Coco avant Chanel

[petronia]

More the adaptation of a non-existent Colette novel than the type of movie that, yanno, has the main character cut up a bedsheet and turn it into an amazing dress in a 30-second musical montage. There's some of that, but not in that way. Mostly you watch her looking at other people's clothes with gears ticking behind her eyes, and realize it'll come out the other end in ten years, twenty years, thirty, even though she didn't know it herself. It's all first act, is the thing: if Coco had been a man she'd've made herself in business like Boy Capel did, and if she'd been a different kind of woman she'd've gone down in fashion history as a trend-setting demi-mondaine muse or the like, but she couldn't have a sense of destiny - to want to be what she became - because it didn't exist. You get two minutes of the future Mademoiselle Chanel* toward the end, and it's like OK that was A to G, where's the other movie that takes us from H to Z.** For most of the running time she's half awkward, half cold-eyed street hustle, and proto-everything; farouche (this doesn't have a good English equivalent). She's not even well-dressed, more like snapshotted at the deliberately ugly refus global stage of the iconoclast who's just grossed out beyond belief at what everyone else is doing. To be fair if I were gazing on my rich boyfriends' perfect menswear every day I'd feel ripped off with the pink crepe de chine roses that were my lot as well.*** Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When it works one experiences a sort of aesthetics dissonance (as opposed to values dissonance) verging on anachronism, where everyone else is dressed normally for a Belle Epoque historical biopic, and Coco Chanel is the only woman in France wearing Chanel.

It's also good to be reminded that Mademoiselle was down on frilly crap given the collections Lagerfeld's been sending down the runway recently. XD; Not that I don't dig the rock'n'roll lolita Marie Antoinette stylings - kinda classic KL boutade in response to the economic crisis - but they do skirt the edge of saccharine, and one suspects Chanel would've judged them horribly vulgar. She'd've liked the Cruise 09/10 collection, though, maybe? The whole thing is up here****, I didn't realize there were so many looks. It rather feels like he designed the regular collections for the Alexa Chungs and Lily Allens, but the Cruise collection is where the clothes for grownups are at.



* The scariest woman of the 20th century. Of course you would dress like she told you to; it'd be easier to disobey Queen Victoria. There's one long shot which is basically model-POV as they file past and her eyes flicker up and down, up and down...

** If they'd carried this characterization forward in time the Nazi thing would've been easily understandable if not sympathetic, because she was all about the survivorship hustle. Like, she clearly didn't have that kind of morals. XD;

*** I'm a fan, obviously. The thing about the Chanel suit or the original LBD (which is this sort of long-sleeved H-line thing in wool jersey that nowadays would probably be described as a "Donna Karan work dress" rather than a LBD) is that they're more comfortable than most of what people have come up with afterward while looking 1,000,000 times more put-together. In the course of this blog I've probably typed and deleted half a dozen screeds against the myth of jeans as "comfortable", because I'd be depressed to discover it was just me, but I really felt cheated by society when I realized they were more restrictive than skirts and dresses, not less.

**** The House of Chanel should podcast DJ mixes that are like electro electro electro *sampled Karl Lagerfeld quote* electro electro. Hilarant.

Comments

[motorbike.livejournal.com]

My french is also nauseating lol

Re: jeans, I am a fan because they make for a good "oh this? just threw it on ohohoh" look, and because I ride a bicycle. (Not knocking skirt+bike combo though! Breezy.) But I agree they limit mobility unless the fit is perfect, and a perfect fit with jeans is like the gd holy grail. Also I can not for the life of me pull off this skinny high-heel combo that lengthens the legs because my thighs are not the exact same circumference as my gd calves >:|

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The problem with skinny jeans is that they don't lengthen your legs unless your legs don't need lengthening. >_>