Trechos de Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (2011), de Lisa Chaney.
On August 3, 1914, the opulence of the grand style was overnight curtailed. The West launched into a conflict that would leave it irrevocably altered. Germany had declared war on France; the First World War had begun.
On the following day, Britain entered the fray by declaring war on Germany. Twelve days later, Arthur ["Boy"] Capel was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Cavalry Division.
- - -
By August 24, Arthur had joined the British Expeditionary Force, under orders from General Edmund Allenby (Cavalry Division), which was taking part in the retreat from the Battle of Mons.
- - -
Behind the lines, forced as the revelers at Deauville had been to face this thing that so many of them had assiduously avoided, people panicked and left the resort. On the fourteenth day of that momentous August, normally the height of the season, Elisabeth de Gramont described how The Normandy, the hotel where Gabrielle [Chanel] and Arthur had stayed, was half closed and The Royal was going to become a hospital. Luxury shops were closing, rental agencies were empty and foreigners were disappearing: "Cars are requisitioned, the price of petrol is going up, and horse-drawn cars demand a hundred francs to go up the hill ... Some prudent people ... are hiding little bags of gold in their corsets ... others are buying petrol."
- - -
Before Arthur left for the front, he had instructed Gabrielle to remain in Deauville; his instinct was that she should keep her boutique open. Meanwhile, luxury, extravagance, conspicuous consumption of any kind suddenly didn't seem appropriate, and practicality became the order of the day. A number of the socialites remaining in Deauville volunteered at the hospital, and a pared-down, unostentatious wardrobe became a practical necessity. Yet while many of the socialites claimed they had "lost everything," they also spent that strange summer living a life as luxurious as the great resort was able to provide. Unaware that this season was the last of an époque, intimations of change nonetheless led many a wealthy woman to Gabrielle's door to equip herself with those unfussy clothes she had originally designed with sport and leisure in mind.
And in spite of shortages of material, Gabrielle continued using her initiative and quickly reaped the rewards: her salon was always busy. Mustering her growing number of assistants, she had them sew and sew, and later said, "I was in the right place, an opportunity beckoned. I took it ... What was needed was simplicity, comfort, neatness: unwittingly I offered all of that." Elisabeth de Gramont, whose stylish unconventionality made her one of Gabrielle's early devotees, remembered the tremendous activity in the boutique and the new somberness of women's wardrobes. Gabrielle recalled the races, just before the war, and said she hadn't realized that
I was witnessing the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century; the end of an era. An age of magnificence but of decadence, the last reflection of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body's architecture ... woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for lace, for sable for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious.
She decried the Belle Époque tendency to transform women into "monuments of belated and flamboyant art," and deplored the trains of insipid pastel dresses dragging in the dust.
- - -
In the realm of clothing at least, Gabrielle was no longer interested in fantasy. Embracing what she saw as the reality of her times, she not only gave women practical, stylish clothes but also made them fashionable. And at the end of that hectically busy summer at Deauville, the first of the war, Gabrielle had earned the huge sum of two hundred thousand gold francs. (In today's currency, this is worth approximately ₤560,000.)
When he could, Arthur rushed back from the front to maintain his business interests and visit Gabrielle and his friends. But life was entirely altered. The majority of his contemporaries were paring down their lives and feeling diminished by the war. To begin with, aside from old men and boys, much of the male population had been packed off to fight. Paris felt unrecognizable:
Rid of its bad ferments, [it] had become popular, fraternal again: we were humble little things at the mercy of events: the stock exchange was closed, theaters were shut, the Parliament was away, luxury cars were in Bordeaux ... the streets of Paris have become great village streets again, where one communicates from door to door.
But Gabrielle's and Arthur's entrepreneurial spirit - some would call it opportunism - made what they had to offer very salable, and their response to their times united them still further. While Gabrielle sold her simple, stylish and appropriately sober clothes, Arthur used his fleet of ships to become one of France's major providers of coal, then one of the most crucial resources in the running of a country and a war.
By the end of November 1914, Arthur was based in Flanders with his fellow officers at the Château de la Motte au Bois.
