The Gospel According to Coco Chanel by Karen Karbo

Author:Karen Karbo [KARBO, KAREN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762796212
Publisher: skirt!

If Misia was Chanel’s woman friend, Cocteau was her gay friend. Cocteau, as any dreamy Francophile liberal arts major can tell you, was the whirling poetic center of that over-romanticized artistic vortex centered in Montparnasse: Paris in the 1920s. Cocteau was the hyphenate’s hyphenate, a poet-painter-novelist-playwright-filmmaker, and of course, boxing manager.*

In the realm of karmic debt, Chanel owes Cocteau (maybe that’s why she disparaged him). Before Cocteau, the Chanel aesthetic may have been everywhere—the war was over and women were free, free, free at last; they lopped off their hair, wore cardigans and belts, and looked like paperboys—but Chanel herself was still the shy pilot fish attached to the side of the gilded pelagic that was Misia Sert. And at Chanel Modes, aside from a few actresses and It girls—the 1920s’ equivalent of young, red carpet B-listers most famous for marrying the much-tattooed guitarists of alt-rock bands—Chanel’s clientele consisted of the carriage trade. Who else could afford her astronomical prices? And then as now, the carriage trade was, well, stodgy. In the famous Mac vs. PC computer commercials they’re PC, only in better suits.

But becoming friends with Cocteau and his avant-garde artist pals conferred upon Chanel a high-gloss sheen of über stylishness (white-hot searchlights!) that was eclipsed for a decade or so mid-twentieth century, but has never really deserted her. After she fell in with Cocteau, not only were her clothes all the rage, she was all the rage, living at the red-hot center of Parisian artistic life, partying late into the night at Le Boeuf sur le Toit (The Ox on the Roof) with a nexus of poets, painters, musicians, theater types, art dealers, and, yes, the fringe of the carriage trade, the really rich folks who had a taste for the wild side.

Thus, at the intersection of Art and Commerce sat Chic, in the person of Coco Chanel. Talk about your cross-branding! Without too much trouble Cocteau conned her into designing the costumes for his production of Antigone (it doesn’t get more artistically high-falutin’ than that). Characteristically, Chanel defied conventional wisdom and stuck the actors in heavy Scotch woolens, which would have given Sophocles’ Greeks heatstroke, not to mention an itchy rash. The press praised her ensembles as being accurate and authentic. She went on to make a mini-career of costume design, stepping up to the plate once again for both Le Train Bleu and Orphée.

Meanwhile, Chanel helped with Cocteau’s bills, specifically the steep cost of rehab. Known quaintly as “the cure,” everything back then was more romantic, even drug addiction, specifically opium drug addiction. At the risk of revealing my total naiveté regarding such matters—do they even have such a thing anymore? Isn’t opium the puffy-shirt, poetry-writing great-grandpa of heroin?

Anyway, Cocteau began smoking the stuff in earnest after the death of his lover, the literary prodigy Raymond Radiguet. Nicknamed Monsieur Bébé, Mister Baby, by a gang of pals that included Juan Gris, Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Chanel, Radiguet published his first novel, The Devil in the Flesh, when he was twenty (he’d been writing since he was fifteen).

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