Free Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney Page A

protested, telling Jacques that she didn’t love his brother, he replied that it wasn’t important; she should marry Etienne anyway. With Etienne and Jacques’ parents dead, perhaps Gabrielle’s status as a kept woman with no background mattered less to the Balsan brothers. Gabrielle recalled Jacques’ anger at her refusal, and that he told her she would end up with nothing. When she replied that she wanted to work, he retorted angrily that as she didn’t know anything about anything, what on earth did she think she was going to do?
    Work indeed became Gabrielle’s new conviction; it was her only possibility of escape from her position as a demimondaine . She would later recall how, as a mere twelve-year-old, she had realized that “without money you are nothing, that with money you can do anything . . . I would say to myself over and over, money is the key to freedom.” 18 She told Etienne that although she was good on a horse, she wouldn’t be permitted to earn her living as a female jockey, so she would like to open a hat shop. One can imagine Etienne’s surprise. He knew she was unusual, but employment was not expected of a mistress.
    He was probably only vaguely aware that for some time, female visitors to Royallieu had asked Gabrielle where she found her hats. Almost beyond our comprehension today, it is worth remembering that at that time, virtually everyone, however old or young, rich or poor, wore a hat. (In many early photographs, where we see men, women and children too poor to wear shoes, they are, nonetheless, almost without exception, wearing a hat.) And women’s headgear was a highly significant aspect of dress. The fashionable woman’s hat was a dramatic edifice intended to cause a stir, to be noticed for its beauty and its grandeur.
    One of the few places Gabrielle had visited on her rare trips to Paris was the palatial department store Galeries Lafayette. Here, instead of leaving with a haul of the seductive luxuries on offer in this temple to the new consumer, Gabrielle bought a number of basic hat forms made of straw or felt. Back at Royallieu, she decorated them, minimally, often with little more than a ribbon around the crown, to which she might simply add a large hat pin.
    As in all previous periods, the definition of elegance and fashion was still the beautiful and the refined. Beauty was associated in large part with adornment. And adornment, whether in the form of costly jewels, silks, satins, laces, furs or hugely complicated hats, was associated with luxury and wealth. (The poor quite simply couldn’t afford these things or, therefore, fashion.) The frisson provoked by Gabrielle’s hats thus lay in their great simplicity and lack of adornment. Being shocking wasn’t then something associated with high fashion, but Gabrielle wasn’t entirely alone. Some high fashion was beginning to practice the same thought, put forward by a few radical contemporary artists. To shock was the idea, and this those unconventional female visitors to Royallieu were now keen to emulate.

8
    Refashioning Paris
    As a collective visual statement, fashion is about the appearance of the individual and of the group. It is at once about self-presentation and conformity. Like music, it is improvisation within a structure. As the human condition doesn’t appear to respond well to too much repetition, fashion could be described as one of our antidotes to boredom. It must be new, but not too new; novel rather than radically different. A kind of planned spontaneity, it is applied art, making use of potentiality. Clothes can change more rapidly than other artifacts; although they are functional, they are statements too. Fashion could be described as the cultural genome of clothes.
    Writing on fashion appears almost universally to accept the idea that fashion follows power. At the courts of rulers and kings, this was undoubtedly the case. By the seventeenth