- - -
Meanwhile, along with many of the Deauville beau monde, Gabrielle returned to the capital with Antoinette, leaving a saleswoman in charge of the salon. While the war hadn't reached the rapid conclusion that had been predicted, people realized that, for the moment, Paris wasn't going to be overrun.
- - -
By 1915, planes were flying reconnaissance, and flamethrowers, hand grenades and the terrifying poison gas were regularly being used. What Gabrielle called the "age of iron" had well and truly begun.
- - -
During the war, the resort of Biarritz remained one of the favored destinations of European royalty. And for all those whom war prevented from reaching the resort, there were just as many who were happy to replace them. They came from across the social spectrum, including black marketeers and those newly rich from speculation, and from countries that were neutral. They were unflagging in their desire to escape from thoughts of war, and Biarritz's elegant attractions soothed their lurking fears.
- - -
War shortages and high prices meant that through Gabrielle's triumphant lead, jersey would overtake more familiar materials such as twill-woven serge, now in great demand for the armed forces' uniforms. In the summer of 1916, Vogue revealed Gabrielle's growing influence when describing the promenade of one of the most distinguished streets in the world [the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne].
- - -
The Maison Chanel, with Antoinette greeting the clients, was overwhelmed by orders. They came from Bilbao, San Sebastián, Biarritz, Madrid, Paris, other French cities and also farther afield. Europeans, bored by the dullness of war, could afford to ease their tedium in one of the last outposts where luxury remained the highest priority.
- - -
The war bans the Bizarre.
Even during the war, the upper echelons of French society, with whom Arthur had always passed his time, still dedicated much of theirs to leisure.
- - -
By the beginning of 1916, when the war showed no sign of ending, Arthur's experiences had stimulated his interest in a more political role. Accordingly, in March, he requested permission to resign his intelligence service commission in the hope of being taken on as a liaison officer instead. He had made it his business to become acquainted with both politicians and senior commanders in the French and British armies.
It appears that there were also more personal reasons for Arthur's resignation of his commission. Working in such a stressful occupation near the battlefields of the front - and the death of his friend Hamilton-Grace, for which he held himself responsible - had reduced him to a state of emotional exhaustion.
Yet the appalling suffering and loss of life he had witnessed had not reduced Arthur to a state of bitterness and demoralization. Instead, his religious faith had provoked in him a renewed sense of hope. Ironically, this change was to set in motion a series of grievous results.
- - -
By the end of that year, 1916, Gabrielle was becoming more self-reliant. Her business was so prosperous she chose to return all of the three hundred thousand francs Arthur had invested in her salon at Biarritz.
The year 1916 saw the twin disasters of Verdun and the Somme.
- - -
By the spring of 1917, when the Allied position had never been more in doubt, he [Arthur] published Reflections on Victory, in which he was confident of just that.
Reflections on Victory was reviewed in serious journals, and despite Arthur's antifederal critics, the book broadened his reputation within the circles of power. Those who had known him only as a rich playboy-businessman - made even richer by the war - now looked at him with more discernment.
Few, however, shared Arthur's optimism. The war had become a crushing burden, leaving many incapable of enthusiasm for anything. Even with the long-awaited arrival of the American troops in Paris.
- - -
While the slaughter continued at the front, in Paris in that May of 1917, the Ballets Russes gave the premiere of a new work, Parade, in aid of war victims. It was the only Ballets Russes work put on in Paris during the conflict and was by invitation only. Diaghilev's carefully chosen audience consisted of a selection of society figures, prominent experimental musicians and artists, and a good number of the bourgeoisie, who he knew liked the frisson of dabbling in the avant-garde. Diaghilev also invited Gabrielle.
- - -
The children of the traditional upper classes would be the last to grow up in the old world. And many of the generation now being slaughtered in the war appreciated, however incoherently, that great change was in the air. To give a minor example, Lord Ribblesdale's privileged daughter, Diana Wyndham, was a volunteer ambulance driver, close to the front lines of battle. [...] she was widowed in the first month of the war - only seventeen months after her marriage to the Honerable Percy Wyndham - and, by 1915, she had also lost both her brothers.
