The reason Freud never figured out what a woman wants–Was will das Weib?, as he put it–is that he was asking the wrong people. If he’d talked to either Coco Chanel or Diane Von Furstenberg, he’d have learned that what many of us want is something decent to put on in the morning, for a change.
A whole literature exists on Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel–to date, at least four biographies–and none of it is especially revealing about the person behind the elegant and exhaustively photographed face. (Not beautiful; Chanel was the classic example of the jolie laide, which translates roughly as “Even a homely Frenchwoman can make a pretty American look as bland as a Barbie.”)
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Sprung from the convent at 18, Chanel set herself up as a seamstress, doing alterations for the Moulins bourgeoisie. But that was only her day job: the young Chanel had theatrical ambitions and spent her evenings singing naughty songs in a cafe catering to young officers from a nearby garrison. (One of the songs, “Qui qu’ a vu Coco?,” provided her nickname.) What Coco lacked in vocal styling she made up for in je ne sais quoi, and she soon attracted the attention of a young cavalry officer who maintained a stable of women at his country estate. These were mistresses in training, or horizontales–a type immortalized by Colette in Gigi–and Coco was a quick study. A polo-playing coal magnate, Arthur “Boy” Capel, became her first serious lover.
For the next 20 years Chanel was on a roll. She dressed royalty, movie stars, and–through the trickle-down process–shop girls. Her clothes were knocked off by everyone, and she didn’t care; to her it meant her designs were wearable. She expanded into accessories: shoes, bags, belts. She hired a chemist and developed Chanel No. 5, a fragrance as unlike the demure, one-note florals that preceded it as her clothes were different from crinolines and leg-of-mutton sleeves. It quickly became the best-selling perfume in the world.
Worse yet, Wallach gamely quotes Chanel’s own excuse for her three-year liaison with a Nazi spy: “At my age if a man wants to sleep with you, you don’t ask to see his passport.” Other biographies pull fewer punches: Chanel paid hush money to her lover’s superior officer to keep the affair quiet, was briefly arrested at the end of the war, and escaped having her head shaved with the rest of the collaborators only through British political connections made during her liaison with the duke of Westminster. Maybe the moral of Chanel’s life is simply that it’s good to have powerful friends.
She first hooked up with Prince Egon–his mother is Clara Agnelli of Fiat, but you knew that–at a ski resort. Diane was in the process of casting about for something to do and had apprenticed herself to an Italian textile manufacturer; she thought she might be able to sell Italian cotton T-shirts in New York. (Egon was living there, training to be an investment banker.) She got pregnant on one of Egon’s visits to Italy, married him, and moved to Manhattan, where the pair became Gotham’s glammest couple.
Like Chanel before her, Von Furstenberg is determined to make le comeback; in fact, Diane: A Signature Life is her way of announcing that she’s still here. She may or may not succeed; rag trade insiders say the redesigned wrap dresses introduced at Saks and elsewhere last spring have met with only mixed success. (Reading between the lines, one can sense Von Furstenberg’s surprise that her 70s customers are somewhat broader in the beam, hence less wrappable, than they were a generation ago. Rich ladies evidently don’t widen with age.) Still, her name has started showing up on the fashion pages of the Times, so who knows? It’s hard to keep a good princess down.
