Coco Chanel and Modernity

COCO CHANEL: MODERNTY THROUGH FASHION

Coco Chanel is still seen today as one of the ground breaking innovators in women’s fashion. Despite Poiret being the leading figure in shifting fashion away from the corseted female body, it was Chanel’s style and her ability to produce both the ‘avant-garde’ and the ‘classic’ which made her decidedly modern (Driscoll, 2010). Through her designs Chanel was able to, not so much invent new fashion pieces, but rearrange the existing to become fashionable (Driscoll, 2010). Using men’s garments and fabrics, translated to womenswear, Chanel was able to explicitly make the connection between her designs and modernity.

This essay will outline how fashion and modernity were parallel in concept and development, thus being strictly related, the rise of the modern woman and how Chanel, herself was modern. Also Chanel’s connection with modernity, translated through her designs will be illustrated and how the wide acceptance of her designs and style cemented her status as a leading innovator in fashion modernity.

Fashion and modernity were strictly related. The word modernite was coined in the mid 1800s to express the technological and industrial process and innovation. The derivative root of modernite, mod, is translated to fashion (Groom, 2012). While this may seem coincidental, this is due to the aligned relationship of fashion and modernity. While both originating approximately the same time, fashion and modernity also parallel in concepts, chronological development and artistic expression. Wilson describes modernity as oppositional and iconoclastic, as it questions reality and perception in its attempts to come to grips with the nature of the human experience in a mechanized ‘unnatural world’ (Wilson 1985, 63). This rejection of the past and looking for the newer and better within science and technology can also be drawn parallel to fashion at the time.

During the mid 1800s until the mid 1900s, the fashion industry witnessed rapid development in production and dissemination as it stabilised itself as an organized system (Blackman, 2012).  As a result of the industrialisation period fashion saw the appearance of the two-tier system. On one hand, couture and made-to-order catered to the bourgeois and the elite, while ready-to-wear and the emergence of department stores catered for the middle working class. This saw the shift in societal fashion as it moved from the courts, to the streets of the city and therefore, from the aristocracy, to the upper middle bourgeois class and the middle working class. Also the imposition of regular changes in styles and seasons of clothing saw the emergence of the concept of newness or newer is better (Benjamin, 1999). This ideology of progress reflects the common concepts of modernity. Fashion, by changing constantly, has interjected the philosophies behind science and technology, that the newer will surpass the old.