The Chanel exhibition at the V&A, which opened last week to cries of ecstasy from the fashion crowd, is full of extraordinary clothes; the jewellery and darling little trouser suits had even me weak at the knees. But the designer herself is more of an absence than a presence. Staring at a photograph from 1928, in which she’s dressed in full hunting gear and sharing a joke with Winston Churchill and several beagles, I wondered again who she really was. Coco Chanel grew up poor; as a child, she spoke in patois. By the time of this picture, however, she was having an affair with the Duke of Westminster, the richest man in Britain. The capacity of human beings to reinvent themselves never ceases to fascinate me.
Back at home to write my review, I searched for her essence on my bookshelves. But even those who knew her struggle to convey the inner Chanel (the outer Chanel was easy, as long as you had an eye for boucle and buttonholes). If she was magnetic, she was also a void – or perhaps I mean a mirror.
In her memoir, DV, the fashion editor Diana Vreeland describes a dinner thrown by Chanel in 1970, or thereabouts, for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (Vreeland was one of only two other guests). It seems that the duke and his hostess quickly repaired to a sofa, where they talked about subjects unknown, everyone else now utterly invisible to them. What, I wonder, did they see in one another? Was it admiration, or was it, as I suspect, more a case of recognition? Asking such questions doesn’t make the designs any the less ravishing, but it’s also important to remember that good taste should not be mistaken for intelligence.
Earning a crust
I have mixed feelings about “condiment gate”, the light squall that has blown up in Padstow, where Rick Stein now charges – outrageous in the eyes of some – £2 for tartare sauce and gravy at his restaurants. Of course I understand how hard it is to make money out of food these days, the cost of everything, including the eggs required to make mayonnaise, having gone up so drastically. But I’ve never forgotten that when I interviewed the chef many years ago, all he gave me to eat in the time we were together was a crust of bread, sawn from a loaf I’d loudly admired as we toured his kitchen (I was ravenous: I’d travelled since the early hours to get to him). I ate my lunch alone in the Cornish drizzle: a crab pasty I bought from, yes, his deli.
Coming full circle
It was sad and strange last week to attend a party to celebrate the publication of Jonathan Raban’s posthumously published memoir Father and Son; all the talk in the world could not make up for his absence. But for me, a circle was closed as I listened to the speeches, a wonderful one of which was made by Jonathan’s younger brother, Colin.
Aged 17, I worked for Colin and his wife, minding their son every evening after school in Sheffield. At the time, I was a hopeless failure academically; the money I earned from this job went almost entirely on nightclubs and dreadful drinks involving Cinzano and blackcurrant cordial. But somehow – snooping, probably – I picked up that Colin-the-academic’s brother was Jonathan-the-great-writer, and it made an impression on me; it may even have been one of the things that encouraged me subliminally to knuckle down.
How good to see him again after more than 35 years. The young me would never have believed it could happen – or at least, not in circumstances like these.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
