle Chanel are two different people. And then, almost as soon as I entered the exhibition itself, I heard it again. A mother was talking to her daughter, who was scrolling rapidly through a Wikipedia page. “So who was Coco?” the mother asked. “I don’t know,” the daughter said. “But I’m looking at the dates and they’re exactly the same.”
This, according to Mirien Arzalluz, director of the Palais Galleria and co-curator of the original exhibition, is precisely the point. “We didn’t want to talk about the legend. We didn’t want to talk about Coco Chanel. So, we reclaimed her name Gabrielle Chanel. We wanted to talk about her as a designer and not the legend.” Indeed, the relationship with von Dincklage gets all of two sentences in the entire exhibition – barely a plaque’s-worth of wall space. It was for this reason that, in another interview, Arzalluz described the exhibition as a “very comprehensive, classic retrospective.”
Except that’s just the thing – such a non-biographical exhibition is not at all the norm any longer. I recall several exhibitions I’ve seen in the past few years, in particular on Vincent van Gogh and Egon Schiele, which were almost as much materialised biographies as they were artistic displays. Fashion Manifesto is instead guided by a narrative apathy, opting for a pure and detached celebration of the stylistic achievements of the house of Chanel.
The exhibition initially opens out onto a large room wherein the early dresses are displayed. Beiges and blacks. Crenelated collar cuts and small bows. Diagonal stitching and asymmetrical hemlines. Patterns appear infrequently, but are never confusing when they do – they’re always organic, unfussy, coherent. Of course, some of the jazzier numbers – dresses with embroidered flourishes like beads and tubes – strike as rather dated, and I couldn’t help but presume that the reason all the garments were presented on headless mannequins was that to see them more fully embodied by a female figure would further pronounce their anachronistic qualities. But then, those somewhat dated dresses are few and far between the wealth of austere and considered elegance which so famously lends Chanel the label of “timeless.” The series of little black dresses is particulary delightful; to see what Chanel made of such a simple premise is enough to turn anyone a believer, and one can quite easily see why the concept was such a critical and commercial hit.
Alongside these early garments runs a video, dating from the magical early period of Chanel, wherein a number of models strut down a staircase lined with a series of tall mirrors. This, of course, is the famous staircase of Chanel’s atelier at 32 rue Cambon, and it’s like something out of The Lady from Shanghai. The succession of garments elegantly sported down the staircase is a dazzling treat, and becomes a motif throughout the exhibition.
The accoutrements, of course, get their due credit. The Chanel N°.5 display features the overlaid audio of Monroe’s famous interview grab. The small space given to Chanel’s 2.55 bag suffices to connote its elegance and ingenuity. And the room wherein presides Chanel’s jewellery work – a work scarcely discussed in Chanel retrospectives – is a kaleidoscope of glimmering treasures. In particular, her collaborations with the House of Gripoix, which produced her designs for leaves, roses, acorns, and other regalia in sparkling gold and jewels, is a delight. Yet it also contains arguably the weakest section of the exhibition: Chanel’s iconographic jewellery, inspired by religious symbolism, which is prone to strike as completely distasteful and not all that elegant.
But sparkling brighter than all else are the garments, which so wholly and devastatingly exemplify genius that not a single additional dress is required to make the point. Nothing lacks, nothing is missing. It’s just us, mirrors, and the creations of a visionary. The great hall of Chanel suits is a highlight, for it displays all the fervidness and originality of Chanel’s mind. They’re not sexy like some of the dresses – although certain of the red suits go a pretty long way in getting there – but then, they’re not aiming for sex appeal. They’re aiming for elegance, for grace, for that ineffable thing called chic. And chic they are, unwaveringly so, even in spite of the variety on display. Braided blazers, tasteful buttons featuring the double-C logo, skirts sometimes lightly pleated and other times not, cuffs which are neatened or buttoned or folded or removable. It’s a medley of brilliance and refinement, an adventitious blend of austerity and what Edmond Charles-Roux called her “breath of naturalness.”
But that wasn’t all, because before I knew it, I was immediately won over yet again. Just around the corner from the suits is the final room of the exhibition: the late dresses. All designed and executed after her belated return to the world over which she’d domineered for almost twenty years, the dresses are the most scintillating exemplification of what exactly made Chanel a genius. For the late work is an apotheosis to some of the more tentative experiments she was making in her early days. It’s the culminating point. It’s all of the prior work synthesised and distilled. Where the early work is sometimes too frivolous and too fluid, the late work is more definite, less rhythmical, and oh so assured. Where the early styles dip into exuberance, Chanel reigns in her revolutionist tendencies to perfection in the late work. And where there are early dresses which are simply too gaudy and can’t be worn anymore, there is not a single dress I saw from her post-1954 output which couldn’t be worn, to great fanfare no less, in 2021.
This is how the exhibition ends: on a note of breathlessness. I found myself bereft of speech, even somewhat emotional, wandering around that final room for what felt like an eternity, soaking it all in, seeing myself reflected on every shimmering surface as if I’d been dropped into a diamond prism from on high. And then, as I looked around, I realised that I was, in fact, alone. And I also realised that for most of the exhibition I had been flanked by a rather intransigent dribble of people. It had been more or less empty the entire time. Was this the result of a typically Melbournian disinterest in capital-F Fashion? Was it a consequence of the moral disgust directed towards the exhibiting artist? Was it simply that I went on a Tuesday morning? All three seemed plausible; yet it didn’t really matter. Alone or not, I was having a pure experience of aesthetic pleasure – and those who know me know that there is little more I could ever want.
Indeed, what is most compelling about Fashion Manifesto is precisely that purity of vision which the curators brought to it. I can’t express how refreshing it is to see an unfussy, apolitical exhibition which extols not the virtues of its celebrant, nor derides their misdeeds, but simply holds the microscope over the work and allows the viewer to make their own mind up. After all, the work is the legacy. The narrative has come and gone; all involved are now dead. But the Chanel name lives on through the women she dressed. The name endures in all those who now wear little black dresses, or wear her perfume, or wear trousers. As Yves Saint Laurent said, “She created the woman of her time.” Indeed, walking through the exhibition, having seen the style of the Jazz Age historicised in popular culture, one is liable to assume that it was Chanel who conformed to the styles of those années folles, the Roaring Twenties. But we must remember that it was, in fact, the style which formed around her. And though Karl Lagerfeld would turn Chanel into a $100 billion business, the principle remains the same. Lagerfeld didn’t build; he built on.
“Couture,” Chanel said, “creates beautiful things which become ugly, while art creates ugly things which become beautiful.” In Dior by Dior, the author adds an addendum. “I would venture to correct Mlle Chanel in one respect,” he says: “There is such a thing as the posthumous vengeance of fashion, and the ugly can become beautiful again with the passing of time.” Indeed, there has been a posthumous vengeance involving Mademoiselle Chanel, though not quite the one Dior may have imagined. Very few of the Chanel fashions have become ugly; but the reputation has been torched in an age unwilling to separate the work from its creator. Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifestoshould be applauded for attempting to do so. In its own way, it has concretised just why Chanel is probably the greatest designer of her time, affording her exactly the kind of posthumous vengeance she deserves. Her art is her only voice left. The rest is dirt in a grave in Lausanne, Switzerland – a grave which, you’ll perhaps be unsurprised to hear, Gabrielle Chanel designed herself.