Biarritz — Wikipedia Republished // WIKI 2

(My first post here. Nervous! Please let me know if I've done it wrong.)
About a year and a half ago, I was reading Juliet Nicholson's The Great Silence (Grove Press, 2009). It was enjoyable, although sad, because it was about the end of WWI and the changes it had made to society. And then I got past the discussion of mourning etc. and it turned into the positive effects, which of course led into ... Chanel. And I honestly never finished the book.
The thing about Coco Chanel, possibly one of the most famous fashion designers of history today, is that she was a great teller of myths. Some of this was personal to her - her parentage and upbringing were obscure and depressing, and she wanted to conceal them - and some of it was the bluster and self-aggrandizing that you get with a lot of people hailed as geniuses, especially in the fashion world. But because of a combination of Chanel's own stories and humanity's love of simplified narratives about individuals changing the course of history, she's the queen of bad fashion history. (Well, maybe she ties with Catherine de' Medici and the idea that she forced the women of the French court to wear iron corsets with 13" waists.) And it generally goes uncorrected - this is just a more detailed version of the narrative you hear about Chanel everywhere. BUT NOT ANYMORE.
Here's the offending passage (the pages can be read in full on Google Books:

In November 1919 pictures of Gabrielle Chanel's chemise dress had filled the pages of Vogue: 'A gown that swathes the figure in straight soft folds, falling at the sides in little cascades.' The editorial commended Chanel's reliance on an uncluttered natural beauty, with a dress that showed only a slender pair of shoulder straps holding it up. The subsequent single-page spread devoted to Madame Lucile's chiffons and to Poiret's plumes seemed to be included simply out of respect for the old masters and appeared fearfully outdated. ... Once the matchless pace setter of individuality in fashion, Poiret snorted that her clothes resembled 'Cages lacking birds. Hives lacking bees.'
One other French designer, Madeleine Vionnet, managed to survive the transition through the war years and become part of the revolution in fashion. Vionnet cleverly amalgamated a still lingering desire for femininity with the wish to dress without the restricting comfort of corsetry. ... But it was the androgyny promoted by Chanel that dominated women's fashion in Europe in 1919. ...
During the war she discovered the versatility of jersey cloth as used by stable lads for shirts for training sessions, and began to make sweaters and waistless dresses for women from the same supple fabric. The ornate Edwardian costume that according to a scornful Chanel had 'stifled the body's architecture' started to disappear. Chanel was after 'moral honesty' in the way women presented themselves. She had gauged the time for voicing these feelings to perfection. ...
The flamboyant colors of Paul Poiret's pre-war designs and the theatricality of Bakst's influential costumes for the Ballets Russes suddenly seemed tawdry and overdone. ... A look of luxury was achievable through the severity of simplicity. Expensive poverty was the aim. She dared to suggest that clothes themselves had ceased to matter and that it was the individual who counted.
She cut her hair short 'because it annoyed me'. Everyone cut off their hair in imitation. ... The British aristocracy came to Paris to be close to the source of inspiration. ... As hem lengths rose and flowerpot hats moulded themselves to the side of the head, a voluntary simplification of clothing spread across a wide spectrum of society.

