Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel

"May my legend prosper and thrive. I wish it a long and happy life." -- Coco Chanel

That, in essence, is what makes Coco Chanel the single most famous fashion designer of the 20th century. Legend. Sure, she did some innovative stuff. Sure, she had some good ideas. Sure, she broke some rules. But ultimately, what Coco Chanel is most remembered for is being Coco Chanel - and not even herself, but the legend she made of herself. The real woman was something else entirely. But smart. She was damn smart.

Coco Chanel was born in 1883 in rural France. She had it rough; her father died when she was young, and by age twelve she was put in an orphanage, where she was taught to be a seamstress. On vacations she was sent to distant relatives, who showed her a bit more of the world. Eventually she went to work for a tailor, where she had an affair with one of the customers, moved to Paris, and decided the good life looked pretty good.

In 1913 she opened a millinery shop in Paris, and it didn't go so well. She went into bankruptcy and was forced to leave the city, taking up residence in the resort town of Deauville. Soon, with the help of another lover, she was back in the business of selling hats. Like Schiaparelli (who was a blood enemy and rival), she soon branched out into sportswear. She scandalized the fashion world by using jersey (tee shirt material; a very thin, super-small gauge knit fabric that is cut and sewn much like a woven) to fashion casual wear. Up until the advent of Chanel, jersey was only used to make underwear.

Very early on she had already settled on her signature style which, ultimately came down to simplicity. Simple fabrics, simple lines, and simple cuts. Occasionally she went wild and added some lace. By the early 1920s she'd begun producing a fairly extensive line of clothing. (Remember you can mouse over these for the year they were designed.)





And, by then, she had already introduced one of her very few original ideas: The Little Black Dress.




The LBD for short. Seriously. You read about fashion you will see it referred to as the LBD. It's that iconic.

You have to remember that when the LBD was introduced, mourning for loved ones was still very common (no antibiotics, no modern disease treatments, many more losses of young, vital people), and there were RULES about how long to wear black, and then going to 'half mourning' in gray or lavender, and well, you DIDN'T wear black unless you had to.

Until Chanel told women black was chic and elegant. And, well, I've got a couple little black dresses in my closet... don't you?

By the 1930s, Chanel was dressing - and SOCIALIZING - with royalty, in particular the British royal family, most notably the Duke of Westminster and the Duke of Windsor (one or the other of whom she was supposed to have had an affair with, possibly both; I can't keep up on who all she slept with and I doubt what she said in public about her conquests was the truth anyway). The thirties was a good era for Chanel, and she cranked out a lot of good stuff:





She did make stuff in colors other than black, just not that often. You can see, though, that she kept it simple and minimalist. Chanel said a lot about how fashion should be about the woman, not the dress. Of course in a more pithy, quotable way. "Look for the woman in the dress. If there is no woman, there is no dress." and like that.

World War Two hit, and most designers closed up shop and headed out, or dug in in Paris to hold on until they were liberated. Chanel? Chanel looked out for number one and shacked up at the Paris Ritz with Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a Nazi officer and spy. There are conflicting, muddled accounts, but it seems that Chanel once tried to lure a distant relative of Winston Churchill's to Paris during the occupation. Reasons why are argued, but I can't see how it would be for something GOOD, considering Nazi Germany held the city at the time.

After the war, Chanel moved to Switzerland to lay low. At one point she was chucked into jail for war crimes, but was eventually let out and nothing more was ever said of prosecution; most historians agree that she got off through intervention by the British royal family.

In 1954 Chanel returned to Paris (that takes some nerve, and I'm amazed no one ever firebombed her atelier or attacked her; memories of the occupation were long and still live on even NOW) and re-opened her shop. The French never again really wore Chanel clothing. It was the Americans and English who kept her in business. Chanel settled in, still at the Paris Ritz, though without her Nazi boyfriend, and proceeded to put into motion the tales and stories that eventually became the legend that is Coco Chanel.

Among other things, Chanel is often credited with inventing the women's suit, but it's not true. The suit, as in skirt-jacket-shirt, had been around for hundreds of years; in the court of Louis XIV, they wore a similar combo:

Obviously this isn't by Chanel. It's from the 1750s and is, essentially, a women's suit. There's a skirt, the 'petticoat' as it was known then, with a long shirt/coat over it, the 'robe', and instead of a shirt, a stomacher (a heavily decorated V shaped piece of fabric) was pinned or tied to the front of the corset. Dunno about you, but to me that's a really francy suit (typo on purpose). This style was known as the 'robe a la francaise'.

