Paris (AFP)
The little black dress and the red mouth symbolize timeless chic and N ° 5 remains the scent of perfumes, unbeatable 50 years after the death of Gabrielle Chanel, whose vision of relaxed elegance still resonates today in modern looks. successful.
"A world was ending, another was going to be born (...) We needed simplicity, comfort, clarity. I offered it all of this", summarized the seamstress who revolutionized women's fashion in the 20th century.
From her beginnings in the 1900s, Gabrielle - known as "Coco" - Chanel was in total opposition to the fashion of her time.
She wears her own clothes while her male peers dress an idealized femininity.
Flexible, they are inspired by sportswear and borrow codes from the male wardrobe of the dandy.
She diverts popular materials and uses knitwear, jersey and tweed to create refined outfits with a casual look.
In the photos from the 1900s, "his posture reveals his mastery of typically masculine recklessness, as illustrated by his hands deep in his pockets," said Caroline Evans, art historian and professor at Central Saint Martins in London .
Unimaginable pose at the time that the designer will have her models copied by her, which she wanted as her doubles: thin, flattened chest, prohibited curves.
"Paul Poiret freed women from corsets but it is really Chanel who puts women at the center of his creation and does not conceive of elegance without naturalness and freedom of movement," Miren Arzalluz, director, told AFP of the Palais Galliera, a museum dedicated to fashion in Paris.
- "Uniform" and abstraction -
What strikes you when you visit the retrospective devoted to Chanel at Galliera, inaugurated in October before the reconfinement, is the extreme modernity of her creations.
"It brings this new vision of radically different feminine elegance, without constraints, it follows its line and and never gives in to the fashion of the moment", explains to AFP Véronique Belloir, collection manager at Galliera.
"What she posed in her time was so avant-garde and today these are things that we all do, in this handling of paradoxes: mixing the ordinary and the chic, costume jewelry and jewelry, masculine and feminine ", underlines the expert.
It was not Chanel who invented the black dress, but it is the epitome of her style.
"The little black dress is an abstract form of dress in which all women nestle (...)", writes fashion historian Olivier Saillard.
"But Chanel does not stop there. By turning off the colors, she soaks the clothes in ordinary jersey, decapitates the dresses, removes the collars, takes off, removes, erases the decorative buttresses".
In 1921, she arrived with her perfume N ° 5, "artificial like a dress, that is to say manufactured", not referring to any specific scent with floral, woody and spicy notes multiplied by aldehydes, synthetic materials.
The bottle is very simple in geometric shape, in black and ivory colors, as in its fashion.
Back in the profession in 1954 (after an episode of collaboration during the war followed by exile in Switzerland) in the context marked by the New Look of Christian Dior with a silhouette exalting the old canons of femininity, Gabrielle Chanel has 71 years and is once again positioning itself against the tide.
Her stripped-down suit was first criticized for its lack of novelty before becoming an iconic piece, uniform for active women for decades.
"She sacked the bombastic style of the 1950s and became a spiritual guide for the young Courrèges and Saint Laurent. Her structured fashion, closer to the uniform than to sartorial instability, imprinted on the generation of the Sixties a line of driving ", analyzes Olivier Saillard.
- "Boyish" -
Accessories like the two-tone shoes - lengthening the leg thanks to the beige, hiding the spots with their black tip -, or the quilted bag worn over the shoulder because Chanel was "tired of holding the bags in her hand and losing them", translate also looking for functionality.
The bag is cleverly structured inside with many pockets, including one dedicated to lipstick.
Because the Chanel style also determines the makeup.
"The boyish redraws her face by accentuating her gaze and wearing red lips, whereas sustained makeup was previously reserved for actresses and demi-mondaines", underlines Julie Deydier, in charge of heritage at Chanel.
And it is in the profusion of jewels, from the Byzantine style to the Baroque via Egypt, combining the true and the false to question the codes and social markers, that Gabrielle Chanel lets her imagination explode.
This "final word without which it is neither an accomplished masterpiece nor a well dressed woman", according to Vogue France dating from 1927. Always the same if we look at the Chanel shows today.
© 2021 AFP