So unlike Gabrielle, this young woman, with her uncomplicated femininity, brought out the gallant in Arthur Capel, and he had soon visited her near the front. Any discomfort Arthur felt at Gabrielle's increasing success and independence must have made the delightful young Englishwoman appear all the more seductive.
- - -
In Paris, in the spring of 1918, we find Arthur's favorite sister, the exuberant and capricious Bertha, watching the showing of Gabrielle's new season's clothes, upstairs in the gold-trimmed salon at rue Cambon. (Gabrielle was one of the first couturiers to have live models walking back and forth, wearing her collections in a floor show.)
As the floor show got under way, without warning, Bertha Capel and her fellow guests were shocked out of their state of self-absorption by the sudden thump of an explosion that blew in windows and rocked the buildings nearby.
Paris was under fire from one of the huge long-range German cannons (nicknamed Big Bertha), the like of which had never been seen before. Shells followed one another every twenty minutes. A friend of Bertha's at Gabrielle's show remembered that at the first cannon shot, "the little emaciated models continued their walk, impassive." "It is a rather extraordinary thing," she [Bertha] says, "to watch the show of a mellow spring collection, during which the rhythm of the bombings sets the pace for the models presentation."
- - -
Arthur's intention to marry left Gabrielle feeling weak and abandoned. She had lost, perhaps forsaken, the only man she had ever really loved [...]. Unforeseeably, the war had changed Arthur's notion of commitment and he had felt honor bound to make a choice.
- - -
Finally, on November 11, the armistice was signed, famously, in Marshall Foch's private train carriage, in that same forest of Compiègne where Gabrielle had ridden so many times with Etienne Balsan and their friends.
- - -
When the armistice had at last been signed, Paris went mad and Gabrielle was to be seen at the festivities with a new lover, another handsome playboy, Paul Eduardo Martínez de Hoz, who was a member of the Jockey Club and scion of one of Argentina's wealthiest families.
King George V came to Paris to celebrate the armistice, and a large and distinguished party met at the Capels' apartment to watch the procession from their balcony. The English socialite and diplomat's wife, Lady Helen d'Abernon, later one of Gabrielle's clients, recorded:
It was a wet day and the entry was far from imposing, although guns fired and the streets were lined with troops and with spectators the whole way to the Elysée ...
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7m8_f4pgqI
On the following day, Britain entered the fray by declaring war on Germany. Twelve days later, Arthur ["Boy"] Capel was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Cavalry Division.
- - -
By August 24, Arthur had joined the British Expeditionary Force, under orders from General Edmund Allenby (Cavalry Division), which was taking part in the retreat from the Battle of Mons.
- - -
Behind the lines, forced as the revelers at Deauville had been to face this thing that so many of them had assiduously avoided, people panicked and left the resort. On the fourteenth day of that momentous August, normally the height of the season, Elisabeth de Gramont described how The Normandy, the hotel where Gabrielle [Chanel] and Arthur had stayed, was half closed and The Royal was going to become a hospital. Luxury shops were closing, rental agencies were empty and foreigners were disappearing: "Cars are requisitioned, the price of petrol is going up, and horse-drawn cars demand a hundred francs to go up the hill ... Some prudent people ... are hiding little bags of gold in their corsets ... others are buying petrol."
- - -
Before Arthur left for the front, he had instructed Gabrielle to remain in Deauville; his instinct was that she should keep her boutique open. Meanwhile, luxury, extravagance, conspicuous consumption of any kind suddenly didn't seem appropriate, and practicality became the order of the day. A number of the socialites remaining in Deauville volunteered at the hospital, and a pared-down, unostentatious wardrobe became a practical necessity. Yet while many of the socialites claimed they had "lost everything," they also spent that strange summer living a life as luxurious as the great resort was able to provide. Unaware that this season was the last of an époque, intimations of change nonetheless led many a wealthy woman to Gabrielle's door to equip herself with those unfussy clothes she had originally designed with sport and leisure in mind.
