Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life. Justine Picardie

of things and have practically no time for myself. I will write to your wife – don’t be too anxious – perhaps everything will finish sooner than we think …’

      Despite the horrors of the front line, her sales continued to increase in Paris and Deauville, and a new boutique, which she had established in Biarritz in 1915. For Chanel’s simple jersey jackets, straight skirts and unadorned sailor blouses looked more and more like the only appropriate fashion to be seen in amid the sombre anxieties of war. They were chic, but not showy; monochrome, in keeping with the mood of the times; clothes that could be worn to drive an ambulance or an army car, as relevant to women’s wartime work as to a seaside promenade. ‘Fashion should express the place, the moment,’ Chanel would later observe to Paul Morand, and even if her words were spoken with the benefit of hindsight, she had seized her moment just as old certainties seemed to be giving way. ‘I was witnessing the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century, the end of an era.’

      She watched its demise without sympathy, knowing that her time was coming, that the grandeur she had witnessed would soon crumble, choking on its own excess. Chanel had come of age in a period of magnificence, but also of decadence; in her words, ‘the last reflections of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body’s architecture, just as parasites smother trees in tropical forests. Woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for sable, for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious. Complicated patterns, an excess of lace, of embroidery, of gauze, of flounces and over-layers had transformed what women wore into a monument of belated and flamboyant art. The trains of dresses swept up the dust, all the pastel shades reflected every colour in the rainbow in a thousand tints with a subtlety that faded into insipidness.’

      But Coco was going to change all that; Chanel was going to impose black.

The Little Black Dress

      In July 1918, an aristocratic beauty named Diana Wyndham wrote a letter to her friend Duff Cooper, from Beaufort Castle in Scotland, where she was visiting her sister Laura and enjoying balmy days in ‘a sea of bluebells, gorse and broom’. The youngest daughter of the fourth Lord Ribblesdale (a former government chief whip in the House of Lords), Diana Wyndham was possessed of connections that placed her at the heart of upper-class society. Her father’s portrait by John Singer Sargent reveals why King Edward VII admired him for his courtly stateliness (the king referred to Ribblesdale as ‘The Ancestor’, because of the impression he gave of having stepped out of an oil painting). Diana was 25, 10 years younger than Coco Chanel, but she had already been married, in 1913, and widowed the following year. Her first husband, often described as one of the handsomest men in London, was Percy Wyndham, half-brother to the Duke of Westminster. An officer in the Coldstream Guards at the time of their wedding, he was killed in action in France on 14th September 1914; his death was followed less than a year later by that of Diana’s brother.

      ‘Dearest Duff,’ she wrote to a man as well connected as herself, who had joined the Foreign Office after Eton and Oxford, and was currently serving in the Grenadier Guards, ‘Lots of things have happened since I saw you – I’ve been ill, we’ve nearly lost the war, and I think I’m going to marry Capel after all – so next time I see you, you’ll be staying with me in my luxurious apartment in the Avenue du Bois.’

      Diana had had a brief flirtation with Duff Cooper three months previously, and so had no need to explain the family references that followed in her letter – to her sister Laura, who had married Simon Fraser, the 14th Lord Lovat, or to her aunt Margot Asquith, the wife of the former prime minister. But it appears she did want to justify her actions to Cooper, following the disapproving responses she had received from Margot Asquith and another of her aunts to her decision to marry Boy Capel. Diana had met the handsome captain while she was driving an ambulance for the Red Cross in France, close to the front line; and their relationship may have been more passionate than Coco Chanel preferred to admit. If Diana was not yet pregnant with Capel’s child when she wrote to Duff Cooper, she would have been soon afterwards, given the birth of her first baby the following April.

      Not that an unplanned pregnancy was the cause of her aunts’ condemnation: they already had other grounds on which to object to Capel, which emerge in Diana’s letter to Cooper: ‘I wrote, the other day, to Lucy and Margot, breaking [to] them the news and have today received masterpieces from them – Lucy’s letter worse than a farewell dinner, saying her heart has never ceased aching since she received mine, that Paris did not lead to high ideals or morality, that it was selfish of me to marry and leave father, that he [Capel] was half French and not fond of country life, and Margot [wrote] much on the same lines, giving some well-aimed hits at the Versailles Council, since he [Capel] has become political secretary on the Council.’