By Ariel Barley

"A dress cannot just hang like a painting on the wall, or like a book remain intact and live a long and sheltered life. A dress has no life of its own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to, glorifies or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty.” — Elsa Schiaparelli

1952, just before a comeback


A Hollywood man asks Marilyn Monroe what she wears to bed.

Marilyn, a tactful woman, doesn’t necessarily want to disclose that she sleeps in the nude. So she smiles. Her golden curls bounce as she comes up with something clever. She thinks of her nightstand and of jasmine misting over her neck.

“Well, I wear Chanel No. 5.”

Months later, Coco Chanel sits at a desk chair in Switzerland, at Beau-Rivage Palace. This is where she has been in exile since the war, hiding from the truth of her German lover — a Nazi intelligence officer. She will be buried here, a few decades from now, under five stone lions that will watch her grave. Even later than that, in 2011, the world will find out she did more than just love a man for Nazi Germany. The House of Chanel will dissociate from its maker.

But in 1952, all is not yet lost. Pages slip between Chanel’s fingers. She reads the same interview, over and over again, a familiar spark settling in her gut. The culprit: LIFE Magazine — an interview with Marilyn Monroe herself. Chanel thumbs the square neck of her own personal bottle of Chanel No. 5. The edges of the stopper make pink imprints on her fingertips, and those same fingertips draw circles into her phone dial. Tucked under her desk is a sketchbook full of collarless tweed suits, a slap-in-the-face for Christian Dior and his restrictive New Look.

She has to make a call. Chanel has never been one to waste an opportunity like this.


Late 1930s, just before the second World War

The scene is a Parisian costume ball. Distinguished guests adorn masks and gloves and big shoes for making dancerly noises — as much noise as possible. They sparkle, because they must in these times, and they speak in tittling whispers when Elsa Schiaparelli enters the hall dressed as a tree, illuminated by candlelight.

By design she ignites conversation. Her name brings a certain association — ”Schiap” is what they call her sometimes — ”shciap” like the sound of velcro teeth ripping apart. That name pinballs from guest to guest, wild hot gossip. If it weren’t a costume ball, people may have been discussing her daring outfit — the whorls of brown paint that form slabs of bark on her skin, blurring the line between dress and body — but today, they wonder if she’s heard who else was invited.

Coco Chanel chose not to dress up tonight.

Her own silhouette — a slinky skirt, sharp shoulders, a shape every distinguished woman will don come morning, after this foray into extravagance  — is iconic enough. She cuts through the throngs of people with her practiced smile. This ball is business for her — hands locked with potential collaborators, lips brushing lightly over the cheeks of loyal and lavish customers. The elite gather naturally around her. They want to touch, to see, to dance with her. They wonder if her glamour will rub off onto them. A smudge of rosewood lipstick, a bit of her signature scent grabbing onto the fibers of their costumes and lingering. She will make them chic by association. She’s so…effortless, they think.

Schiaparelli pays Chanel no mind at first. She has her own rounds to make, her own charm to pour onto her own clientele. Schiaparelli’s girls come to her; she never seeks them out. They prod her with questions and wait for her outlandish responses. Her words demand eyes, and her hands command attention. Those hands are rugged from countless pins poking into them. They tell the story of her newly dyed furs at home — of the icy blues and shocking pinks she’s woven into her upcoming collection, bright against the drab of a looming war.

“Elsa,” one of her girls indicates, pointing behind Schiaparelli. Mid-spiel, Schiaparelli turns around.

Chanel stands, all smooth hands, head cocked in an unspoken proposition. “Shall we dance?”

The hall holds its breath.

“Sure, hatmaker.”

Their dance is tight, practiced, one woman trying to lead the other. Sharp heels clack. Guests pretend not to watch. They are backing up, backing up, and —

A scream from outside their dance is their only warning. Schiaparelli has misstepped — or maybe it was Chanel. Either way, Schiaparelli falls into an ornate candelabra, and her dress is on fire.

An explosion of smells. The sea of guests condense around them and extinguish the fire with whatever they have on hand. Soda water seeps into Schiaparelli’s skin. Onlookers mourn the destruction of her dress.

But Schiaparelli just stares at Chanel, at the twitchings of a red smile on her lips. Chanel is thinking: checkmate, and she wants Schiaparelli to hear it. Instead, her sentiment echoes through the guests, and later to the streets of Paris, over coffees and dinner: She pushed her. No, she didn’t. I saw it — no, I saw it!

But in that moment Schiaparelli does not speak. Instead she pictures a dress made of fire, wondering what fabric could capture the intensity of that brief luminescent explosion. What could make the sounds of the guests around them? Chiffon? Rayon? Cellophane? She thinks of construction, where seams will meet.

She’s in her own world, back in her studio, waiting to materialize this moment and then touch it a thousand times.


1937, just before Time Magazine's first cover with a female fashion designer

At 21 Place Vendôme, everything is pink, and Elsa Schiaparelli sits in all of that pink, observing the fruits of her most recent collaboration.

Models slink by her, donning the combined work of her and surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. Schiaparelli met him by chance a handful of years ago on the streets of Paris, their early friendship culminating in a compact powder compartment shaped like a rotary phone dial. Now, they bask in what they are able to do together — the fact that their work gets people talking.

A model stops in front of her, her hair blending seamlessly with a hat shaped like a shoe. Another wears a dress painted with the form of a lobster; Schiaparelli still feels that copper paint dried on her palms, sticky and cracking. A ribbon cinches the model’s waist, pulling the eye towards the point before the fabric swells.

Schiaparelli thinks of what that Coco Chanel calls her, in place of her name, to anyone who asks — press, other designers, Schiaparelli herself: that Italian artist who makes clothes. She turns it over in her head, and watches as a model breathes life into her dress. Or maybe the dress brings life into the model. Either way, it’s creation. She wonders: how could clothes be anything but art?


1903, just before her big break

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel is almost twenty, and she kicks her legs high, face adorned in dark, thick makeup that will show up well under the bright lights of La Rotonde cafe. She is poseuse for today — the act sandwiched between the main acts, and she can’t stand that thought. She is a seamstress on the days where she doesn’t dance, and she can’t stand that thought either.

Chanel will not settle for mediocrity. She will be great — she is great. She just knows it. And so she sings, and she sews. Her lucky break will come soon, in the form of a rich man who will fund her first shop under her new name — a name given to her by the cabaret girls. There, she will sell elegant hats for elegant women, and her empire will blossom.

Until then, she sings, and she waits for her opening.

In Rome, Elsa Schiaparelli fancies herself ugly. Her sister is the natural beauty of their family, but that thought does not enrage her. Instead, as she travels with her father to Tunisia, she borrows beauty from the world around her and tucks it away for later, in sketchbooks and in the folds of her ever-rippling mind.

Tunisia is only the beginning. Schiaparelli will write over the next few years, because she cannot help but create. She will write poems of mythology and sex and love and call them Arethusa. Those images will later appear in her collections — in a button shaped like a bow or a painting of a nude woman on fabric. She will stun — her family, her friends, the world — she just knows it. She will be shocking, and she will turn wars into gloves because she is an artist.

A hatmaker and an artist. Clothes that comfort women and clothes that redefine them. The fashion world will chew you up and spit you out, merciless. It wants to — but for them, it waits. ■