The End of an Era

As the 1930s progressed, the fashion world that Chanel had helped create began to change. New designers emerged with different visions. Elsa Schiaparelli, Chanel's great rival, offered surrealist-inspired designs that challenged Chanel's rationalist aesthetic. The bias-cut gowns of Madeleine Vionnet provided an alternative vision of body-conscious design. Chanel, once the revolutionary, began to seem established, even conservative.

The economic crisis following 1929 also affected luxury fashion. While Chanel's business survived, partly due to perfume sales, the carefree spending of the 1920s ended. Women still bought fashion, but more carefully. The multiple orders from single clients that had sustained couture houses became rarer. Competition intensified as the market contracted.

Personal factors also influenced Chanel's work in the late 1930s. Boy Capel had died in a car accident in 1919, a loss from which she never fully recovered. Subsequent relationships, including a long affair with the Duke of Westminster, provided companionship and social connection but not the intellectual partnership she had shared with Capel. As she approached her fifties, Chanel seemed increasingly isolated despite her success.

The political situation in Europe cast shadows over the fashion world. As fascism rose and war threatened, the escapist fantasy that fashion could provide seemed increasingly hollow. The Spanish Civil War, beginning in 1936, cut off wealthy South American clients who traveled through Spain. The growing tension between France and Germany affected business confidence. By 1939, war seemed inevitable.

On September 3, 1939, France declared war on Germany. Within days, Chanel made a decision that shocked the fashion world: she closed her couture house, laying off her workforce of over 3,000 employees. She claimed it was inappropriate to focus on fashion during wartime, but critics suggested other motives: revenge against workers who had struck in 1936, inability to compete with younger designers, or simple war profiteering by eliminating overhead while perfume sales continued.

Whatever her reasons, the closure marked the end of Chanel's first fashion career. The woman who had revolutionized how women dressed, who had built an empire from nothing, who had become synonymous with modern elegance, retreated from the stage she had dominated for three decades. The fashion revolution she had initiated would continue, but without its primary revolutionary.

The period from 1910 to 1939 had seen Chanel transform from milliner to international icon. She had freed women from corsets, raised hemlines, introduced sportswear as daily wear, made black chic, created the most successful perfume in history, and established a template for modern fashion that endures today. Her designs had both reflected and enabled women's changing roles in society.

Yet as 1939 ended, questions remained. What would happen to the house of Chanel without its founder? How would fashion evolve in wartime? And what would Coco Chanel herself do during the dark years ahead? The answers to these questions would prove as complex and controversial as the woman herself. The revolutionary had left the battlefield, but her story was far from over.# Chapter 3: Business Innovation