All Chanel did was update it in a big way. From 1927, in her usual black:



By 1937 - possibly earlier but this is the earliest one I could find - she had settled on that trademark four-pocket jacket:


From 1958, when she was still using it:


And on into 1994, when Karl Lagerfeld had taken over and was basically creating Chanel knock-offs:


The suit became the fallback for any kind of day wear semi-formal to formal occasion, and just like the LBD, we all have at least one of these in the closet. I've even got one in the trademark tweedy woven with the four pockets. I got it because it'll never go out of style; they've been making the damn things for going on a CENTURY. All that changes is the skirt length and the shirt under it.







In the 1970s, Karl Lagerfeld took over the reins of House of Chanel, and Chanel settled into semi-retirement, still gleefully swanning about at all sorts of social events. She passed away in her suite at the Paris Ritz in 1971, leaving behind a legacy of scandal, larger-than-life legend, and minimalist design principles. Say whatever you like about her methods or ethics, the woman was a survivor, and I think that ultimately, that is what made her so famous; she just bloody well outlasted everyone else.

Chanel was one of the first to advocate comfortable, functional clothing. Not just for sportswear, but evening too. And while little of what she did was truly original, she did set in motion some set-in-stone traditions that are still followed today by most women in the western world, namely the day suit and the little black dress.

Fun wrong numbers.

I just got a call from a woman who wanted to hire me to cater a pig roast. Apparently she thought this number was for a restaurant. Wouldn't it have been fun if I said yes?


This is up there with the time I got a call from a guy who wanted to cater a boat to the Aleutian Islands. (You know, the ones that are part of Alaska.)

Why am I always tempted to say yes? Hahahahaha.

Paul Poiret

So far I've been presenting our designers more or less in chronological order, but for Poiret we're going to have to flip back our mental calendars. House of Poiret was open from 1903 to 1929, losing relevance after WW 1 and finally shutting down after the market crash in '29, knowing they wouldn't survive the Great Depression. So shuffle this into your mental files in the proper time, and let's look at some great clothing. (FYI, for most of the clothing in most of these posts, if you put your mouse pointer over the photo, you'll get the name of the picture - and I've put the year they were designed or first made in the photo title.)

"I am an artist, not a dressmaker." -- Paul Poiret

Paul Poiret was actually Parisian, which sets him apart from most other designers and certainly from the ones we've covered here. His father was a cloth merchant in Les Halles, which at the time was a pretty rough neighbourhood. As a teen he drew fantastical ideas for clothing and occasionally sold them to fashion houses of the day. Due to this, he eventually was hired at Doucet, who at the time was pretty much the only competition Worth had (and I suppose needs its own post). It was 1896, and the fashion world was poised on the edge of huge changes; Poiret was seventeen and arrogant enough to be the guy to lead the way.

By 1903, Poiret had decided that Doucet was too conservative for his talents, so he struck out on his own and established his own house. There, he proceeded to dictate fashion, to his own exacting, artistic standards.





He was the first to suggest women ditch corsets and wear something comfortable. As you see, his designs were loose and easy to wear. Of course they were a huge scandal at the time; you could probably find a variation on each of these cuts in any department store you walked into, today.

From a technical point of view, what he's done above is moved the support point of the dress from the waist (where it had been for centuries, with corsets to supply the needed architecture) to the shoulders. By doing this, he set the tone for all the famous 'flapper' dresses of the 1920s and is often credited as the guy who invented that flapper silhouette:






Poiret also exhibited some marketing savvy that would be picked up later by Madeline Vionnet. He was the first to use catalogues to market his clothing to an audience wider than Parisian circles. He also opened his own nightclub and used it to throw fantastical parties requiring costumes - that he would be happy to sell you.


These are favorites, for fashion retrospectives. The public goes wild over them. But even Poiret, at the time, didn't expect them to be worn more than once or twice, and certainly not for regular wear.

He was also, rather notoriously, famous for the lampshade dresses*:


These he DID expect women to wear out in public, and they did. Which goes to show, even in the nineteen teens, people would wear utter silliness if they were told it was fashionable.

During WW1, Poiret left his fashion house - which was supposed to still be running - and served in the army, helping to streamline uniform manufacture. When he got out, his fashion house was heavily in debt, fashions had changed, and he was unable to keep up. Eventually he bowed to the inevitable and closed in 1929. He died in Paris in 1944, mostly forgotten, while Germany occupied Paris. Even today, he's a little-known name in fashion, which is a shame because he's the one who really led the way and showed other designers how they could dress women who didn't wear corsets. I daresay he brought some color and flash to the industry, too.



