By Lina Das
She gave us trousers for women, black as a fashion statement, fake pearls and the little black dress, but while Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel revolutionised women's fashion with her clean lines and unfettered simplicity, her own life was as messy and complicated as her signature style was uncluttered.
This year has seen a tidal wave of Chanel mania sweep across Europe, from films such as Coco Chanel starring Shirley MacLaine, and Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, which closed the Cannes Festival in May, as well as a biography due out in the autumn.
And the most anticipated of them all - the film Coco Before Chanel starring Audrey Tautou in the title role - is released today.
Audrey Tautou Coco Before Chanel
Elegant: Audrey Tautou in new film Coco Before Chanel. The actress captured Chanel's birdlike appearance
But the irony of a woman who strove for simplicity in her work, yet whose life was a study in untidy truths, hasn't been lost on those attempting to tell her story.
Much of what she achieved in her 87 years was to be admired, Chanel having transformed herself from an orphanage-raised young girl to someone whom the film's director terms 'the world's first businesswoman'.
But there were also some unpalatable facts, namely her alleged anti-Semitism and her relationship with the truth, which at best could be described as sketchy.
She was taught to embroider by the nuns who ran the orphanage and it was a skill she seemingly put to use when it came to telling the truth. 'She said she invented her life because she didn't like it,' says director Anne Fontaine. 'Parts of her life were too heavy to come to terms with. She lied to be free.'
Coco Chanel
Ground breaking style: Coco Chanel in signature faux pearls and cigarette
Freedom was a big deal for Chanel. For a young girl born in 1883 in a poorhouse (she paid her brothers to disappear lest the truth of her origins became known), it must have seemed a commodity that was unattainable.
Her father Albert was an itinerant salesman and when her mother Jeanne died when Gabrielle was 12, she and her two sisters were placed in the orphanage of the Aubazine monastery, where Gabrielle was to remain for six years.
Taught to sew by the nuns (whose habits inspired her lifelong love affair with black minimalism), at 18 she moved to a convent to work as a seamstress.
ALESSANDRO NIVOLA & AUDREY TAUTOU
The man of Chanel's life Arthur 'Boy' Capel, played by Alessandro Nivola (left) tragically died in a motoring accident in 1919
'Most people don't know Chanel came from such humble beginnings,' says Fontaine, 'and that without any intellectual or artistic education, she managed to fashion herself and shape her own destiny. It shows what a strong personality she had.'
In Audrey Tautou, known for her role in Amelie, Fontaine found someone who captured Chanel's birdlike elegance. 'It was imperative to have an actress with similar proportions to Chanel,' says the director, who shot the entire film in French - there are subtitles.
More...
* LIZ JONES: Coco Before Chanel made me fall in love with fashion again
* The sexiest shop on Earth: The uproarious story of Biba, the store that defined the Sixties
* How to be a Coco clone: Steal the style of the design legend
Chanel's formative adult years saw her trying to make it as a music hall singer in the French city of Moulins. (One song, Coco, provided her nickname.) This gave her access to the wealthier sets and it was here that she was to meet the first of two men who would help her achieve the fame, fortune and, ironically, the independence she so richly craved.
Couturiere Gabrielle
Audrey Tautou as Coco Chanel
Homage: Coco seen here on the mirrored staircase of her couture house. £1.3million was spent on more than 200 costumes and 700 hats for the movie
Etienne Balsan (played in the film by Benoit Poelvoorde) was a wealthy breeder of horses who took Chanel on as his second mistress. 'Essentially, she was a courtesan, which is a bit of a contradiction to the image we have of Chanel as an independent woman,' says Fontaine.
'She was very thin, anorexic almost, and although men found her funny, they didn't think more of her. But she knew she had to sleep with Balsan to get anywhere, which was revolutionary for this period.'
At Balsan's, she learned to ride horses like a man (giving rise to her trademark androgynous style and her love of sportswear as fashion) and to reject the elaborate, corseted fashions of the time in favour of creating simple sack dresses.