When I originally went at this on my blog, I did it point-by-point. And that works in a certain sense, but why I'm ultimately unsatisfied is that that way doesn't clarify the bigger pictures of a) the fashion world of the time or b) how The Chanel Myth distorts it and why it does.
The couture house tradition that we know today - celebrity designers, runway models, collections - was born in the 1870s; the original couture houses that were still in business by 1900 were only still in business because there was a transfer of power to a new generation. Mainly, this new generation consisted of the sons of the older one. Where today it's normal for the name to go on while head designers change, it was more common then for it to be inherited by a family member or sold to someone else who would work under their own name. (The exception is Redfern: John Redfern was succeeded by his protégé Charles Poynter, who took the name Charles Poynter Redfern in order to make it all legitimate.) Apart from these - Worth, Doucet, Redfern - the major houses that were active at the same time as Gabrielle Chanel, who opened her original dressmaking establishments in 1913, were being run by the same people that started them. They were opening gradually from the mid-1890s through the early 1910s: there was always new blood coming in, and she was competing in large part with relative newcomers rather than a solid establishment where she was a pioneer.
Lucile (Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon) and Paul Poiret, the two called "old masters" in The Great Silence, are fairly well-known today, and are popularly seen as the polar opposites representative of women's dress in the 1910s: she is stereotyped as chiffon and lace and pastels, he as bright colors and simple cuts. They in no way stood head and shoulders above Chéruit, Paquin, Beer, Jenny, or Lanvin, though, all of whom also appear in the pages of the exclusive and expensive Gazette du Bon Ton, along with the actual "old masters", Worth, Doucet, and Redfern. They were very successful, but their being remembered is not a good indication that they were the pre-eminent couturiers of the period. I'm not sure what the term is for this bias (familiarity or mere exposure effect? survivorship bias?), but it's pernicious.
(Poiret's quote about "hives lacking bees" is often used as indicative of a big change in the fashionable body around this time, but the funny thing is that Poiret had always been designing for a thin, small-breasted figure. The difference between his ideal figure and that of the 1920s is tiny.)
It's impossible to point a finger at any couturier as a tide-changer. Fashion at this time was highly documented and moved incrementally - examinations of the Gazette du Bon Ton and the slightly more egalitarian Harper's Bazaar and Vogue show that all designers were updating their silhouettes and styles on a regular basis, as the changes flowed logically from one year's fashions into the next. Throughout the 1910s, simplicity was a high priority in design - it wasn't an invention in 1919. It's variously attributed to Mariano Fortuny, inventor of the Delphos dress in 1907; Lucile, creator of the first evening dress intended to be worn without a corset, also in 1907; and Poiret, because he said that he designed the first dresses intended to be worn without a corset as well. Which just goes to show how prevailing ideas in fashion and the arts tend to come from more complex social forces than one person having a specific good idea.
Throughout the 1910s, you can see the beginning of 1920s fashion. In the high-waisted, narrow-skirted part of the decade (roughly 1911-1914), there is no narrow waist to speak of, and a columnar silhouette that seriously resembles that of the 1920s. During the war years, the waistline dropped while remaining loose and skirts flared and shortened, leading the way for the narrow silhouette to come back with a shorter skirt and looser, lower waistline. Simple, clean, loose evening gowns with light straps were already a part of fashion by 1919, and another iteration of them should not be seen as something groundbreaking. Even a dress that slipped over the head without fastenings was in existence by 1916.
(Something else in existence by 1916 was the bob. Popularized by the dancer Irene Castle after her hair was cut in the hospital, it was first known as the "Castle bob". Chanel actually told multiple stories about her invention of the bob after the fact, and after Irene Castle had been forgotten by history.)
Paris was a difficult place to sell dresses to rich women during World War I, but all of the couture houses got back into the swing afterward - not just Chanel and Vionnet. The earliest to drop was technically Lucile, but this is because Lady Duff-Gordon left the company in 1922 for legal reasons, and it didn't survive without her. After the stock market crash - that's when the great firms started to close their doors. Poiret shut down in 1929; Beer merged with Drécoll in 1929-1930, and Doucet merged with Doeuillet at the same time; Agnes merged with Drécoll in 1931; Premet closed in 1931; Redfern closed in 1932; Drécoll-Doeuillet closed in the early 1930s; Chéruit closed in 1935; Boué Soeurs closed in 1937; Jenny closed in 1938. The advent of WWII didn't help either: the Paris couture houses closed down, and Vionnet and Callot Soeurs both failed to reopen afterward.
Chanel's success and increased visibility after WWI can be partially attributed to her having been based in the resort towns of Biarritz and Deauville. Biarritz is just across the border from neutral Spain, far from the fighting, and Deauville hosted soldiers in hospitals while the casinos remained open. She had an advantage that couturiers based in Paris and with much smaller operations in the resort towns lacked during that specific period - a huge advantage that gets downplayed in favor of the idea that Chanel was just "better" than everyone else. At the same time, it's important to realize how limited her success was at that time. Far from suddenly becoming the biggest name in postwar fashion, she was just one of the crowd.
I contacted a friend/colleague who is still at the Fashion Institute of Technology and has access to their archives, and she examined both the November 1 and November 15, 1919 issues of Vogue for me. The truth? On the 1st, there's a short description of her collection with three sketches (very normal for Vogue), and a mention of the Princesse de Broglie wearing Chanel. On the 15th, there's another mention of the princess and one dress illustrated among those of other designers. Lucile is not mentioned at all. Poiret gets one dress illustration and one mention. Her domination of Vogue in November 1919 never happened. I have no idea where it came from, as the book is not well cited. But it's completely invented.
In fact, Chanel does not turn up frequently in fashion magazines in the early 1920s. The couture houses of the 1910s do instead - there's no sudden break where they all drop out. There are many issues of Vogue where she doesn't turn up at all, and there are plenty of other couturiers described as innovative and on-trend. Primary sources don't bear out the notion of Chanel as an overwhelmingly successful agent of change to anywhere near the same degree as her personal stories post-WWI, when her 1910s-1920s contemporaries had shut down or died and were largely forgotten. The narrative works because it turns the complexity of history into a straightforward hero narrative where one visionary individual changes the tide because they're simply superior to everyone else, and people like to read that. It's shameless, but it's understandable why it's bought.
(Not even getting into her WWII shenanigans, this post has been long enough in the making.)