Lukewarm Coco
"Chanel" artfully captures the letter - in this case the double-C's - of the fashion house's designs, but only hints at the spirit that inspired them.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published June 5, 2005
NEW YORK - So completely have we absorbed the stylistic vocabulary of Coco Chanel that many will look at the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition of her couture and ask, "What's the big deal?"
Quite simply, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel revolutionized the way women dress. The unlined blazer and swing skirt, the body-hugging knit pants and top, the chain belt looped around jeans, the boucle suit, probably by St. John and favored by society ladies, even that of-the-moment big brooch made with fake jewels all can be traced back to the French designer who began her career making hats in the early 1900s and went on to become rich, famous and perhaps the most iconic fashion designer of all time.
The Met's "Chanel" is reverential, cerebral and disappointing, devoid of mise en scene, the information about her life and times that would have given flesh and bones to what is essentially a beautiful, lifeless show. Still, judging from the crowds I navigated around during a recent weekday visit - including a surprising number of men and women in their teens and early twenties along with the expected matrons garbed in Chanel ballet flats and carrying quilted handbags - it is a huge hit. Because, as any observer of fashion will tell you, everything Chanel sells.
That was not the case for about 10 years before and after her death. When Chanel died in 1971 at 87, she had lost her creative edge, her clothes considered musty relics compared to the contemporary swagger of Yves Saint Laurent. It took another designer with titanic ego, Karl Lagerfeld, who was hired away from Chloe by the House of Chanel in 1983, to revitalize the name and make it an international brand. In the fashion parlance of the 1980s, that meant making the clothes sexy and extravagant yet identifiably Chanel, not an easy juxtaposition.
Wisely, the exhibition is arranged on the museum's first floor rather than in the basement cave usually occupied by Costume Institute shows. In addition to the generous proportions of the gallery, it's a nice move since visitors must pass through the Greek and Roman wing to reach the Chanel show, perhaps giving the antiquities a different audience than usual.
About one-third of the 63 ensembles are by Lagerfeld, often positioned alongside Chanel's designs. All are arranged in Corbusierlike white cubes, or vitrines, designed by Olivier Saillard, the postmodern version of Henri Bendel's Avenue of Shops from the 1970s. On some of the walls, artist Marie Maillard projects pithy phrases by both designers or images, such as a white camellia, which Chanel made up in silk and pinned onto many of her black suits and evening dresses as a frothy counterpoint to the linear severity of her clothes.
The exhibition opens with promise and flourish. We are met by a mannequin (all have little feathers on their heads instead of wigs) wearing an exquisite Lagerfeld gold lace gown, hand-embroidered by the famed needleworkers of the Lesage company, which emulates a similar dress Chanel designed and wore in a Cecil Beaton photograph. But neither it nor any other photograph of Chanel living her fascinating life is presented in this exhibition.
The reason given by its chief curator, Harold Korda, is that this is not about Chanel the woman but Chanel the designer. Unlike most other designers, though, Chanel's designs grew out of the way she lived. And, like fashion, Chanel often relied on fantasy to embellish mundane facts or ignore difficult truths.
Gabrielle Chanel was the daughter of an itinerant peddler and a frail mother who died, after bearing six children, when Gabrielle was 11. The children were parceled out to relatives or, in her case, a convent orphanage, where she lived for six years. (Her autobiography claims she was raised by spinster aunts.) Rather than take the veil, she entered a training school run by another convent, where she learned to sew.
She was hired by a draper in Moulins, a garrison town with a number of cabarets. She moonlighted at one, singing ditties between the real entertainers' sets (even though by all accounts she could never carry a tune). But she was saucy and gamine; the soldiers liked her and nicknamed her Coco after the little dog in one of her songs.
In Moulins, she met the first of several lovers who would aid her climb out of poverty. Etienne Balsan, a wealthy polo player, initiated her into the life of the idle rich. But she yearned to be more than a courtesan, and another lover and polo player, Arthur "Boy" Capel, financed her first boutique in the fashionable resort town of Deauville. Her slouchy cardigans and breezy hats, so different from the corseted and plumed finery of conventional fashion, established her as the exemplar of a new chic.
They were the kind of clothes she had been wearing for years, clothes announcing that women should have as much freedom of movement as men. She was her own best model, with an athletic body, bobbed hair and sharp features that departed from the curvaceous ideals of La Belle Epoch.
