Women never amuse me. I feel no friendship for them. (What is more they don’t know what it means.) In France, in any case, friendship is a challenge.
The word ‘honour’ has no meaning for women.
They don’t play the game, but they expect it to be played with them.
Couples are the worst.
You can like them individually; together, they are detestable. As for being the friend to both of them, it’s like squaring the circle. The couple is an association; an association, ‘unity is strength’, is tiresome because it is useful. Love should be an organisation for mutual extermination and not a charity. It’s just as difficult to witness complicity in a couple as it is dissension. The couple never stop to think of the intolerable position of a third party; a couple is never straightforward, generous and spontaneous; it is nothing but reflection, scheming and selfishness. It’s inhuman: it’s an artificial creation, a corporation. Even if the couple loathe one another, they unite against you; it’s like one of those serrated wheels that bite into one another, but make the machine function better.
But fortunately “the woman is not always the female of the male; there can be two completely dissimilar people in a household”. It was Balzac who said that; it’s comforting. Marie Laurencin used to say: “I detest that third person who is known as the Couple.”
Boy Capel would often say to me:
“Remember that you’re a woman …”
All too often I forget that.
So as to remind myself, I stand in front of a mirror: I see myself with my two menacing arched eyebrows, my nostrils that are as wide as those of a mare, my hair that is blacker than the devil, my mouth that is like a crevice out of which pours a heart that is irritable but unselfish; crowning all that, a great knot of schoolgirl’s hair set above the troubled face of a woman who spent too much time at school! My dark, gipsy-like skin that makes my teeth and my pearls look twice as white; my body, as dry as a vine-stock without grapes; my worker’s hands with cabochons that resemble an imitation American knuckle-duster.
The hardness of the mirror reflects my own hardness back to me; it’s a struggle between it and me: it expresses what is peculiar to myself, a person who is efficient, optimistic, passionate, realistic, combative, mocking and incredulous, and who feels her Frenchness. Finally, there are my gold-brown eyes which guard the entrance to my heart: there one can see that I am a woman.
A poor woman.
ON FASHION OR: A GOOD IDEA IS MADE TO PERISH
FASHION SHOULD BE DISCUSSED enthusiastically, and sanely; and above all without poetry, without literature. A dress is neither a tragedy, nor a painting; it is a charming and ephemeral creation, not an everlasting work of art. Fashion should die and die quickly, in order that commerce may survive.
At the beginning of creation, there is invention. Invention is the seed, it’s the germ. For the plant to grow, you need the right temperature; that temperature is luxury. Fashion should be born from luxury, it’s not twenty-five very elegant women (dressed, incidentally, free of charge, which is not luxurious), luxury is first and foremost the genius of the artist capable of conceiving it and giving it form. This form is then expressed, translated and disseminated by millions of women who conform to it.
Creation is an artistic gift, a collaboration of the couturier with his or her times. It is not by learning to make dresses that they become successful (making dresses and creating fashion are different things); fashion does not exist only in dresses; fashion is in the air, it is borne on the wind, you can sense it, you can breathe it, it’s in the sky and on the highway, it’s everywhere, it has to do with ideas, with social mores, with events. If, for example, at this moment, there are no indoor dresses, none of those tea-gowns beloved of the heroines of Paul Bourget and Bataille, it is probably because we live at a time when there is no longer any indoors.
I have created fashion for a quarter-of-a-century. Why? Because I knew how to express my times. I invented the sports dress for myself; not because other women played sports, but because I did. I didn’t go out because I needed to design dresses, I designed dresses precisely because I went out, because I have lived the life of the century, and was the first to do so.
Why have the ocean liners, the salons, the big restaurants never adapted to their real purpose? Because they are conceived by designers who have never seen a storm, by architects who have never been out in the world, by interior decorators who go to bed at nine o’clock and dine at home. Similarly, before me, couturiers hid away, like tailors, at the back of their shops, whereas I lived a modern life, I shared the habits, the tastes and the needs of those whom I dressed.
Fashion should express the place, the moment. This is where the commercial adage ‘the client is always right’ get its precise and clear meaning; that meaning demonstrates that fashion, like opportunity, is something that has to be grabbed by the hair. I am looking at a young woman on her bicycle, with her bag on her shoulders, one hand placed chastely on her knees that rise and fall, the material of her clothing cleaved to her stomach and chest, and her dress puffed up by the speed and the wind. This young woman has developed her own fashion, according to her needs, just as Crusoe built his hut; she is admirable and I admire her. I admire her so much that I don’t see another woman who approaches me at full speed. She crashes into me, we fall down together, and I find myself on the ground with my face between her two bare thighs: it’s wonderful. She yells at me, it’s perfect.
“So what were you looking at?” she says to me.
“I was looking at you, Madame, to make sure I was not behind the fashion.”
For fashion roams around the streets, unaware that it exists, up to the moment that I, in my own way, may have expressed it. Fashion, like landscape, is a state of mind, by which I mean my own.
“This dress will not sell,” I sometimes tell my staff, “because it is not me.”
There is a Chanel style of elegance, there was a 1925 or 1946 elegance, but there is no national fashion. Fashion has a meaning in time, but none in space. Just as there are Mexican or Greek dishes, but no authentic cuisine in these countries, there is a regional type of clothing (the Scottish plaid, the Spanish bolero), but nothing else. Fashion came from Paris, because for centuries everybody used to meet there.
Where then does the couturier’s genius lie? The genius is in anticipating. More than a great statesman, the great couturier is a man who has the future in his mind. His genius is to invent summer dresses in the winter, and vice versa. At a time when his customers are basking in the burning sun, he is thinking of ice and of hoar frost.
Fashion is not an art, it is a job. If art makes use of fashion, then that is sufficient praise.
It’s best to follow fashion, even if it is ugly. To detach oneself from it is immediately to become a comical character, which is terrifying. No one is powerful enough to be more powerful than fashion.
Fashion is a matter of speed. Have you visited a fashion house just before the collection is shown? Something I made at the beginning of the collection, I may find outdated before the end. A dress that is three months old! A collection takes shape during the final two days; in this respect our profession is like the theatre; how often does a play only come together between the rehearsals and the final dress rehearsal? Ten minutes before the buyers arrived, I would still be adding bows. At two o’clock in the afternoon, we would still be trying dresses on the models, to the despair of the manager of the fitting rooms, who is responsible for organising these pretty performers’ manoeuvres.