Chanel, Vionnet, Schiaparelli
French Fashion & Haute Couture
Course 1 · Chapter 4 · Chanel, Vionnet, Schiaparelli and the Interwar Years
After the First World War the dress of women in France changed quickly, and a new group of designers, most of them women, defined what modern clothes looked like. This chapter covers the three best known, Gabrielle Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet and Elsa Schiaparelli, their rivals, the business of perfume that made some of them rich, the effect of the Depression, and the couture houses during the German Occupation. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".
The Three Designers
Gabrielle Chanel
Born in 1883 in Saumur and raised partly in an orphanage, she began as a milliner and opened shops in Paris, Deauville and Biarritz in the 1910s (check). She used jersey, a soft knitted fabric then associated with underwear, to make simple, comfortable clothes. Her house in the rue Cambon grew in the 1920s into one of the most successful in Paris.
Madeleine Vionnet
Trained in the Callot house (Chapter 3), she opened her own house in 1912 and reopened it after the war (check). She developed the bias cut, cutting fabric diagonally so that it clings and falls in soft folds, and she designed without a corset, often draping fabric on a small wooden doll. Her work was admired by other designers as the most skilled of the period.
Elsa Schiaparelli
Born in Rome in 1890, she moved to Paris in 1922 and made her name in 1927 with sweaters knitted with trompe-l'œil bows (check). She worked with Surrealist artists, notably Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau, on the lobster dress and the shoe hat of 1937, and she made "shocking pink" her colour (check).
The 1920s Look and the Business
| Item (check each) | Detail |
|---|---|
| The silhouette | The 1920s brought straight lines, dropped waists and hemlines to the knee, with cropped hair. The type was called la garçonne, after a controversial novel of 1922, and was linked to women entering work and the loss of men in the war. |
| The 1925 exhibition | The Paris exhibition of decorative arts in 1925, which gave its name to Art Deco, showed fashion as part of the wider design world. |
| Chanel No. 5 | Launched in 1921 with the perfumer Ernest Beaux, it used synthetic aldehydes and became one of the best-selling perfumes in history. The company that sold it, Parfums Chanel, was set up in 1924 with the Wertheimer brothers, who owned most of it (check). |
| The little black dress | In 1926 the American Vogue printed a simple black dress by Chanel, comparing it to the Ford car (check). Black was no longer only for mourning. |
| Jean Patou | A designer of sportswear for women, including tennis clothes for the champion Suzanne Lenglen, and of the perfume Joy (1930) (check). In 1924 he took American women as models, after a search in New York (check). |
| The Depression | After 1929 the American market, on which many houses relied, shrank, and some houses closed. Perfume and licensing became more important (check). |
Craft, Copying and Workers
- Copying. The couture houses sold patterns and toiles to American manufacturers and department stores, and were copied widely. Vionnet fought copyists and put her thumb-print on her labels to prove authenticity (check).
- Workers. Vionnet is also remembered for providing her workers with paid holidays, a canteen and medical care at a time when few did (check). The staff of the ateliers were mostly women, and the history of couture is also the history of their work (Chapter 9).
- The designers' background. Chanel, Schiaparelli and Vionnet all came from modest backgrounds and built their houses on talent and contacts. Chanel's rise was helped by wealthy lovers and patrons, a part of her story that she described in different versions over the years (check).
The Occupation
| Point (check each) | Detail |
|---|---|
| The plan to move | In 1940 the German authorities considered moving the couture industry to Berlin and Vienna. Lucien Lelong, the head of the trade body, argued that couture could not be moved because it depended on its Paris workers and traditions, and the plan was dropped (check). |
| The houses | Many houses stayed open, selling to German officers' wives and French clients and to export markets in neutral countries, while others closed. Schiaparelli spent the war in the United States, and Chanel closed her fashion house in 1939 (check). |
| The shortages | Fabric was rationed, and women improvised with wooden soles, hats and recycled materials. Hats became large and ornate as a form of defiance (check). |
| Chanel | She lived at the Ritz hotel in Paris during the Occupation and had a relationship with a German officer, Hans Günther von Dincklage. In 1941 she tried to use anti-Jewish laws to take control of her perfume company from the Wertheimers, who had left France, and the attempt failed (check). Historians still debate her wartime contacts and what she knew, and she was questioned after the Liberation but not charged (check). She then lived mostly in Switzerland until 1953. |
The account of Chanel's wartime activities is based on archives and has been revised by historians, and it should be described only to the extent that it is documented (Exercise 3).
Exercises
Test the claim "Chanel freed women" with the six questions, and give a more careful sentence.
Compare Chanel, Vionnet and Schiaparelli in a table (background, what each contributed, how each is remembered) and say whose contribution is most easily overlooked.
Separate what is documented from what is disputed in the accounts of Chanel during the Occupation, and say what each kind of source adds.
Quick Reference
- Designers: Chanel (jersey, No. 5, the little black dress), Vionnet (the bias cut), Schiaparelli (Surrealism, shocking pink), Patou
- Business: perfume and licensing; the Wertheimers and Parfums Chanel
- The Occupation: Lelong and the plan to move couture; Chanel's wartime record is debated
- British links: the Duke of Westminster, tweed, Molyneux