Her evening dresses from the 1920s codified the flapper aesthetic: diaphanous fabrics, cut to skim but not cling to the body, unfussy but glamorous details and lots of leg and shoulder showing. Her daytime jersey suits (jersey! the fabric of men's underwear!) had the same insouciant slouch, and she introduced details such as extending jacket lining onto the front of its lapels, as on military uniforms, which in later years became a signature detail copied by other designers.
Chanel had a string of lovers through the years, usually "kept" by her, including Grand Duke Dimitri, nephew of the last Czar and a refugee from the Russian Revolution. He introduced her to Ernest Beaux, who invented the famous formula that became Chanel No. 5 and made her a very wealthy woman in the 1920s. She had a mansion, a villa in Provence and presided over a fashion empire. She was great friends with influential writers and artists such as Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau, and designed the costumes for some of Cocteau's theatrical presentations. She had a serious affair with the Duke of Westminster, whom she hoped to marry. (Chanel was also a terrible snob.) But she was never lucky in love; he, like the other men in her life, left her.
World War II was a near disaster for Chanel. Her lover during the occupation was a German officer, and after the liberation of France she was arrested briefly, suspected of being a Nazi collaborator. Stories also circulated that during the war, she attempted to take advantage of her business partners, who were Jewish and had to leave France. After the war she moved to Switzerland for a number of years.
Chanel's first post-war collection was presented in 1954. The French were not impressed; the Americans loved it. The relaxed suits trimmed in braid, the monochromatic colors; the strings of fake pearls and clusters of brooches that were just enough; the grosgrain-wrapped boater and two-toned slingback pumps that oozed French elan; the little black dress, resurrected from the 1920s, that became the epitome of understated sophistication - all were easygoing without being casual.
Today those suits and dresses are dowdy. Look at the boxy suits from the 1960s, and you see that people wore Chanel when they wanted to look correct, a far cry from her youthful rebellion.
Enter Lagerfeld. Examples from his earliest collections indicate he cautiously emerged from his predecessor's long shadow, introducing a reverential boucle suit spiffed up by a chain belt. Within a few years, he was cutting loose. A suit from 1994 is unmistakably Chanel, but it's a miniskirted version trimmed with crocheted black rubber rather than braid or grosgrain. A fat medallion hangs from the belt chain, emblazoned with the new logo of interlocking C's.
Lagerfeld took every Chanel motif and turned it on its tasteful ear. The elements are all there, just in new ways that range from fabulous to ridiculous. The "Scuba" ensemble from 1991 looks foolish: a long sequin jacket paired with jersey and Lycra leggings is unflattering even on the skinny mannequin. The quilted leather bomber jacket worn over a long skirt belted by a wide gold weightlifter-style buckle and accessorized with motorcycle boots looks equally dated.
But the evening coats embroidered by the famed needleworkers of Lesage to resemble Chanel's Coromandel screens, the fraying of a jacket sleeve into a whisper of netting, the cascades of lace worked into new generations of the little black dress are examples of creativity triumphing over appropriation.
And, of course, there are the accessories. Chanel pioneered complementing hats, handbags, jewelry, fragrance and makeup, all of which we see in the exhibition. Lagerfeld and Chanel Inc. have elevated his hybrids to haute status, too, with an almost cultish following. If you can't afford an $80,000 evening dress, you might max your credit line to get a $2,000 handbag with the double C's.
The exhibition almost allows you close enough to admire the details of these clothes with their perfect stitches, tiny pintucks and handbound buttonholes. What I longed for was a look at the way they were made: a jacket turned inside out to reveal the dressmaker details and Chanel's famous gold chain she sewed into hems to keep them straight, for example.
And I have to question whether Chanel is served best by sharing space with her successor. The exhibition, financed by Chanel, sometimes seems to be a cynical attempt to extend the brand. A point the exhibition makes - and that all dealing with fashion make - is its fleeting nature. If styles were timeless, why would we ever want new clothes? The interest in a Chanel exhibition is its historical and social significance, which is given short shrift here.
Chanel, who never gave an inch of her turf to a competitor without a fight, would probably cackle at Lagerfeld's interloping presence in the show.
- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
REVIEW: "Chanel" is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through Aug. 7. For information go to www.metmuseum.org