Chanel and Schiaparelli: Rivalry on the Riviera
The competition that spurred Coco Chanel’s creativity and influenced her business decisions, while war threatened Europe
The fashion icon and businesswoman coco Chanel is known for her perfume, the little black dress, her quilted handbags. She was also a fixture of the social scene on the French Riviera in the ’30s on the brink of war, and one side of an intense rivalry with Elsa Schiaparelli, another up-and-coming designer who operated in similar circles. In this excerpt from her upcoming book Chanel’s Riviera: Glamour, Decadence and Survival in Peace and War, social historian Anne de Courcy shares the rise of Chanel’s fortunes and rivalries juxtaposed against the darkness of a war-threatened Europe.
In 1932, no one was better known than Gabrielle Bonheur, or “Coco,” Chanel. It would be some years before a serious rival showed up to challenge her supremacy, a woman whose ethos was completely opposed to her own but whose originality and alliance with the avant-garde in art made her a force to be reckoned with. This was Elsa Schiaparelli, and their opposing viewpoints encouraged each to play to her strengths. Chanel believed that the woman should wear the clothes, not the reverse; Schiaparelli, in contrast, would create the flamboyant “Lobster Dress” which her friend Salvador Dali wanted to accessorize with real mayonnaise.
She had alluring looks—sensual, androgynous and chic—short hair and a slender figure that showed off the pared-down elegance of her clothes to their best advantage. Add in her high-profile lovers, who everyone gossiped about. Altogether they created a powerful public image. Well aware of this, Chanel never shirked the limelight or turned away from a photographer; on the Riviera, she was seen at all the smartest evenings. She and her pareddown style had, in fact, become a brand, of which she was the living expression: “To my mind, simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance,” she said.
Already, she had invented what perhaps is still her most famous creation: the little black dress. “That won’t last,” she had said one evening at the theater, looking at all the women in their over-elaborate clothes. “I’m going to dress them all simply, and in black.”
Hitherto, black had been worn solely, and strictly, for mourning, so she was inaugurating not only a new
idea, but breaking a social taboo. In 1926, Vogue published a photograph of a Chanel black dress, calling it Chanel’s Ford (Henry Ford’s Model T, affordable for everyone, came only in black). She also brought in tweed jackets for women, costume jewelry piled on simple sweaters, striped Breton tops and—what had made her a millionairess—the best-known scent in the world, Chanel No. 5, which she launched in 1921.
Just about this time, Chanel’s only serious rival—elsa Schiaparelli—was emerging. Schiap—as her friends called her—could hardly have been more different. She was a Neapolitan aristocrat, her father an accomplished scholar, and she had been born in an Italian palazzo. She could not sew and regarded herself as an artist rather than a dressmaker. Her first, and instantly successful, design had been a sweater with a trompe l’oeil design of a bow at the neck with sleeves ending seemingly in cuffs.
By the early ’30s, Schiap was employing a workforce of 2,000, and the 70 new pieces she showed twice a year were simple and wearable—wrap dresses, black suits—that fitted the lives of wealthy, conservative clients. Already, though, she was showing the originality for which she became famous, from zips that were visible rather than concealed to evening dresses with jackets (these had never yet been seen). Soon, her hallmark flamboyance would contrast vividly with Chanel’s discreet elegance.
Chanel, by contrast, had climbed, step by step and man by man, from a poverty-stricken girlhood to the pinnacle of success on which she now stood. She had surmounted her past as a kept woman—something that usually remained a lifelong social barrier—and many of her wealthy clients were now her friends. She also
had overcome what would have felled a lesser personality, the death of her mother when she was 11, followed by the immediate disappearance of her father, and her six-year incarceration in the convent orphanage of Aubazine in a French village of the same name.
Here Chanel learned to sew, and rather than be beaten down by her adolescence, she was saved by her unbounded energy, determination to survive and an originality unbowed by external pressures and constraints.
Just as Chanel’s rise seemed unstoppable, she suffered a bitter personal blow. Her lover Paul Iribe—the brilliant illustrator and designer with whom she had worked closely and whom many thought she might marry—collapsed as they spoke over the net during a game of tennis and died without ever regaining consciousness.
It was a body blow. And when Chanel returned to Paris from the Riviera in the autumn of 1935, she found that Elsa Schiaparelli had become more than just a threat; she was now someone who might overtake her. At the root of the problem was that although both designers had utterly different tastes, they both appealed to the same type of woman—one who wanted a crisp-edged, modern, stylish look.
Then, too, fashion itself had changed. The androgynous flapper with her cropped hair, boyish figure and short skirts, for whom Chanel’s pared-down elegance might have been created, had disappeared. Women’s figures and curves had reappeared, emphasized and enhanced by the gleam of bias-cut satin; skirts were longer and a newly adventurous note had appeared—and no one was more adventurous than Schiaparelli.
