In 1917 I slashed my thick hair; to begin with I trimmed it bit by bit. Finally, I wore it short.
“Why have you cut your hair?”
“Because it annoys me.”
And everyone went into raptures, saying that I looked like “a young boy, a little shepherd”. (That was beginning to become a compliment, for a woman.)
I had decided to replace expensive furs with the humblest hides. Chinchilla no longer arrived from South America, or sable from the Russia of the czars. I used rabbit. In this way, I made poor people and small retailers wealthy; the large stores have never forgiven me.
“Coco succeeds because there are no more grand soirées,” said the best known couturiers of the pre-1914 years, “but an evening dress …”
An evening dress, it’s the easiest thing. The jersey is another matter! Like Lycurgus, I disapproved of expensive materials. A fine fabric is beautiful in itself, but the more lavish a dress is, the poorer it becomes. People confused poverty with simplicity. (It’s better, by the way, to deprive yourself of things than for others to do so.)
After 1920, the great couturiers tried to fight back. At about that time, I remember contemplating the auditorium at the Opéra from the back of a box. All those gaudy, resuscitated colours shocked me; those reds, those greens, those electric blues, the entire Rimsky-Korsakov and Gustave Moreau palette, brought back into fashion by Paul Poiret, made me feel ill. The Ballets Russes were stage décor, not couture. I remember only too well saying to someone sitting beside me:
“These colours are impossible. These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black.”
So I imposed black; it’s still going strong today, for black wipes out everything else around. I used to tolerate colours, but I treated them as monochrome masses. The French don’t have a sense of blocks of colour; what makes a herbaceous border beautiful in an English garden is the massed array; a begonia, a marguerite, a larkspur … on their own, they’re not at all special, but over a space twenty feet thick, the accumulation of flowers becomes magnificent.
“This removes all originality from a woman!”
Wrong: women retain their individual beauty by belonging to an ensemble. Take a bit-part actress in a music hall; isolate her, and she’s a ghastly puppet; put her back in the chorus line, and not only does she resume all her characteristics, but, compared to those alongside her, her personality is released.
I brought in tweeds from Scotland; home-spuns came to oust crepes and muslins. I arranged for woollens to be washed less, so that they kept their softness; in France we wash too much. I asked wholesalers for natural colours; I wanted women to be guided by nature, to obey the mimicry of animals. A green dress on a lawn is perfectly acceptable. I called on Rodier: he proudly showed me a range of twenty-five different greys. How could a customer reach a decision? She would rely on her husband, who had other things to do, the woman would postpone her order, and the sales people wasted their time; once the dress was cut, she would change her mind etc. I really had to congratulate myself for having simplified the choice.
Let’s stop there. I’m not chattering on to expound truths that have become truisms. All this is common knowledge, and we have moved on. For a quarter-of-a-century, the fashion pages and the magazines have been full of my working methods: how I work with the mannequins themselves, whereas the others make drawings, or construct dolls or models. (My scissors are not those of Praxiteles, but nonetheless, I sculpt my pattern more than I draw it.) Why are my mannequins always the same, to such an extent that their faces and bodies are more familiar to me than my own? Why is it that everything that comes from my workshops, from the simplest suit to the smartest dress, appears to be cut by the same hand?
Were I writing a technical handbook, I would say to you: “A well-made dress suits everyone.” Having said that, no woman has the same arm width; the shape of the shoulder is never the same … everything depends on the shoulder; if a dress doesn’t fit on the shoulder, it will never fit … The front doesn’t move, it’s the back that takes the strain. A plump woman always has a narrow back, a slim woman always has a wide back; the back must have room to move, at least ten centimetres; you have to be able to bend down, play golf, put on your shoes. The customer’s measurements must therefore be taken with the arms crossed …
All the articulation of the body is in the back; all movements stem from the back; so one has to insert as much material there as possible … A garment must move over the body; a garment should be fitted when one is standing still, and be too big when one moves. No one should be frightened of pleats: a pleat is always beautiful if it is useful … Not all women are Venus; however, nothing should be concealed, trying to cover up something only accentuates it … You don’t get rid of bad legs by lengthening a dress … With the mannequin, I think firstly of the clothed shape; the choice of material can come later; cloth that is well-fitted is prettier than anything … The art of couture lies in knowing how to enhance: raising the waist in front to make the woman appear taller; lowering the back to avoid sagging bottoms (the ‘pear-shaped’ bottom is, alas, all too frequent!). The dress must be cut longer at the back because it rides up. Everything that makes the neck longer is attractive …
I could go on like this for hours and hours: it would only be of interest to a few people, these basic facts are well known to all the specialists anyway, and thousands of copies of Marie-Claire have circulated them to the humblest dwellings; as to America, I am amazed to see, when I go there, that they know it alclass="underline" the year in which I began making long dresses, and which year I shortened them. I don’t have to explain my creations; they have explained themselves.
There, in a word, is why I would never tell you how a dress is made: I have never been a dressmaker. I admire those who can sew enormously: I have never known how; I prick my fingers; in any case, everybody knows how to make dresses nowadays. Gorgeous gentlemen who have failed at the Ecole Polytechnique know how to make them. Doddery old ladies know how to make them; they have used a needle all their lives; they are eminently sympathetic people.
Me, I am quite the opposite. I am a loathsome person and I hope that these sincere remarks will be appreciated.
Boy Capel and I lived in the Avenue Gabriel, in a delightful apartment. The first time I saw a Coromandel screen, I exclaimed:
“How beautiful it is!”
I had never said that about any object.
“You who are such an artistic person …” an elderly gentleman whom I didn’t know said to me at a dinner party.
“I am not an artistic person.”
“Then,” he replied, squinting anxiously at my invitation card, “you are not Mlle Chanel.”
“No, I am not her,” I replied, to simplify things.
I have had twenty-one Coromandel screens. They play the role that tapestries did in the Middle Ages; they allow you to recreate your home everywhere. Bérard used to say to me: