Coco’s black wool jersey and silk satin day dress with pleated skirt, 1926
Coco still had her three boutiques and plunged into work as a memorial to Boy. In his will, much of his estate went to his wife and baby daughter, but he had left Coco a huge sum of money, which she used to move to a five-story building at 31, rue Cambon. Later, in about 1928, she installed mirrors that covered every wall in the salon. Mirrors lined the walls of the staircase too. The faceted mirrors reflected multiple images of the models as they presented new collections. Coco, perched out of sight at the top of the stairs, could see the reactions of the spectators below.
Boy had introduced Coco to a circle of artistic friends that included a legendary model named Misia Sert. As a young woman Misia had posed for artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Édouard Vuillard. Portraits of her appeared in posters, photographs, and paintings all over Paris. The first time she and Coco met, Misia admired Coco’s fur-trimmed red velvet coat, and at the end of the evening Coco offered to give it to her.
Jean Cocteau and the cast of the ballet Le Train Bleu wearing Coco’s costumes, 1922: (left to right) Lydia Sokolova, Anton Dolin, Jean Cocteau, Leon Woizikovsky, and Bronislava Nijinska
“Obviously I could not accept it,” recalled Misia. “But her gesture had been so pretty that I found her completely bewitching.” The next day Misia hurried over to rue Cambon, and the women became best friends. Sometimes they dressed in twin Chanel outfits.
After Boy’s death, Misia sympathized with Coco. “I tried desperately to think of ways to distract her,” she said. At Misia’s dinner parties Coco met artists Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, composer Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Diaghilev, the director of Ballets Russes. The artists and writers didn’t ask or care about her background; they simply admired her talent and wit. Coco did not need to fabricate stories for them—a vice she still indulged in among certain people.
A few years later, she created costumes for Cocteau’s ballet Le Train Bleu, about rich vacationers traveling to Deauville, and Picasso designed the stage curtain and program. The costumes for men and women were based on Coco’s own lines of sports clothes: swimsuits, tennis outfits with headbands, and striped sweaters. When Cocteau was asked why he had chosen Coco, he said, “Because she is the greatest couturiere of our age.”
One evening at the Paris Opera House, Coco sat in her box seat and surveyed the gowns of the women in the audience. “All those gaudy . . . colors shocked me,” she said. “Those reds, those greens, those electric blues . . . brought back into fashion by Paul Poiret, made me feel ill. . . . I remember only too well saying to someone sitting beside me: ‘These colors are impossible. These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black.’”
Up till then, women had worn black only if they were in mourning. But in 1920 Coco made the color fashionable by introducing “the little black dress.”
“I imposed black,” she said, “for black wipes out everything else around.” Using materials such as crepe and wool, she designed simple sheaths with rounded necklines, close-fitting sleeves, and skirts that fell just below the knee.
Coco made many versions of the “little black dress” for daytime and evening. One dress in sheer silk chiffon had floating panels and a pointed handkerchief hem with streamers at the shoulders that could be tied into bows. Another evening dress was sleeveless, with tiers of chiffon in the skirt. A severe, long-sleeved black dress featured a cowl neckline and resembled a nun’s habit, a reflection of her days at the orphanage. Sometimes Coco added a white fabric camellia for contrast, and the flower became her symbol.
By 1926 the fame of Coco’s creation had spread to America, and Vogue dubbed it the “Ford dress,” comparing it to the mass-produced car that came only in black. Wealthy women on both sides of the Atlantic wore her designs or copies of them. Coco once said, “You have a style when everyone on the street is dressed like you. I achieved this.”