Free The Great Fashion Designers by Brenda Polan Page B

comeback.
    Dwindling sales of Chanel No.5 prompted the Wertheimers, the family that owned the rights to the scent, to make an extraordinary offer to Chanel. She would sell the house of Chanel to them, while they in return would pay all her bills for the rest of her life. With the deal sewn up, Chanel set about recapturing the magic of her pre-war house. The first show, staged on 5 February 1954 and attended by an adolescent Karl Lagerfeld, was not an instant success. The collection was like a ‘time warp’, recalled one junior American
Vogue
editor. But Bettina Ballard, then editor of French
Vogue
, felt differently. Her eye was caught by a navy blue wool-jersey suit that, she felt, summed up Chanel’s style. The jacket had square shoulders and was lightly padded with patch pockets and sleeves that unbuttoned to reveal white cuffs. The Chanel suit remains one of the great creations of modern fashion. The armhole was crucial, always small and high, constantly reshaped by Chanel herself to create a close fit. This emphasised the slenderness and fragility of the wearer’s shoulders and neck. Another internal detail, a gold chain sewn into the hems of the jacket, ensured that the jacket hung straight and did not ride up. The essential accessories included a hat, flesh-coloured stockings and two-toned sling-back shoes. As for jewellery, Chanel did not stint, from her trademark strings of pearls to her enjoyment in mixing both fake and real, which appears particularly modern from a twenty-first century perspective.
    Within three collections, Chanel had made a spectacular comeback. The girl who came from nowhere now made the suit that every young high-society woman chose to wear. The suit was copied relentlessly in America and Europe, bringing Chanel style to a generation of women who could not afford couture prices. In her later years, Chanel became a French icon. She surrounded herself with her cabinet of young models and a close-knit circle of trusted friends and servants. Many of the celebrated Chanel maxims emerged from the 1960s, such as: ‘A woman’s education consists of two lessons: never to leave the house without stockings, never to go out without a hat.’
    It is doubtful that the young Chanel, who broke through so many traditions back in the 1920s, would have had much time for such stipulations. But the old Chanel had come full circle, now locked in her own legend. Since her death in 1971, at the age of 88, that legend has remained intact, while the house of Chanel, driven forward by Karl Lagerfeld since 1983, has continued to flourish. Her status as an outsider may hold the key to her success. As Katell Le Bourhis, director of the Musée des Arts de la Mode et du Textile in Paris, put it: ‘She had no references, no education, no upbringing, so she was free to invent her own rules of dress.’
    Further reading:
There is a wealth of writing on Chanel, from Edmonde Charles-Roux’s early biography,
Chanel
(1976), to Alice Mackrell’s
Coco Chanel
(1992) and Janet Wallach’s
Chanel: Her Style and Her Life
(1998). Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton’s
Chanel
(2005), the catalogue to the Chanel exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has some illuminating essays.
The Allure of Chanel
, by Paul Morand (translated by Euan Cameron in 2008), is also of interest.

8 JEAN PATOU (1880–1936)
    Often overshadowed in his lifetime and beyond by his archrival Coco Chanel, French designer Jean Patou was equally influential during his heyday, which can be precisely traced from the end of the First World War in 1918 through to the Great Crash of 1929. Perhaps, like Chanel, he might have made a glorious comeback, but he died relatively young and impoverished by his great vice—gambling.
    Of all his many achievements, his development of sportswear for women is perhaps the most significant. In 1921, he dressed the tennis player Suzanne Lenglen at Wimbledon in a straight