Gabrielle Chanel: the woman who wove her own legend

She was born on 19 August 1883 in the poorhouse at Saumur, into a family of modest means: that is what the Palais Galliera writes, and it is about all the institutions say of her childhood. In 1909 she opened a hat workshop; in 1910, Chanel Modes moved into 21 rue Cambon. A milliner, not a couturière. Couture would come by way of the beach: Deauville in 1912, Biarritz in 1915.

What follows is a series of decisions, and each one consists of taking something away. The corset. Then ornament: it is the material that makes the dress, she said, and not the ornaments you can add to it. Then colour. The Palais Galliera sums up the gesture: out of knit or tweed, those common stuffs, she made clothes with an offhand air. Take what is worth nothing and make it expensive.

In 1939 the couture house closed the moment war was declared, on 3 September; only the perfume and accessories shop at 31 rue Cambon stayed open. Then fourteen years away, including years of Occupation on which the Palais Galliera acknowledges that the argument goes on. The house reopened in 1953, and Chanel showed her collection on 5 February 1954, at seventy-one. Part of the fashion press accused her of redoing her own past decades; Elle and American Vogue said she was right.

Jersey is a knit, not a couturier’s cloth: soft, cheap, good for sweaters and underwear. She made clothes of it, and a silk jersey sailor top from the summer of 1916, held by the Patrimoine de CHANEL, opened the Palais Galliera retrospective. In November 1915 the New York Herald Tribune wrote, in the V&A’s quotation of it, that “it was the Chanel silk jersey suits which were to be seen in such profusion at Deauville last summer that they were considered to be almost a Deauville uniform and necessity”. A year later American and British Vogue settled the matter, the V&A reports: “Chanel is master of her art, and her art resides in jersey”.

Black at the time was the colour of mourning and of service. In October 1926 American Vogue predicted that a black CHANEL crêpe de chine day dress would be “the frock that all the world will wear”, and the dress was dubbed the Ford of fashion, after the popular American car. The Palais Galliera dates the consecration of the little black dress from that publication.

N°5 was created in 1921 at Grasse with the perfumer Ernest Beaux. It smells of no flower in particular: no fewer than eighty components according to the Palais Galliera, and aldehydes, synthetic materials used, in the museum’s words, in overdose for the first time. A square bottle, a white case outlined in black, and a figure for a name when every perfume carried the name of a flower.

Five stories circulate about her, always the same ones. The nickname Coco is said to come from the cafés of Moulins. The double C is said to come from the mosaics of Aubazine abbey. The N°5 bottle is said to copy the place Vendôme. The overdose of aldehydes is said to be an assistant’s mistake. And the bottle is said to have entered the MoMA collection.

Look at what the museums actually write. The Palais Galliera does carry the Moulins Coco in its chronology, and the same museum writes that books have tried to penetrate the mystery of her origins. Aubazine appears neither in that press file nor in the V&A articles. The Galliera dates the first appearance of the double C monogram to 1921, the V&A places it on the stopper of the first N°5 bottle: neither says where the drawing came from. The place Vendôme, nowhere.

The last two deserve better than a denial. The overdose of aldehydes is documented, but as a choice: used in overdose for the first time, writes the Galliera. And the MoMA is indeed in the chronology, at its date: in 1959 the bottle was shown there in the exhibition The Package. Shown is not acquired. The rule holds for the rest: the prettier and the more repeated an anecdote, the harder it is to find the institution that carries it.

The museum that gave her her first Paris retrospective writes it plainly: Gabrielle Chanel became a legend in her own lifetime, a legend she wove herself, notes Miren Arzalluz, director of the Palais Galliera. From the 1930s the press was relaying numerous biographical accounts that only heightened, she writes, a confusion deliberately maintained about her life.

Hence two regimes of truth in the same file. The collections, the shows, the press photographs can be dated. The childhood stories and the origin of the symbols cannot. Two INA archives show her at work on herself: her first television interview, on 6 February 1959, and a conversation from 1969 broadcast on 11 January 1971.

She died on 10 January 1971 in her room at the Ritz, while preparing a collection. What she leaves is not a dress but a silhouette, and four objects you recognise without having to name them: the braided tweed jacket, the chain bag, the beige shoe with the black toe, the square bottle. Half a century after her death they are still sold as decisions, which is what they were.