*For those who are fans of the Amelia Peabody novels: There is a scene in one of them where Nefret is dressed for a night out and asks "how do I look?" and Ramses replies "You look like a lampshade." Amelia goes on to think, well, it WAS a Poiret dress. So next time you read this scene, make sure to laugh soda out your nose like I did.

Double poop.

[I'll get to a fashion designer in a minute. First I need to whine.]


This isn't the right color blue, either.

Fuck it. I'm gonna just get some silk/merino and dye it myself. This stuff, I'll spin into sock yarn. The silk should act much like nylon - nylon was invented to be artificial silk to begin with. Not as stretchy, but ten times as durable.

Otherwise, I'm getting ready to ply the last of the blue silk that also wasn't the right color.


And the Goob has a new word. "Hunormous". This is another one that'll see regular use, like eleventeen, and henno [hello]. "Wook, mumma, the block wall is HUNORMOUS!"

MISSING ROULETTE SOCK ALERT!!

Susan M in Victoria, Australia hasn't gotten her Roulette sock yet. Whoever had her, can you contact me and let me know what's up? Either SamuraiKnitter@gmail.com or JTheaker@sc.rr.com

Thanks!!

Yesterday...

...all my troubles seemed so... well, right in my face, actually.

I've been having a chronic pain flareup - big duh, for anyone who's been reading more than ten minutes - and so have been trying to take it easy. Anything that spins up my nervous system, say, loud noises, crowds, like that, make it worse, so I try to avoid it. Which means no Wolverine, no Star Trek, no Watchmen, damn it.

Which does nothing to explain how I found myself at a children's birthday party for about twenty three-to-five year olds at the House of Bounce. (Bounce houses are a relatively new idea here, where they rent a warehouse and fill it with those air-filled trampoline-type jump castles they used to set up at fairs when we were kids.) I'd loaded up on painkillers first, which was good, 'cause it was pretty much everything that makes me nuts. I did, however, get two pieces of birthday cake. Which can't be discounted.

Among other things, the people who run the place had gotten a case or two (we're talking about a hundred) of inflatable beach balls and thrown them into the place. So while the kids jumped up and down until they collapsed, the adults indulged in an impromptu game of dodge ball. Without the teams. Or rules. Or, uh, win or loose. Okay, we all just threw beach balls at each other. At one point, after pelting the husbeast, I said "We should keep some of these at home; it's way better than throwing dishes" and several of the other moms burst out laughing.

I forgot the camera. I did take some photos with my phone (the technology, it burns me, precious) and if I ever figure out how to get them OFF my phone, I'll post them here.

So, today, I'm sleeping off painkillers AND two slices of birthday cake (I'm on a diet; all that sugar at once made me sick) AND okay, so I broke down and got into one of the jump castles with the Goober for a while. Which is why our fashionista series is on hold for another day. (Up tomorrow: Gabrielle Chanel, cockroach of the fashion world. Wait until tomorrow before you send the hate mail.)

I was planning to end the series with Chanel - she's the one who put knitwear on the map, but you guys are having fun and I'm still feeling like crap, so I'll probably continue it with occasional installments. It'll probably alternate between people relevant to knitters, and cool fashion icons through history (I'm already collecting photos of Poiret and Lanvin clothing.)

Otherwise, there's the usual going on.

I finished up another bobbin of the blue silk/merino and started on the last one.


I've got this much left to spin.

I finally got off my arse and washed the first skein of this stuff, and I was admiring it in the window this morning, and I've gotta say, I think this is the best thing I ever spun.

There are still a few slubs in there (it looks like someone upended a basket of white silk trimmings into the hopper of the carder; I've been picking them out but didn't get them all), but for me, and my experience, and level of skill, it's remarkably even spinning. I'm not one of those who disdains looking machine-made. It's like the first step to be taken, before you start breaking the rules and producing crazy stuff. (And I've got an idea on the crazy stuff...)


The sock continues. Finished the foot and began the gusset increasing (remember, it's toe up), yesterday.

Knitting will likely continue today; it's easier to do while chasing the Goober, than spinning.


Thanks to all of you asking questions about the fashion, and me doing research, I've - for now - ditched the art history and French cuisine and am reading this.

For those of you who've expressed an interest in Japonism and Orientalism and their impact on western clothing, this is the book you want. It's from the Kyoto Costume Institute (the link goes straight to their on-line collection - WOW) and published by Tashcen. (Why the Japanese give a rip - pun intended - about western clothing when they have so much awesome clothing of their own is beyond me. But it's a good book.) This is an old edition; the new edition of the same book is a purple and white dress on a white background, but otherwise the same cover in terms of layout.


