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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
I once had a chance to buy a couture suit by Chanel that was made sometime in the nineteen-fifties, her comeback years. She had closed her maison de couture, on the Rue Cambon, when war was declared in 1939, and reopened it in 1954, when she returned to France, at seventy-one, from self-imposed exile in Switzerland. The stories of her attempts to wrest control of Chanel Parfums from her partners, the Wertheimer family, by exploiting the Nazi race laws, and of her startling offer to Hitler's secret-police chief to broker a negotiated peace with her old friend Winston Churchill--a farcical operation code-named Modellhut (fashion hat) by Chanel's S.S. handlers--have always somewhat dampened her charm for me. But the suit was a classic tweed in opalescent pink, with flecks of mauvish blue and a selvage trim, a slightly flared skirt that grazed the knee, and a boxy jacket with her signature cropped sleeves and narrow armholes. The dealer who was selling it, a Frenchwoman, sized me up--literally--before she let me try it on. She had been keeping it under wraps in her back room like a rare piece of erotica, waiting for the right customer.
Except for the thrilling virtuosity with which it is made, there is very little sex appeal to a mid-century Chanel suit. It is a conventional and even dowdy uniform if one wears it without some wink of impiety. But it keeps faith with an enlightened notion that refuses to die, no matter how hard its adversaries--the Versaces of the world--try to kill it, and one which we owe almost entirely to Chanel: that a woman is entitled to dress with the same dignity, comfort, and self-possession as a man.
Chanel died in 1971, at the age of eighty-seven, with no heirs except a trusted manservant. She left her estate to a foundation in Liechtenstein, and, according to Axel Madsen, the author of a thorough biography, "A Woman of Her Own," its value was estimated at thirty million dollars. By then, the Wertheimer family, secretive patricians who amassed a fortune in cosmetics, owned the House of Chanel. For a few years, they did nothing with it except to continue to market the perfumes, and to pay rent on a small boutique on the Rue Cambon, which sold accessories. Eventually, they hired a new designer, who has since vanished from the scene, and introduced a line of ready-to-wear. In 1983, the president, Kitty D'Alessio, lured Karl Lagerfeld away from Chloe, and made him the creative director. His mandate was to raise the profile of the brand and to rejuvenate--which in the aggressive fashion climate of the early eighties meant to sex up and trick out--the Chanel style, and he did so with a bravura or a brashness, depending on one's point of view, that seemed to some critics and clients a betrayal of the Chanel patrimony. But as Lagerfeld began to define a creative identity that was both separate from Chanel and consonant with his interpretive role as her steward, he reliably produced superior collections.
A new show of...
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