Inspired by her romance with Boy, Coco began decking herself out in his clothes. She borrowed things from his closet: polo shirts, loose sweaters, and English schoolboy–style blazers. Coco had already started wearing jodhpurs at Royallieu for horseback riding, but now Boy sent her to a tailor to have a riding jacket and trousers made out of the finest material.
Once, she and Boy attended a costume party at Royallieu where the guests dressed up for a mock country wedding. Coco was supposed to be the “best man.” She bought trousers, a white shirt, a dark jacket, and ankle boots from the boys’ department at a Paris department store. Although the outfit was meant for fun, Coco added a feminine touch with her alluring looks and charm. The tomboy clothes suited her and showed off her slim figure. While other women wore fussy feathers and lace, Coco purposely created an image of herself as a gamine, a playfully mischievous girl, and sparked a trend.
Her adoring patrons at rue Cambon urged her to expand her line and offer more than hats. So she began selling women turtleneck sweaters and open-neck polo shirts like the kind she took from Boy’s closet.
Coco (on the right) and her aunt Adrienne outside Coco’s Deauville boutique beneath the awning with her name, 1913
By 1913 Boy had encouraged Coco to open a branch of her shop in the seaside resort of Deauville, where they spent summers. They chose a spot on rue Gontaut-Biron, across the street from the Grand Casino. Coco hung out her first awning. Black letters against a striped background spelled out “Gabrielle Chanel.” An article about Coco’s “trendy new boutique” appeared in a women’s magazine. The article included a photograph showing Coco in a long skirt, a simple blouse, and an oversize knit tunic with big patch pockets. In those days, pockets on the outside of clothes were part of a man’s wardrobe and considered unladylike, but Coco liked sagging pockets and defied convention. She also pinned a camellia on her jacket the way men did, starting another signature style.
One day, the weather turned cold. Coco needed something warm to wear and took one of Boy’s jersey sweaters. But she didn’t want to pull it over her head, so she cut it down the front, finished the edge with ribbon, and added a collar and a knot. When she went out, people asked her, “Where did you find that dress?” Coco said, “If you like it, I’ll sell it to you.” Quickly she made and sold ten jersey dresses. Later she said, “My fortune is built on that old jersey I’d put on because it was cold in Deauville.”
On the beach, she posed for photographs to promote her sporty clothes. “Everybody wanted to meet me,” she recalled. “I became something of a celebrity, and there, too, I started a fashion—couturiers as stars.”
The following summer, when Coco was again in Deauville, Germany declared war on France, and the next day Great Britain declared war on Germany. August 3, 1914, was the start of the Great War (World War I). Boy enlisted and joined a British intelligence unit.
By the third week of August, German troops had advanced toward Paris, and wealthy people fled to Deauville. Coco’s was the only store open in town. Women needed practical outfits to do volunteer work in hospitals, and they snapped up Coco’s skirts, sailor blouses, and knit jackets.
Boy visited Coco whenever possible. In the summer of 1915, they went to a fashionable resort south of Biarritz, near the Spanish border. Spain was neutral, and the rich flocked there to escape from thoughts of war. Coco and Boy hit on the idea of opening a branch of her boutique in Biarritz. Once again they chose a key location: an ornate villa on rue Gardères, facing the casino near the beach. On July 15, 1915, Coco opened her shop, the first fashion house in Biarritz. She hired Marie-Louise Deray, an expert seamstress, and sent for her sister Antoinette. Before long she had sixty women sewing for her in Paris while also maintaining salons in Biarritz and Deauville.
Since there was a wartime shortage of fabric, Coco thought of making dresses out of inexpensive machine-knit wool jersey, the kind used for men’s underwear and nightshirts. “The jersey in those days was only worn underneath,” she said. “I gave it the honor of being worn on top.”
