Free The Great Fashion Designers by Brenda Polan Page A

located today. Together with Jean Patou, whose contribution has been underestimated, she brought simplicity and practicality to fashion in the 1920s. She blew away the ostentation of belle époque fashion, producing accessible clothes that continued to borrow heavily from the working man’s wardrobe. The youthful energy and vigour of Chanel’s clothes chimed with the open-air sports-obsessed mood of the times.
    In the early 1920s, she was the arch exponent of the garçonne or flapper look, the boyish style that dominated the decade. Her women wore sweaters, short pleated skirts with dropped waistlines and cloche hats. Boni de Castellane, a Parisian dandy, said: ‘Women no longer exist. All that’s left are the boys created by Chanel.’ The little black dress, a reaction to Paul Poiret’s orientalist colours and derived from the chemise dress, was a signature piece. Previously, black was for mourning clothes only; Chanel made it chic. Black and white, for her, created a ‘perfect harmony’. In 1926, American
Vogue
made a celebrated comparison with the Ford motor car: ‘Here is Ford signed Chanel—the frock that all the world will wear.’ After the shock of Boy’s death in 1919, Chanel dallied briefly with the Grand Duke Dmitri of Russia, picking up a penchant for all things Russian, including oversized pieces of jewellery, that fed into her collections. Perhaps more important was her friendship (and on-off romance) with Misia Sert, a well-connected society hostess with a fiery temperament to match Chanel’s own mercurial personality and friends scattered throughout the art world, such as Cocteau, Picasso, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. The quick-witted Chanel adapted quickly to this milieu and the two women enjoyed a long-lasting love-hate friendship.
    Her love life continued to flourish, culminating in an intense relationship with the Duke of Westminster, known to his friends as Bendor, the richest man in Britain. She admired his British tweeds, which she turned into coats for her customers, trimmed with fur for a luxurious and softer look. She even created flared trousers inspired by the sailors’ bell-bottoms on Bendor’s yacht. Meanwhile, he widened her social circle to include dignitaries on both sides of the channel, most notably Winston Churchill. All the riches of the world were now hers to enjoy; nothing and no one was beyond her orbit. The orphan girl had come a long way. But the Duke chose to marry elsewhere in 1930, leaving Chanel alone again. Her solution was to plough herself into her work. During the 1930s, the house of Chanel achieved newheights, with a team of some 4,000 employees and production of up to 28,000 dresses a year. A brief flirtation with Hollywood aside, Chanel was based in Paris, where she slept at her suite in the Ritz hotel and received guests in her apartment in the rue Cambon. A fierce rivalry with Elsa Schiaparelli, both personal and professional, gave a competitive edge to her work. Yet another lover, the illustrator and designer Paul Iribe, held out hope of marriage once again. However, after four years together, he died of a heart attack in 1935, collapsing right before her at their holiday home in Roquebrune in the south of France.
    The advent of war with Germany in 1939 created hardship for all the Paris couturiers. Chanel’s business solution was to close the couture house but to keep open the boutique, selling only her celebrated Chanel No. 5 scent and accessories. Her personal solution—finding a German lover, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who was both a diplomat and a spy—proved an unmitigated disaster. When the war ended, Chanel was arrested, accused of treachery and forced into exile in Switzerland. For years, with her personal reputation in tatters, she mooched around Lausanne with occasional visits to Paris. Not until 1954, at the age of 70, did she astonish the Paris fashion world by announcing her