Tea at Trianon: Coco Chanel, the Savonarola of Fashion

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, June 2, 2019

Coco Chanel, the Savonarola of Fashion

An interesting take on Chanel. From The Catholic Herald:

Democratic as this elevation of simplicity may sound, it made possible a new form of elitism in dress. Anyone can recognise the fineness of costly silks. Only initiates can appreciate rough fabrics finely employed. Chanel disdained the woman “who is so happy with her green scarf printed in all the signs of the zodiac” which “will only astonish those who don’t know”. Her ideal was an elegant simplicity recognisable only by the cognoscenti.

Anyone who has observed the way our tech overlords dress (Mark Zuckerberg is the most famous example, Jack Dorsey the most telling) understands the strange form of sartorial elitism propagated by Chanel. Post-conciliar liturgical aesthetics conform to the same logic. What Morand called “poverty for billionaires … extravagantly expensive simplicity, seeking out what did not attract attention” is hardly humbler than lace and taffeta.

Malraux once said: “Chanel, De Gaulle and Picasso are the greatest figures of our times.” In contrast to De Gaulle, Chanel collaborated with the Nazis. She not only took a German baron as her lover, she also arranged through him to become an agent of German security. It is hard not to see Chanel’s hatred of prettiness and delicacy, her belief that with modernity something definitely new had come into being, as preparing her for these vile mistakes. For all its faults, the decadent and prettified society of the Belle Époque, despised by Chanel, was too delicate to accept something as barbarous as Nazism.

As Lagerfeld’s death reminds us, Chanel has reigned for 100 years. Black quilted purses still hang from shoulders in Singapore, Dubai and LA. Fashionable women still wear boxy tweed suits. Those who cannot afford these things strive for a cheaper version of ostentatious simplicity. (Read more.)