And in spite of shortages of material, Gabrielle continued using her initiative and quickly reaped the rewards: her salon was always busy. Mustering her growing number of assistants, she had them sew and sew, and later said, "I was in the right place, an opportunity beckoned. I took it ... What was needed was simplicity, comfort, neatness: unwittingly I offered all of that." Elisabeth de Gramont, whose stylish unconventionality made her one of Gabrielle's early devotees, remembered the tremendous activity in the boutique and the new somberness of women's wardrobes. Gabrielle recalled the races, just before the war, and said she hadn't realized that
I was witnessing the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century; the end of an era. An age of magnificence but of decadence, the last reflection of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body's architecture ... woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for lace, for sable for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious.
She decried the Belle Époque tendency to transform women into "monuments of belated and flamboyant art," and deplored the trains of insipid pastel dresses dragging in the dust.
- - -
In the realm of clothing at least, Gabrielle was no longer interested in fantasy. Embracing what she saw as the reality of her times, she not only gave women practical, stylish clothes but also made them fashionable. And at the end of that hectically busy summer at Deauville, the first of the war, Gabrielle had earned the huge sum of two hundred thousand gold francs. (In today's currency, this is worth approximately ₤560,000.)
When he could, Arthur rushed back from the front to maintain his business interests and visit Gabrielle and his friends. But life was entirely altered. The majority of his contemporaries were paring down their lives and feeling diminished by the war. To begin with, aside from old men and boys, much of the male population had been packed off to fight. Paris felt unrecognizable:
Rid of its bad ferments, [it] had become popular, fraternal again: we were humble little things at the mercy of events: the stock exchange was closed, theaters were shut, the Parliament was away, luxury cars were in Bordeaux ... the streets of Paris have become great village streets again, where one communicates from door to door.
But Gabrielle's and Arthur's entrepreneurial spirit - some would call it opportunism - made what they had to offer very salable, and their response to their times united them still further. While Gabrielle sold her simple, stylish and appropriately sober clothes, Arthur used his fleet of ships to become one of France's major providers of coal, then one of the most crucial resources in the running of a country and a war.
By the end of November 1914, Arthur was based in Flanders with his fellow officers at the Château de la Motte au Bois.
- - -
Meanwhile, along with many of the Deauville beau monde, Gabrielle returned to the capital with Antoinette, leaving a saleswoman in charge of the salon. While the war hadn't reached the rapid conclusion that had been predicted, people realized that, for the moment, Paris wasn't going to be overrun.
- - -
By 1915, planes were flying reconnaissance, and flamethrowers, hand grenades and the terrifying poison gas were regularly being used. What Gabrielle called the "age of iron" had well and truly begun.
- - -
During the war, the resort of Biarritz remained one of the favored destinations of European royalty. And for all those whom war prevented from reaching the resort, there were just as many who were happy to replace them. They came from across the social spectrum, including black marketeers and those newly rich from speculation, and from countries that were neutral. They were unflagging in their desire to escape from thoughts of war, and Biarritz's elegant attractions soothed their lurking fears.
- - -
War shortages and high prices meant that through Gabrielle's triumphant lead, jersey would overtake more familiar materials such as twill-woven serge, now in great demand for the armed forces' uniforms. In the summer of 1916, Vogue revealed Gabrielle's growing influence when describing the promenade of one of the most distinguished streets in the world [the Avenue of the Bois de Boulogne].
- - -
The Maison Chanel, with Antoinette greeting the clients, was overwhelmed by orders. They came from Bilbao, San Sebastián, Biarritz, Madrid, Paris, other French cities and also farther afield. Europeans, bored by the dullness of war, could afford to ease their tedium in one of the last outposts where luxury remained the highest priority.
- - -
The war bans the Bizarre.
Even during the war, the upper echelons of French society, with whom Arthur had always passed his time, still dedicated much of theirs to leisure.
- - -
By the beginning of 1916, when the war showed no sign of ending, Arthur's experiences had stimulated his interest in a more political role. Accordingly, in March, he requested permission to resign his intelligence service commission in the hope of being taken on as a liaison officer instead. He had made it his business to become acquainted with both politicians and senior commanders in the French and British armies.
It appears that there were also more personal reasons for Arthur's resignation of his commission. Working in such a stressful occupation near the battlefields of the front - and the death of his friend Hamilton-Grace, for which he held himself responsible - had reduced him to a state of emotional exhaustion.
