Free Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney Page B

century, Louis XIV of France had understood perfectly the connection between fashion and power. His dramatic self-presentation was about manipulating clothes as actual and symbolic reflections of the greatest power—in other words, his own. But the idea that fashion always follows power is far too simplistic and is only an approximation of what actually happens. In Gabrielle Chanel’s case, the story is more complex and interesting than that.
    Over time, the most fashionable rendezvous in Paris had been exclusive or semiprivate. As the nineteenth century wore on, however, its sweeping changes were reflected in the fact that one of the most significant and fashionable places to be “seen” was now on the city’s new boulevards—in public, on the streets. Here the populace “treated life as a spectacle . . . and intensely enjoyed their own and everyone else’s performance.” 1
    Between 1830 and 1860 alone, Paris almost doubled its population, rising from half a million to almost a million, spreading ever farther outward. And still it grew, and the city’s social problems multiplied. After years of division, plots, counterplots, massacres and the raising and breaking down of the barricades, in 1851, the Machiavellian nephew of Napoléon I, Louis Napoléon, led a coup d’état . Having hoodwinked the nation, he was soon installed by referendum as Louis Napoléon III, absolute monarch of France.
    Over the centuries, many had attempted to organize the chaos of Paris, but when Louis Napoléon took on as his assistant the engineer Georges-Eugène Haussmann, all was set to change. Louis and his accomplice were quintessential representatives of “industrial progress” and saw the hundreds of streets in the city’s busy, cramped, ancient quarters as a series of dreadful anachronisms. In an almost messianic urge to drag Paris into the modern industrial world, the two men conceived an unprecedented urban renewal. Haussmann envisaged “the Imperial Rome of our times,” while Louis saw Paris as the modern capital of the world, and a monument to his power.
    Beginning as they meant to go on, in one great onslaught, neither the monarch nor Haussmann, calling himself the “demolition artist,” gave a jot about the Parisians’ sense of their buildings or their neighborhoods, or that the city’s grandeur was found in the densely interwoven layers of its past. For years, as much as one fifth of Paris’s workforce was occupied in making continual noise and dust as buildings, streets, whole quarters were ruthlessly torn down and replaced by acres of large, uniform apartment blocks lining the wide, stately new boulevards. These were too expensive for the working classes, who were pushed to the jerry-built outer suburbs. There they were deprived of either the benefits of the age-old system or those of the new one. 2 In addition, the railways, bringing food from far and wide, squeezed out the traditional providers of much of the city’s food and drink. The vineyards, market gardens and farms ringing the outskirts of the city for centuries gradually dwindled to a handful. Artisans, small-scale industrial enterprises, merchants large and small, the rich, the middling sort and the poor had always lived and worked cheek by jowl in each of the city’s quarters. For the first time, they were separated, as the new neighborhoods became bound by class.
    And while Paris’s great new inner boulevards, road junctions, squares and vistas were quite breathtaking in scale, this modern city par excellence had lost much of its previous intimacy. Many were troubled by the loss of “old roots.” Not only were at least 350,000 displaced by the “Haussmannization” of Paris, but one critic also complained that for the first time, the city was physically divided in two: the rich and the poor. It was said that the continual destruction of Paris had led