Coco Chanel by Lisa Chaney Page B

Gabrielle’s friend Suzanne Orlandi, mistress to Etienne Balsan’s friend Baron Foy. Gabrielle would become fiercely protective of her reputation for originality and was neither to leave any record of her earliest ideas about clothes nor speak about her influences. What she did talk about was motivation, and she famously said, “My work came about as a reaction to my times.” But while admitting her admiration for the designer Vionnet, Gabrielle would play down the influence of another designer, Paul Poiret. Perhaps more even than the clothes, Gabrielle observed his example in self-presentation and the way one ran a business. Yet she would also understand her century better than Poiret and consequently go far beyond him.
    In 1911, Poiret was a charismatic young couturier (just four years older than Gabrielle) who had provoked outrage with the introduction of his harem pants. Seen as a perilous development, they were thought to challenge male supremacy and encourage the women’s movement. Nonetheless, by 1914, Poiret would hold sway as one of the most radical designers in Paris.
    He had trained with the great Jacques Doucet, himself a product of the extravagant nineteenth-century Second Empire and a fierce advocate of taste and discrimination. Doucet’s rue de la Paix atelier was only a few doors away from that of his own mentor, Charles Frederick Worth, the first couturier of them all and still the dominant figure in the fashion industry at the end of the nineteenth century. Like Worth, Doucet amassed a large library and works of art, including Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , bought directly from the artist. Doucet believed the watchwords for couture were luxury and distinction rather than practicality and function. Young Poiret had set out to emulate his master.
    At first, Poiret gained notoriety with dresses and costumes for famous actresses, including Sarah Bernhardt and the courtesan Réjane. Then he quickly outstripped Worth and Doucet to become the fashion guru of the moment. His greatest contribution toward the history of dress was in his outright rejection of a fundamental convention. This was the fierce division of a woman’s body to two. Previously, the abdomen and rib cage were encased in armorlike corsets, while the lower half was swathed in voluminous skirts, plumping out the behind. (Proust said that women looked as if they were “made up of different pieces that had been badly fitted together.”) 8 Instead, Poiret utterly shocked his contemporaries by doing away with this rigid division and making dresses that clung revealingly to the body in soft, fluid lines, from a high waist just below the bust. Provoking still further outrage, he insisted his clients must dispense with their armored corsets. This gave the Poiret silhouette a particularly sinuous and alarmingly natural effect, driving furious critics such as Worth to denounce it as “hideous and barbaric.” Worth thundered that Poiret’s clothes were really “only suitable for women of uncivilized tribes.” 9
    Fashion is a fabulously subjective pastime, and contemporaries were unable to see that Poiret’s designs weren’t really so outlandish. Above all, they were a reflection of fashion’s frequent tendency to look over its shoulder to the past. Poiret’s major inspiration was in fact the postrevolutionary Directoire period, whose “classical” understatement was in turn inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. At the same time—largely under the influence of the Ballets Russes—all things exotic and oriental were then much in vogue, and Poiret’s intense palette of colors as well as his layered dresses and turbans earned him the description “Pasha Paris.” In strong contrast to the Belle Epoque craze for embellishment, which was synonymous with haute couture since its beginnings, any ornament or elaboration in Poiret’s dress, hairstyles