Yet the appalling suffering and loss of life he had witnessed had not reduced Arthur to a state of bitterness and demoralization. Instead, his religious faith had provoked in him a renewed sense of hope. Ironically, this change was to set in motion a series of grievous results.
- - -
By the end of that year, 1916, Gabrielle was becoming more self-reliant. Her business was so prosperous she chose to return all of the three hundred thousand francs Arthur had invested in her salon at Biarritz.
The year 1916 saw the twin disasters of Verdun and the Somme.
- - -
By the spring of 1917, when the Allied position had never been more in doubt, he [Arthur] published Reflections on Victory, in which he was confident of just that.
Reflections on Victory was reviewed in serious journals, and despite Arthur's antifederal critics, the book broadened his reputation within the circles of power. Those who had known him only as a rich playboy-businessman - made even richer by the war - now looked at him with more discernment.
Few, however, shared Arthur's optimism. The war had become a crushing burden, leaving many incapable of enthusiasm for anything. Even with the long-awaited arrival of the American troops in Paris.
- - -
While the slaughter continued at the front, in Paris in that May of 1917, the Ballets Russes gave the premiere of a new work, Parade, in aid of war victims. It was the only Ballets Russes work put on in Paris during the conflict and was by invitation only. Diaghilev's carefully chosen audience consisted of a selection of society figures, prominent experimental musicians and artists, and a good number of the bourgeoisie, who he knew liked the frisson of dabbling in the avant-garde. Diaghilev also invited Gabrielle.
- - -
The children of the traditional upper classes would be the last to grow up in the old world. And many of the generation now being slaughtered in the war appreciated, however incoherently, that great change was in the air. To give a minor example, Lord Ribblesdale's privileged daughter, Diana Wyndham, was a volunteer ambulance driver, close to the front lines of battle. [...] she was widowed in the first month of the war - only seventeen months after her marriage to the Honerable Percy Wyndham - and, by 1915, she had also lost both her brothers.
So unlike Gabrielle, this young woman, with her uncomplicated femininity, brought out the gallant in Arthur Capel, and he had soon visited her near the front. Any discomfort Arthur felt at Gabrielle's increasing success and independence must have made the delightful young Englishwoman appear all the more seductive.
- - -
In Paris, in the spring of 1918, we find Arthur's favorite sister, the exuberant and capricious Bertha, watching the showing of Gabrielle's new season's clothes, upstairs in the gold-trimmed salon at rue Cambon. (Gabrielle was one of the first couturiers to have live models walking back and forth, wearing her collections in a floor show.)
As the floor show got under way, without warning, Bertha Capel and her fellow guests were shocked out of their state of self-absorption by the sudden thump of an explosion that blew in windows and rocked the buildings nearby.
Paris was under fire from one of the huge long-range German cannons (nicknamed Big Bertha), the like of which had never been seen before. Shells followed one another every twenty minutes. A friend of Bertha's at Gabrielle's show remembered that at the first cannon shot, "the little emaciated models continued their walk, impassive." "It is a rather extraordinary thing," she [Bertha] says, "to watch the show of a mellow spring collection, during which the rhythm of the bombings sets the pace for the models presentation."
- - -
Arthur's intention to marry left Gabrielle feeling weak and abandoned. She had lost, perhaps forsaken, the only man she had ever really loved [...]. Unforeseeably, the war had changed Arthur's notion of commitment and he had felt honor bound to make a choice.
- - -
Finally, on November 11, the armistice was signed, famously, in Marshall Foch's private train carriage, in that same forest of Compiègne where Gabrielle had ridden so many times with Etienne Balsan and their friends.
- - -
When the armistice had at last been signed, Paris went mad and Gabrielle was to be seen at the festivities with a new lover, another handsome playboy, Paul Eduardo Martínez de Hoz, who was a member of the Jockey Club and scion of one of Argentina's wealthiest families.
King George V came to Paris to celebrate the armistice, and a large and distinguished party met at the Capels' apartment to watch the procession from their balcony. The English socialite and diplomat's wife, Lady Helen d'Abernon, later one of Gabrielle's clients, recorded:
It was a wet day and the entry was far from imposing, although guns fired and the streets were lined with troops and with spectators the whole way to the Elysée ...
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7m8_f4pgqI
