Coco Chanel and Contagious Celebrity

Coco Chanel and Contagious Celebrity, Rhonda Garelick
More than a fashion designer, Gabriele Chanel was a modern-day mythologist, the first couturiere to
understand and harness in her work the art of self-reinvention and promotion on a global scale. Born to
peasants and raised with little formal education in a provincial orphanage, Chanel sought to leave behind
her impoverished childhood and rewrite the narrative of her life. Discovering her talent for design early,
Chanel, by the age of thirty-one, had established her first boutique in the affluent resort town of Deauville,
where she not only dressed the vacationing rich, she became one of them. Trading on her beauty and
compelling personality, she steered herself into the beau monde and acquired a kind of parallel royalty of
style. Friends were enlisted to tutor her in art, literature, and history: some served as accent coaches,
helping her to acquire more Parisian tones. Whenever she was asked about her early life, Chanel would
offer fictional—and ever-shifting—versions of it, with peasant roots, orphanage, and poverty neatly
expunged. “The lies ... became her truth,·writes Lilou Marquand, Chanel's longtime assistant. "Different
stories would contradict one another. You had to forget the earlier version and believe the latest one."
The transformation was successful: Gabrielle created for herself a glamorous alter ego, "Coco—an
athletic, sexually independent playgirl noted for her cultivation, famous friends, and royal lovers. Mindful
of the commercial power of her myth, Chanel made sure to be photographed wearing only her own
designs while living the life she knew her customers already lived, or wished to live, and fusing her public
life to her art.
Chanel became a celebrity in the modern sense, a trademark personality whose performance of a
carefully tended persona became indistinguishable from her actual life. In performing this highly
constructed self, Chanel made use of the layering of narrative characteristic of media celebrity. We see
such layered narratives in the performances of iconic stars such as Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, or
even Arnold Schwarzenegger—performers who always play, in part, themselves—or rather, the roles they
invent for themselves. Like those actors, Chanel created a persona that she layered atop her more
humble, biographical self, creating her own mythological character.
But in Chanel's case, the layering effect of media celebrity is more complex and pervasive than it is in
the realm of strict performance. As a fashion designer, Chanel did not merely embody her own stardom;
she conferred it upon others. More than just her product, she was selling her entire me to the many
customers who longed to emulate it. When Chanel cut her hair short, she started an international craze
for the bobbed, “garçonne” look. When she sported a suntan (formerly scorned as a sign of peasant
labor), flaunted her eyeglasses (an accessory women had typically hidden), and wore flat shoes, women
copied her. "Chanel wore what she made,” ·writes Marquand. "Her collection was, simply herself, and she
considered imitation an homage.” ·Chanel's zeal to see herself reproduced became particularly apparent
at her runway shows, for which she hired models who resembled her physically and had them trained to
reproduce her mannerisms and gait.
The character of “Coco” became inextricable from the little black dress or the bouclé suits that her
customers wore, with the result that those who bought her clothes acquired a bit of Coco's narrative
through a contagion of theatrical, osmotic celebrity. As Holly Brubach has observed, "Chanel recreated
woman in her own image.” Chanel's close friend Maurice Sachs wrote of the same phenomenon: “Chanel
. . . created a feminine personage of a sort . . . never before seen. . . . She represented a new being.”
Chanel intended to costume a new kind of real-world modernist heroine-unfettered and fast moving.
Her designs reduced and streamlined the female silhouette, casting off the layers of elaborate fabric and
undergarments women typically wore.
Working with fluid, easily draped fabrics such as machine-made
jersey, Chanel relied on solid colors, simple stripes, pleats, and straight lines. Unlike the fragmented
female body of earlier eras, with its disjointed parts—exaggerated waist, bosom, hips, and derriere—the
Chanel body (modeled always on Chanel's own body) was boyish and small breasted, with natural—
uncorseted—waist and hips. Her clothes, which hung straight and loosely, skimmed rather than
emphasized female curves. As a result, they added great visual "speed" to the body, while granting
increased actual speed to women, who in Chanel's clothes enjoyed greater freedom of movement. "I
wanted,”·wrote Chanel, “to give a woman comfortable clothes that would flow with her body. A woman is
closest to being naked when she is well dressed."
Chanel asserted her personality so powerfully that "wearing a Chanel" turned into wearing Chanel·wearing, that is, the persona constructed by the designer for herse1f. And although Chanel couture was a
costly luxury, its machine-made aesthetic lent itself easily to imitation. Even shopgirls riding city buses
could put together a version of the "look"—a fact that delighted the narcissist in Chanel (and perhaps the
secret populist as well).”Anything good ought to be copied and worn by many,” she wrote. The result was
a de facto theatrical pageant with thousands of women all staring as one character: Coco. When Chanel
turned her attention to actual theatrical costuming, this layering technique had even more complex
results.
