THE GUILLOTINE
Twentieth-Century Classics That Won't Last - No 21: Coco Chanel
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Your support makes all the difference.What drama was to the 1950s (the rise and reign of the Angry Young Man), painting to the 1960s (the cult of the art school, Hockney), photography, it could be argued, to the 1970s (Mapplethorpe, Bruce Weber, the news photographer in Vietnam and Latin America) and movies to the 1980s (the Hollywood hegemony), so fashion is to the 1990s. Fashion is both cool and hot. Fashion is sexy. Fashion is now. Fashion, to coin a phrase, is in fashion.
It may therefore seem perverse - at a moment of cultural history when fashion, with all its glamour and foolishness, its frivolity but also its epiphanies of authentic beauty, has upstaged many of the grander art forms - to write off a woman who did more than most to revolutionise how her gender should dress. For if Coco Chanel is still best-known to the uninitiated for her haute couture, she was also, and primarily, the first grande couturiere to design clothes from simple fabrics - the humdrum and hitherto disdained jersey, for example. She uncorseted 20th-century woman, granting her a new freedom of movement; and, because her sportswear and beachwear in particular left themselves open to the plagiarism of mass production, she may be regarded as the pioneer of cheap chic.
Yet it's precisely the charm of fashion that, given its insatiable appetite for the new and the latest, nothing it produces is destined to live for long. Nor, for that matter, are those who toil in its orchidaceous vineyards. (Who, save a specialist, would now be capable of naming one great couturier of the 19th century?) And, in Chanel's case, her claim to posterity has been compromised by the fact that she liberated women from the fastidious totalitarianism of the fashion world (wear this, don't wear that, this is in, that is out) by encouraging them to ignore its immemorial laws and edicts and set about programming their own clothes. In a sense, she made herself redundant.
One is tempted, nevertheless, to save her in extremis. Not for her clothes but for her other claim to fame, Chanel No 5. A bottle of perfume, after all, belongs to much the same mythology and ideology of luxury as a precious stone. In its exclusivity, its faintly ethereal coloration and of course its cost, it constitutes a form of liquid jewellery. And, like a diamond, it's for ever.
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