In the '60s, Coco sprang no surprises, only refinements on what was her classic look: the short, straight, collarless jacket, the slightly flaring skirt and hems that never budged from knee length. Wearing the broad-brimmed Breton hat that was her hallmark, her scissors hanging from a ribbon around her neck, and her four fingers held firmly together in spite of severe arthritis, she would feel for defects. Working directly on the model, she often picked a apart with the point of her scissors, complaining that it
was unwearable.
Her fashion empire at her death brought in over $160 million a year. Here
clients constituted a litany of the best-dressed women, not of the year but of the century: Princess Grace, Queen Fabiola, Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman, all the Rothschilds and most of the Rockefellers. A musical version of her life, enhanced by Katharine Hepburn but stripped of most of the real drama, put Coco on Broadway. She was on a first-name basis with people too famous to need first names: Cocteau, Colette, Diaghilev, Dali, Picasso. Yet at the time of her death, the woman Picasso termed "the most sensible in the world" had a Paris wardrobe consisting of only three outfits.
"If Mademoiselle Chanel has reigned over fashion," mused Jean Cocteau some time ago, "it is not because she cut women's hair married silk and wool, put pearls on sweaters, avoided poetic labels on her perfumes, lowered the waistline or raised the waistline and obliged women to follow her directives; it is because--outside of this gracious and robust dictatorship--there is nothing in her era that she has missed."
