The importance of being Coco
Coco Chanel once said, “A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.” True enough, class and fabulousness were abundant at Rustan’s invitational screening of Coco Avant Chanel at Gateway Cinemas last week.
Around 400 celebrities, fashion designers, models and friends of Rustan’s were out, loud and proud about being Chanel fans at the pre-movie cocktail in Gateway’s Mandarin Suites. Holding Chanel’s famous quilted bags were Anne Curtis, Vina Morales, Stephanie Zubiri, Bea Soriano, Angelika de la Cruz, and Bubbles Paraiso. Boy Abunda regaled the crowd with tales about Chanel, and “he knows every single detail about her life,” marveled Anton Huang, executive vice president of Stores Specialists, Inc.
Once the Moet et Chandon champagne had been drunk, a red carpet led from the cocktail area to the cinema, where Madame Imelda Marcos was seated middle-row center waiting for the movie to begin. She was clad in her usual Filipiniana terno — not a Chanel jacket — but was that a whiff of Chanel No. 5 I detected as I sat down in the row behind her?
You’ve got to give props to a designer with a legacy so enduring that people 18 to 80 are still partaking of it. What woman doesn’t aspire to own a piece of Chanel, whether it’s a bag, an outfit or a fragrance? (For me, wearing Chanel No. 5 or any of her other fragrances is akin to slipping into a sophisticated Chanel jacket.)
Coco Avant Chanel is about Coco before she became the iconic designer Chanel, so fashionistas expecting lots of couture eye candy are only going to get their fill towards the end. The film starts in Obazine orphanage, 1893, where 10-year-old Gabrielle Chanel is taken after being abandoned by her traveling salesman father (maman died when she was 6). The rather prim little girl with serious dark eyes quickly morphs into a cabaret singer (played by Audrey Tautou) whose signature duet with her sister about a little dog, Who’s seen Coco in the Trocadero? becomes the source of the nickname that will stick to her for life.
An orphan who grows up poor in drab uniform, Chanel learns her trade by working for a seamstress, and later, for a tailor. Backstage at the Moulin, we see her fashion-consciousness start to grow as she takes scissors to her and her sister’s stage costumes, adjusting them for comfort.
At the cabaret she meets Etienne Balsan, a rich horse breeder who promptly dubs the outspoken young lass “Coco.” Chanel, who had a number of affairs with prominent men like Russian composer Igor Stravinsky but never married any of them, is pragmatic about men and love: “The only thing interesting in love is making love,” she tells her sister Adrienne, who hopes to escape their humble existence by marrying a baron. Ironically, though, this early feminist falls in with the wealthy Balsan, wangling an extended stay at his country estate and relying on his financial kindness. However, his tendency to hide her away in the attic whenever his aristocratic friends come calling, like Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, makes theirs a rocky relationship.
At this stage we see Coco regularly struggling out of her corsets; she soon gives up on anything binding or frou-frou and starts wearing men’s clothes, to the bemusement of Balsan, who distills her earthshaking fashion philosophy in one statement: “She likes dresses with no corsets, shoes with no heels, hats with no feathers.”
More appreciative of Chanel is Balsan’s friend Arthur “Boy” Capel, a dashing English businessman who becomes the love of her life. By calling her “elegant” at first meeting, it’s obvious he “gets” her — sharp tongue, weird dress sense and all.
The movie chronicles other fashion milestones in Chanel’s life: how women loved her featherless straw hats so much she started as a milliner; how, when Boy takes her to have a dress made, she chooses black fabric over pink: “Only black shows off the eyes,” she insists, before the film cuts to her dancing in the resulting Little Black Dress; how she discovers the lowly knit, jersey, and decides it’s comfortable enough to turn into couture.
Ultimately, though, Coco Avant Chanel is less about fashion and more about how a fashion icon develops her style. A number of films about Chanel have already been made prior to this, most notably the 2008 TV movie Coco Chanel and the 1981 Chanel Solitaire, but Avant director Anne Fontaine chooses to find her drama in two of Chanel’s most pivotal relationships; her rise as one of the world’s most influential fashion designers seems almost secondary.
When she learned that Audrey Tautou was playing Chanel, a fashionista friend of mine sniffed that Tautou lacked a certain je ne sais quoi needed for the role, but, with cigarette dangling from her lips, severe brows and all the world’s weariness seemingly contained in her eyes, I found Tautou quite convincing. With none of the wink-at-the-camera preciousness of Amelie, she brings truth to the role of a dame — which is what Chanel was, really — who’s liberated ahead of her time and has the vision to liberate the rest of womankind along with her, starting with the clothes they wear.
Satisfyingly, Coco Avant Chanel ends with a runway show of sorts. In Chanel’s Rue Cambon atelier, models parade down a staircase dressed in her most classic designs. Costumer Catherine Leterrier was supposed to have collaborated with current Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld on the outfits and accessories, and Kaiser Karl was reportedly kind enough to open the archives for her. Vintage or not, these designs are so dateless they look as modern and wearable today as they were almost a century ago. Which proves Mademoiselle Coco wrong on one point, when she said in a quote that Yves Saint Laurent later co-opted and tweaked, “Fashion fades; only style remains the same.”
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Chanel cosmetics and fragrances are exclusively available at Rustan’s.
