Madame Chic

A seamstress in Coco Chanel's studio revels in her love of fashion.

THE COLLECTION

By Gioia Diliberto

Scribner. 275 pp. $25

Long before a Prada-wearing she-devil inspired fear and awe among the devotees of high style, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883-1971) ruled the fashion world with an iron fist, a sharp tongue and an unfailing eye for chic. Endowed with talent and ruthlessness in equal measure, this formidable French designer was known as much for her unconventional lifestyle (she had many high-profile lovers, but never married) as for her iconoclastic brand of glamour (simple fabrics like jersey cut into clean, unfussy, eminently wearable shapes) and as much for her remarkable business acumen as for her trailblazing of modern women's fashion.

Gioia Diliberto's enjoyable new novel, The Collection, offers insight into the multiple facets of the Chanel persona, as seen through the eyes of a young provincial seamstress, Isabelle Varlet, working in her atelier. Imagined from this perspective, Diliberto's Mademoiselle Chanel emerges as a bitter, perennially dissatisfied workaholic who would "rather be dead than poor and ordinary." (She tells Isabelle, "It's not dresses that obsess me; it's work.") Although she admires her boss's boundless drive, Isabelle sees how it leaves the older woman immune to the joys of normal human companionship and unable to derive "happiness, or, at least, the warmth of satisfaction" from even her greatest professional triumphs. In this, Chanel stands as Isabelle's perfect foil; for while the seamstress is passionate about her career in couture, she's also reeling from the loss of a fianc¿ during World War I and seeks to reconcile her ambition with the more traditional pleasures of home and hearth.

Diliberto, the author of several biographies and of the novel I Am Madame X, restricts her tale to just one year, 1919. This was the year when the designer, as she herself put it, "woke up famous" -- thanks in no small part to the collection upon which the fictional Isabelle and her counterparts tirelessly slave. With this collection, the seamstress explains, Chanel "hoped to dominate Paris fashion. The new mode would be the Chanel Mode. It was the look of Mademoiselle herself, and it would embody the very spirit of the new age." The drama of Isabelle's employment chez Chanel is thus intertwined with the drama of 20th-century fashion itself.

One of this book's most engaging features is its meticulously researched account of life in a Parisian atelier: the complicated pecking order, the nasty internecine rivalries, the technical intricacies of assembling couture garments, the at times overwhelming pressures of creating beauty on a deadline. Like her heroine -- who announces in the novel's memorable first line that "instead of dying, I learned how to sew" -- Diliberto seems to have a genuine love for clothing as craft. She is at her best not so much when providing details of Chanel's actual styles, which she describes in fairly bland, predictable terms ("loose and easy, even the evening gowns had the relaxed, casual feel of sports clothes"), as when emphasizing the workmanship that gave them their allure. Isabelle's particular obsession is "Angeline," a burgundy evening gown that she helps to design and create. Her enthusiasm is infectious when she recounts how one of Chanel's house models "slipped on the finished dress, and everyone in the studio -- from Mademoiselle to the arp¿tes -- saw it come alive, saw the perfection of the fit, the elegant flutter of the cascades, saw the skill and determination that had gone into every stitch."

In some instances, Diliberto carries her protagonist's dressmaking obsession too far, as when recounting the young woman's near-rape at a party. When her aggressor makes her watch him masturbate, Isabelle forces herself "to think not of what was happening, but instead of Angeline." This scenario places an unexpected, clothes-oriented spin on the old prescription for sexual passivity: "Lie back and think of England." To be fair, though, fashion has always contained a healthy -- or unhealthy -- dose of escapism; it has always, at least to some degree, represented the triumph of fantasy over experience. (I defy any woman who, like me, has teetered to the subway in five-inch heels or frantically dodged rainfall in a feather-trimmed jacket to claim otherwise.) In this respect, Isabelle is very much a creature of her vocational interests and milieu. Diliberto's seamstress appeals because of the profound delight she draws from her own handiwork. "When I looked at [Angeline]," she confesses, "my heart tightened and there was a little catch in my throat -- for a moment I forgot my sorrows and deceived myself that the world is a better place than it is." ¿

Caroline Weber's latest book, "Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution," has recently appeared in paperback.