Lastly, I got a good photo of the Goober. We got caught out in the rain yesterday, and her hair dried crazy and looks like an afro. That was the idea of the photo. But when I said "Say cheese!" she said "Banana pudding!" and I said "BANANA PUDDING?" and she giggled at her own joke and I snapped the photo.


Sekhmet says "I hate rain. Shut up. I'm trying to nap."

Elsa Schiaparelli

[Due to my Beloved Readers, this was almost the history of the phone book. It may yet be. I'm doing research. At the moment I'm choosing designers due to relevance to US - knitters who buy clothes - today, but once I'm done with that I'll probably choose designers that just looked good, if we're still enjoying the information dump.]

Elsa Schiaparelli, "Schiap" to her friends, was born in Rome in 1890. She studied art, and philosophy, and wrote racy poems that offended her family and got her sent to a convent. She got out of the convent by going on a hunger strike, which says about all you need to know of the personality of Elsa Schiaparelli. She married a Count, moved to New York, hung around with artists, and when the artists decided to move to Paris, she went with them, leaving her husband the Count in New York. (At some point she had two kids. Fashion history books are quite foggy on where, when, and by whom; I haven't read any extensive biographies of her to know. Sorry.)

Schiaparelli seems to have been self-taught, and relied heavily on employees for the bulk of 'making it work' when it came to her designs. She was the one who came up with the Grand Ideas. She had no formal training that I can find note of in her biographies, she just hung out with a lot of surrealist artists, like Man Ray and Duchamp and Picabia and, eventually, Dali himself.

She opened a little atelier in Paris in the early twenties, but it closed in 1926. Despite people liking her clothes, she had a lot yet to learn about business and the industry (if she'd apprenticed with Vionnet, she'd have taken over the world). Ultimately, she re-opened with a smaller, less ambitious line of clothing "pour le sport" - sportwear - in 1927. It featured this little number, which may look familiar, as it's one of the most famous sweaters in knitting history:


The "Trompe L'oeil Sweater", referring to the fake bow knit on the front. It is produced by "Armenian Knitting", which involves carrying the unused yarn along behind the in-use yarn, twisting it every three or four stitches. This produces a heathered look (see how the black has little flecks of cream in it, and vice-versa? see the wrong side of the fabric, at the back of the neck?) and opens the door to intarsia-type patterns knit in the round. Meg Swansen and Joyce Williams wrote a book on Armenian knitting; to this day, no one's sure if it's a 'real' Armenian technique used traditionally, or if it's something that was made up on the spot in Schiaparelli's atelier, by the Armenian refugees who were doing her knitting. I, the person who usually has a theory, has no idea on this one, myself.

ETA: Free download of pattern for Trompe L'oeil/BowKnot Sweater available from Schoolhouse Press, FREE!! Click here.

See? I told you I was steering this around to knitting relevance.

In 1931, a female tennis star wore a pair of Schiaparelli's divided pants to compete at Wimbledon. The world was scandalized, Schiaparelli's rep was made, and she went back to a full clothing line the same year, offering evening wear. I THINK she was the first woman to design/sell an evening suit, though Chanel may have beat her to it.



All of Schiaparelli's evening wear is flat-out awesome, really. Maybe she was hiring Vionnet's former employees (they were operating in Paris at the same time), because the drape and form is really great. Except for the metallics, the second one could be from Vionnet.





Besides the sweater, which put knitwear on the backs of fashionistas the world over, Schiaparelli's real contribution to fashion was a surrealist approach that put the avant in avant garde fashion, and, well, she's ultimately responsible for the crop of unwearable crap that hits the runways every spring and fall. Though to give her credit, all her clothing was wearable for real purposes - cocktail parties, evening events - and I doubt she had any idea how far the avant-garde movement would go as each season tried to top the season before. What you see here is the first step on the path. So while she started the trends that ultimately make me dislike The Fashion Industry, well, she had some cool ideas and I can't dislike her.

She was also - again, as far as I know - the first designer to produce things so iconic that they became known as "THE _____". She had multiple designs like that, the most memorable being The Shoe Hat.

I bet everyone's seen a variation on this. The original idea was hers, in 1937.

There was also The Lobster Dress in 1937:

It was a salute to Salvador Dali, who at the time was putting lobsters in a lot of his own work.

In 1938 was The Tears Dress, which had false, three-dimensional rips in the fabric printed on it:


For most of Schiaparelli's clothing, I find the cut is fairly traditional; it is in the surface decoration that she was innovative.

