Female Beau Brummell
“From this century, in France,
three names will remain:
De Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel.”
André Malraux
Not even the mythomaniac Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel could have anticipated how her legacy, predicted by Malraux decades ago, would persist triumphantly into the next millennium. Ironically, the first chapter of her epic life—the grim facts of which she took pains to obscure—will now be the subject of a feature movie, Coco Before Chanel, scheduled for a mid-2009 release. Starring Audrey Tautou and directed by Anne Fontaine, the film is now being shot on location in Normandy and Paris.
Born out of wedlock in a provincial poorhouse, Chanel was deposited at 12 in a Dickensian orphanage. At 20, toiling part-time in a tailor’s shop, she met aristocratic infantryman Étienne Balsan, the fairy-tale hero who helped transform her by turns into a chanteuse, an equestrienne, and his mistress. Her singing skills were negligible, her horsemanship was instinctive (“Ride as if you had a pair of balls,” she advised), and her physical appeal was tantalizingly ambiguous. Small-bosomed and narrow-hipped, Chanel said, “Cut my head off and I look like an adolescent boy.”
In fact, this “female Beau Brummell” (Cecil Beaton’s words) modernized women’s clothing in part by ransacking her lovers’ closets. Early on, as a milliner, she replaced heavy, ornate hats with severe straw boaters. As the girlfriend of polo-playing entrepreneur Boy Capel, she pioneered sportswear separates. Paramour Grand Duke Dmitri of Russia (Rasputin’s co-assassin) inspired the iconoclastic couturier to pile on exotic jewels. Instead of marrying the he-man millionaire Duke of Westminster, she appropriated his salmon fisherman’s sweaters and tweeds.
Though lionized even in her lifetime by Hollywood, Chanel did not return the compliment. She found the town to be “the Mont-Saint-Michel of tit and tail,” and its celluloid goddesses to be distasteful. Noted Karl Lagerfeld, who will be supervising costumes for the Warner Bros.–France production, the silent-era luminaries she disdained made the fatal error of assuming “they were bigger stars than she.”