Audrey Tautou
The fashion designer had a 50-a-day habit which was portrayed in the film. However French authorities outlawed adverts for the movie that featured smoking
Though Balsan regarded her as something of an embarrassment, forbidding her to leave the bedroom when his society friends were around, he grew to admire and then love Chanel, though it came too late as he had already introduced her to the man who was to prove the love of her life - his friend Arthur 'Boy' Capel.
An Englishman from a wealthy coal mining family, Boy was to have a lasting effect on Chanel's life. He is played by actor Alessandro Nivola.
Nivola says: 'What I loved about the story was that Boy's relationship with Coco begins the moment he tells her he's going to marry someone else, which isn't typical of most period, romantic movies.
Coco Chanel
Lavish: The French designer in her Paris apartment actually came from very humble beginnings
'They're both orphans, and he delights in her power rather than being intimidated or turned off by it.' It was Capel who loaned Chanel the money to set up her first fashion salon in Paris and her designs flourished after World War I.
Nivola says: 'She got men to finance her career without being tied to them. But I think it was only human for Chanel to long for something more traditional.'
Sadly, it was never to be, as Capel was killed in a motoring accident in 1919. Fontaine says: 'For Chanel, it was a disaster when he died.'
Jackie Onassis John F. Kennedy
Fan: Jackie Onassis reportedly wore Chanel on the day of husband President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963
The film ends shortly after this period and the truncation of Chanel's life story meant that some liberties had to be taken with the fashions that appear in the film.
The movie's costume designer, Catherine Leterrier, admits: 'The photos of Chanel in the famous striped mariner's sweater didn't appear till the Thirties, so we had to move the fashion forward slightly by showing her walking along the beach and noticing the sweaters of the fishermen as they pull in their nets.
'The Chanel bag is another iconic creation and Anne Fontaine wanted me to imagine how it originated, so I created a quilted sewing bag as if the young Coco had made it out of a remnant given to her by her aunts. I hope Chanel will forgive me!'
Chanel No 5 perfume
Iconic: Chanel No 5 perfume was reportedly the only thing Marilyn Monroe wore in bed
No doubt Coco would have been pleased by the sumptuous feel of the film (£1.3 million was spent on more than 200 costumes and 700 hats which feature in the movie). But by cutting swathes out, it manages to dispense with some of the more unsavoury aspects of her life.
After Capel's death, she embarked on affairs with the composer Igor Stravinsky and the Duke of Westminster, with some speculating that she might have become the Duchess had she been able to have children (she was rumoured to have undergone a botched abortion and motherhood and marriage always evaded her).
She later befriended Winston Churchill. But as the Germans marched into Paris in 1940, Chanel closed down her fashion house and ensconced herself in the Ritz, embarking on an ill-advised affair with the Nazi intelligence officer Hans Gunther von Dinklage.
Fontaine says: 'She liked men and had many of them and I don't think there was any anti-Semitism on her part.'
But after Chanel created her own perfume range - the first designer to do so - she tried to wrest control from the Jewish brothers who owned the business by trying to make use of the anti-Semitic laws of the time.
When France was liberated in 1944, she was arrested and evaded punishment, eventually fleeing the country in disgrace and living out the rest of the decade in exile in Switzerland with von Dinklage.
She returned to fashion in the early Fifties, and while the French greeted the new collection with scorn, in America they were more forgiving (the suit Jackie Kennedy wore on the day of her husband's assassination came from Chanel).
The film ends with a strange, dream-like sequence where an elderly Chanel, perched on the staircase of her Parisian atelier, watches the models parade in front of her in some of the label's best-known creations.
Chanel lived till 1971, having spent her final years in her private suite at the Hotel Ritz in Paris.
Fontaine says: 'At the end, she felt a life without a husband and children was a disaster. She was very alone and the day she died, she went up to the concierge and told him: "In about three or four minutes, I'm going to die."
'She went up to her room and was dead five minutes later. She was so much of a control freak in her life that it was no surprise that she had that control in death, too.'
• COCO BEFORE CHANEL is released in cinemas today.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1203293/The-woman-REALLY-invented-French-dressing-New-movie-reveals-different-Coco-Chanel.html;jsessionid=937B2BF57873B581B43CFB83F08FEF10#ixzz0MsipmXo8
No comments:
Post a Comment