As well as shocking Paris on a regular basis - so much so that bright pink is still called Shocking Pink in her honor, and her first perfume was named "Shocking" - Schiaparelli dressed a couple movie stars you may have heard of.

Most famously, she dressed Mae West, not only for Ms. West's personal wardrobe, but for the movie "Every Day's a Holiday" in 1937:


Ms. West had an anatomically correct dressmaker's form made of her body and shipped to Paris, which Schiaparelli would then use to fit dresses and send them back across the pond to Ms. West. The perfume bottle for "Shocking" was glass blown in the shape of this famous dressmaker's form.

She also dressed Zsa Zsa Gabor for "Moulin Rouge" in 1952:


When World War Two began, Schiaparelli headed back to New York, closing down her atelier for the duration (no word in the bios I've read on what ever happened to her husband). She re-opened after the war, but people's tastes had been irrevocably changed by the war, Dior's New Look was the new big thing, and bowing to the inevitable, Schiaparelli permanently closed her atelier in 1954, ending an amazing era of innovation and creativity. Among the other first already listed, she was usually the first to experiment with new materials - acrylic, cellophane, rayon, and lurex - and was the first of the Great Fashion Houses to put zippers in her clothing.

Schiaparelli left a tradition of avant-garde experimentation still - obviously - followed in fashion today. But unlike today's excesses of... whatever they call that unwearable craziness, Schiaprarelli never lost sight of the fact that she was making clothing that was to be worn by real people for real reasons. And that's a pretty damned impressive legacy.

I really want a shoe hat. I wonder if we could knit and felt one?

Trace elements: we has them.

I finished up an all-natural dye experiment today, and finally confirmed my suspicions that no, indeed, this dye job was NOT gonna turn out as planned.

It's a pretty color, I kinda like it, but it sure as hell isn't the red it's supposed to be. With all the research I've done, I think the biggest variable is the unfiltered water I mordanted and dyed the yarn in (alum mordant, cochineal dye; it SHOULD be red). Or rather, what's IN the unfiltered water. Trace elements, especially iron, can really screw with touchier dye processes. Like this one, apparently. Geez.

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On the fashion designer front, I'm going to continue the series, really, but responses have been rather mixed with a love-hate reaction, so I'm going to start doing reality posts in between the fashion designers. I've got a few designers to go yet, but I'm gonna start steering this boat toward knitwear. It'll get more relevant. Honest.

In the comments people were marveling at what Vionnet accomplished on her own, which is true, but not (as history gets). She did marry, but left her husband at 18 to go to London and work as a seamstress. After that, there's no mention of him in any of her bios that I've read; her business partners were friends or contacts she'd made in the business, herself. As were the people she collaborated with. Personally, I see her as doing it herself, but she WAS married. Honesty forces me to throw that info on out there.

There was also a question about where she went during the World Wars. WW1 she spent in Rome, according to what I've read. WW2, I'm not sure where she was - sources aren't clear and I haven't read the on-paper biographies of her - but it looks like she rode it out in Paris.

There are excellent articles about her, available on line. Threads did an article that discusses the sewing techniques used in detail, here.

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Otherwise, it's the usual over here at House O' Samurai. I'm still spinning:


And I finally started the second sock. Finished the toe increasing and am on the foot itself, lovely lovely rounds and rounds of zombie knitting as I read a book:


And I replaced the bulb in the halogen light over my spinning wheel:

Which doesn't seem like a big deal, but around here, with my increasing hand problems, getting those little screws out, and removing the piece of glass and the bulb - not the reflector cartridge but a little prongy bulb - and then putting it all back together again was an event. Really. The husbeast offered to do it for me but I was determined to make my hand do it. And I did.

The Goob got new shoes:

I've got a love/hate relationship with Crocs, but you can't beat them for cooking in the kitchen (lots of time on your feet, spilling things) or splashing in mud puddles (if you're three or standing next to someone who is three). The Goober had outgrown her old ones and the husbeast went off last night, dog in the woods that he is, to find new. These slipper-style Crocs were not on the shopping list, but he spotted them on the clearance table and now I'm stuck looking at ugly brown Crocs. Ah well. The way she grows, I won't have to look at them for long.


Otherwise, the weather is really crappy. I intend to spend my Friday night watching documentaries of some kind or other off the DVR (Warriors is turning out to be a good show if you're interested in history and/or martial arts; How the Earth was Made is kickass geology geekdom of the best sort) and spinning blue-violet silk and wool blend.

Have a nice weekend.

Tomorrow... Elsa Schiaparelli and the Trompe L'oeil Sweater.