It was Schiap who invented the color Shocking Pink and designed clothes that echoed the ideas of the surrealists—in particular those of Dali, offering black gloves with red “fingernails,” an evening dress with trompe l’oeil rips and a black gown decorated with a full “skeleton.” Her talent was such that many of Chanel’s long-time clients turned to her—though most, like Daisy Fellowes, heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune and Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar—bought from both couturières.
The immensely rich Daisy was a catch worth having. Despite the long shadow of Nazi Germany menacing nearby, the smart set on the Riviera behaved as if the life of privilege, glamour and untrammelled hedonism would go on forever, and Daisy played her role as social icon and fashion leader to the hilt. If one of the 100-odd guests she would invite to her 30-room villa, Les Zoraides, appeared in a dress at all similar to hers, she would change at once; one night she appeared in five different outfits.
Schiaparelli’s appeal to Daisy, for whom the outrageous was a way of life, is not hard to understand with her huge pink palace perched on a cliff above the sea. It was Daisy who wore the eye-catching Shoe Hat, created the previous year by Dali, with the nonchalance of complete self-confidence. It was Daisy for whom diners at the Ritz climbed on chairs to get a sight of her Schiaparelli monkey fur coat embroidered in gold.
Chanel fought back by acknowledging this new more feminine look in
“Although both designers had utterly different tastes, they both appealed to the same type of woman—one who wanted a crisp-edged, modern, stylish look.”
her own way. She introduced shoulder pads to emphasize the smallness of the waist, creamy or peachy satins for evening and elegant, gently fitting tweed suits, while her underlying theme remained black and white, echoing the black skirts and white blouses she had worn at Aubazine. At the Monte Carlo Casino, she herself was always seen in a cream or white satin dress, usually worn with her famous pearls.
One of those most faithful to Chanel was Diana Vreeland, socialite and columnist for Harper’s Bazaar, who lived for fashion. “You gotta have style,” Diana would say. “It helps you get down the stairs. It helps you get up in the morning. It’s a way of life.” She would go for the endless fittings necessary for a Chanel garment—even a nightgown needed three—to Chanel’s private atelier, six floors up in Coco’s house at 31 rue Cambon, which she purchased in 1918 and housed a shop, apartments and couture studio.
Diana viewed Chanel as unique. She was “mesmerizing, strange, alarming, witty,” said Diana. “You can’t compare anyone with Chanel. They haven’t got the chien. Or the chic. She was the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
Yet by 1937, Chanel found herself temporarily eclipsed by Schiaparelli, who was now dressing many of Chanel’s most faithful clients. With change in the air, Schiap was regarded as the epitome of modernity, her designs influenced by surrealist artists like Man Ray, best known for his photography, and the cubist Marcel Duchamps. Many of Chanel’s inner circle had now become part of Schiap’s also, from artist Jean Cocteau to Chanel’s ex-lover Dali. Then too, 1937 was the year of Schiaparelli’s “Lobster Dress;” the gown of white organza, scarlet sash and Dali-designed lobster wasmade famous when Wallis Simpson modeled it in Vogue. Although in public both damned each other with faint praise, in private Chanel referred to Schiaparelli disparagingly as “that Italian artist who makes clothes.”
Chanel would not have been Chanel had she not fought back. In the spring of 1939, with Europe on the brink of war, on the heels of Kristallnacht the previous November, the spring couture collections were shown as usual in the Riviera, where Chanel was ensconced. Stepping out of her usual idiom of clean uncluttered lines in a palette based on black, white, beige and navy blue, she answered the more eye-catching clothes of Schiaparelli with a range of “Gypsy” dresses with lace ruffles on the bodice and as flounces on skirts On them, here and there, were the colors of the
“Work has always been a kind of drug for me.”
French national flag, the Tricolour— red, white and blue.
That last peacetime summer brought a final burst of the gaiety for which the Riviera was known, with fireworks, balls, open-air concerts, theaters and almost constant parties, with one of the most eagerly expected events, the first-ever Cannes Film Festival, due to open on September 1. Everyone who was anyone seemed to be there. Joseph Kennedy had leased the Domaine de Ranguin, Marlene Dietrich had arrived with her husband, daughter and lover; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Somerset Maugham and Maxine Elliott were all entertaining guests, Winston Churchill was gambling at the Monte Carlo Casino. Chanel, the spring collection over, was at her villa La Pausa.
On September 3, World War II broke out. While Schiaparelli, like most other French designers, kept her couture house open, Chanel closed hers, saying simply: “I had the feeling that we had reached the end of an era. And that no one would ever make dresses again.”
It was not until 1953, at the age of almost 70, that Chanel reopened her couture salon, with a first collection in 1954. Ironically, it was that same year that her great rival Schiaparelli closed down her own—heavily indebted—house, while Chanel went on from strength to strength, introducing her iconic quilted handbag in 1955 and the famous little tweed suit a year later. When asked by Marlene Dietrich why she was relaunching her brand, she replied: “Because I was dying of boredom.” As she once said: “Work has always been a kind of drug for me.”
→ Excerpt adapted from CHANEL’S RIVIERA by Anne de Courcy, published by St. Martin’s Press.