She bought a manufacturer’s entire stock, which came only in beige and gray, and transformed the fabric into chemise dresses. Coco shortened hems to above the ankle so that women could move freely. “I created a brand-new silhouette,” she said. The dresses sold out! So she bought more jersey and had it dyed in a range of colors. Coco shaped the soft jersey right on the models, who had to stand still for hours. An assistant held pins while Coco barked commands.
“Mademoiselle was demanding,” recalled Marie-Louise, the head of the workroom. “If a fitting went wrong [Coco] exploded. She loved to pester people . . . She was tough, unrelenting with the staff. But what she came up with was sensational, both chic and exceedingly simple.”
In America, Harper’s Bazaar published a picture of Coco’s creation with the caption, “Chanel’s charming chemise dress.” The stretchy material clung to the figure, so the dresses had to be worn without corsets. Poiret had killed corsets, but his clothes featured dizzying pleats and feathers. Coco’s dresses were simple and sporty. She later said, “By inventing the jersey I liberated the body; I discarded the waist.” Of course, women had to be “slim like Coco” to look good in the dresses.
Coco’s comfortable and stylish outfits made of silk jersey shown in the magazine Les Elégances Parisiennes, March 1917
Orders flooded the Biarritz boutique. Customers included members of the Spanish royal family. By early 1916, while the war raged on, Coco employed three hundred people in her boutiques and traveled in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce.
She sent Marie-Louise back to Paris to take charge of the atelier (workroom) there. Soon Coco had five workrooms, including the headquarters in Paris, producing dresses in silk, cotton, and wool as well as jersey. She selected the fabrics and colors herself. “Our workrooms were like a fairyland, a veritable rainbow,” recalled Marie-Louise.
Coco boasted that she had started another trend in 1917 by cutting her hair short. At that time, it was fashionable for women to have long hair. Coco’s thick hair fell below her waist, and when she went out in the evening she did it up in three braids wrapped around her head. One night she was dressing to go to the opera, and the gas burner in her bathroom blew up. Soot covered her white dress and her face, and her hair was singed. She washed her face, determined to go out.
Coco with short hair, circa 1923
“I took a pair of scissors and cut one braid off,” she said. Then she cut the second braid and finally told her maid to cut the third. Coco slipped into a black dress and left for the opera. Everyone admired her coiffure, saying that she looked like “a young boy, a little shepherd.” From then on, when planning a new collection, as a ritual she cut her models’ hair and her own with a pair of nail scissors. But it was Poiret who had introduced short “bobbed” hair for women when he presented his 1908 collection. The clothes, inspired by ancient Greek gowns and Japanese kimonos, featured straight, geometric lines. Poiret wanted his models to have very spare hairdos to complement the outfits. So they wore Dutch-boy cuts with full bangs.
Coco must have known about her rival’s innovation. Nevertheless, she gave another account of how she popularized the fad. “In 1917 I slashed my thick hair,” she recalled. “To begin with I trimmed it bit by bit. Finally I wore it short. . . . And everyone went into raptures.”
Coco’s earnings enabled her to pay back the money Boy had loaned her to open the boutique in Biarritz. “I was my own master,” she said, “and I depended on myself alone.”
Heart-shaped earrings made of gold metal, red and black plastic, and rhinestones, 1995, that feature the double Cs linking the names Chanel and Capel
Yet she had always hoped that one day they would marry, despite her lower-class background. But in the spring of 1918, Boy became engaged to an English aristocrat, Diana Lister Wyndham. They married in October, just before the war ended. Coco was heartbroken.
She and Boy still cared about each other. Coco rented a villa in the town of Garches, west of Paris, and he visited her there. After seeing her in December 1919, he left in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce to meet his sister in Cannes. On the way there, a tire exploded. The Rolls flipped over and burst into flames. The driver escaped. Boy was killed on the spot. An old friend of Coco’s drove to her villa that night to tell her about the accident, but she guessed what had happened and asked him to take her to Cannes. They drove for eighteen hours without stopping. No one saw her cry. “His death was a terrible blow to me,” she later said. “1919, the year I woke up famous and the year I lost everything.”