Jean Cocteau recognized Chanel as a serious artist, and her collaborations with him inducted her into
the French literary avant-garde. Chanel costumed five plays for Cocteau: Antigone (1922), Orpheus
(1928), The Infernal Machine (a retelling of Oedipus Rex via Hamlet, 1937), Oedipus Rex (1937), and
The Knights of the Round Table (1937). She also costumed a number of productions for Serge de
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, in which her geometric purity of line punctuated Léonide Massine's and the
young George Balanchine's newly sharp-angled choreography. Her Ballets Ausses credits include The
Blue Train (set on the beach at Deawiee and known as "the flapper ballet,” 1924), Zéphyre et Flore
(1925), Bachanale (conceived by Salvador Dali, 1927), and Apollon Musagéte (starring Vaslav Nijinsky,
1929). She also consulted with Bronislava Nijinska on costumes for Les Biches (1924).
Chanel's contributions to these productions were never anonymous. On the contrary, producers took
care to publicize her participation, since her famous name boosted ticket sales. Onstage, moreover,
Chanel's costumes were as recognizable as her name, since they resembled her street fashions so
closely, relying upon her sartorial lexicon of neutral-toned jersey and wool, geometric shapes, pleats,
head wraps, and oversize costume jewelry. Such design elements immediately evoked not only Chanel's
fashions, of course, but also her carefully tended persona. In other words, Chanel’s costumes inserted
her personal mythology into the fictional settings of the performances. In this way, they helped create
characters whose identities expanded beyond the parameters of the stage and outward into the "real” or
at least the extrascenic, stylized world connoted by “Coco Chanel.” This blending of theatrical and
biographical narratives created an arresting disruption, a version of the multiple perspectives and collage
techniques for which her modernist collaborators were known.
We see this blending of "inside" and outside" narratives in Chanel's work for Cocteau's Antigone, for
example, for which she designed her own idea of antique Grecian robes in neutral· toned wool. (Antigone,
in fact, went onstage dressed in Chanel's own woolen coat.) Although the robes resembled Chanel's own
couture woolen suits more than they did anything remotely "ancient,” Vogue magazine praised their
historical accuracy.
We can see a similar fusion of narratives in Chanel's contributions to the 1937 Oedipus Rex, for which
she dressed Jean Marais in the title role in little more than mummy wrapping, which brought accusations
of indecency. Yet here again, we see that the bandage (or bondage?) outfit actually resembles the head
wraps Chanel made famous, as well as the wrapped belts that she so often placed around her jackets
and dresses. The mummy wrapping, furthermore, effectively "striped' Marcus’ body, so that the actor's
bare flesh came to resemble the striped jersey Chanel's sportswear. For Jocasta in the same production,
Chanel designed a necklace of spools of thread strung together, which managed brilliantly to connote at
once the unspooling threads of the Three Fates of Greek mythology ·who spin out mortal destiny and the
flamboyant ropes of costume jewelry with which Chanel adorned her couture collections.
Chanel's career as a costume designer extended beyond the modernist stage and into both French
and American cinema. Her clothes were worn onscreen by Romy Schneider, Gloria Swanson, and Ina
Claire, among others. The films costumed by Chanel in turn influenced the fashion sense of millions of
female moviegoers, whether or not they could afford a Chanel original. Even today, clothes produced by
the House of Chanel (under the direction of Karl Lagerfeld, who himself has developed a highly stylized,
theatrical persona) signify elite status and singular elegance, while being endlessly imitated in
inexpensive knockoffs.
Historians date the birth of “fashion”·to the end of the fourteenth century, when clothing began to
express individual taste, as opposed simply to indicating profession or social status. “Fashion ... (became]
…a drama using live actors,” explains Anne Hollander. “Persons became characters.” The advent of
fashion, in other words, brought theater to everyday life. Chanel understood the inherent theatricality of
fashion, enhancing and deepening it with the very twentieth-century power of international media
celebrity. When she then costumed theatrical characters with her Coco-inflected designs, her personal
iconography wove itself into the narrative of modernist performance. Connoting far more than mere
fashionability, the character of “Coco”·functioned onstage as an archetype associated with the worlds of
machine-age reproduction, the avant-garde, and a certain kind of emancipatory politics for women. A
new, real-world heroine, an unacknowledged extra character, thus stepped onto the modernist stage and
screen, costumed by, and in a sense as, Coco Chanel.