Coco Chanel’s stylish exit – archive, 1971

As the spring couture collections start, fashion talk in Paris revolves around shorts. These have already been exposed, indeed overexposed in London and Rome; so let us hope that this coming week will bring forth something else to write home about. As for fashion gossip, this is preoccupied with postmortem Chanel stories. There is the story that she was not 87 years old as reported, but 95. To which there is an alternative version that she was, in fact, 87, but liked to say she was 95, so that people would think how young she looked for her age. Then there is the story that her sudden death in her Ritz Hotel suite was caused by a fit of rage at the Ritz cuisine for offering the same boring menu through all the years she had lived there.

Paris Match has the most macabre account of that fatal Sunday evening of 10 January. Mlle Chanel’s friend and business aide of many years, Madame Lilou Grumbach, put in her customary Sunday phone call at 8.30pm, and was asked by Chanel to get in a taxi quickly because she thought she was dying.

When Madame Grumbach arrived the “Grande Mademoiselle” lay stretched on her bed in pyjamas … “Elle est morte. Les yeux ouverts.” The uncharacteristic inelegance of this appearance had to be swiftly corrected. Madame Grumbach and Mlle Chanel’s faithful femme de chambre saw to it that she was dressed without delay in her favourite Chanel suit, a tweed suit in shades of green, pink and beige. Paris Match does not tell us, but one can surely assume that she was correctly accessorised with Chanel costume jewellery.

Although there were two weeks to go before the showing of her collection, they say that Mlle Chanel had completed 76 models. This could have been a sign that she felt her working days were numbered, because usually nothing was finished until the 11th hour. We shall see the Chanel collection this afternoon and I myself feel that it could be one of the successes of the season. For the length that was a natural to Chanel is the length to which most couture houses are expected to revert, and the look of Chanel, casual but elegant, could be the answer to the modern woman’s dilemma.