Chanel in Mayfair, 1927: When Gabrielle Entered London's Fashionable Society

By the summer of 1927 Gabrielle Chanel was the most talked-about designer in Paris, and that year her name became just as familiar in London. She opened her first London salon and atelier in Mayfair, and spent much of the decade moving between the French capital and the houses, shooting estates and salmon rivers of the British aristocracy. The London salon was short-lived, but the British years left a lasting mark on her work.

The introduction

Chanel's way into British society ran through a friend. Vera Bate, later Vera Bate Lombardi, was an English socialite with connections to the royal family, and she worked for Chanel from the early 1920s, acting in effect as a representative of the house among her own acquaintances. Through her Chanel met many of the people who would shape her British years, among them Winston Churchill, the Prince of Wales and, above all, Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, known as Bendor.

Chanel and the Duke met in Monte Carlo in about 1923. He was widely regarded as the richest man in Britain; his family's estate included much of Mayfair and Belgravia. Their relationship lasted for much of the decade, and it brought Chanel into the private world of the Duke's houses: Eaton Hall in Cheshire, with its shooting parties, and the fishing lodges of Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands, where the couple spent time at Rosehall.

The salon

The salon of 1927 was a business, not simply a social gesture. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum, Chanel opened both a salon and an atelier in Mayfair that year, and she insisted on showing her clothes on English mannequins. One account places the shop in Davies Street. Its life was brief, and the precise address and the date of its closure are not well documented. Chanel's links with London continued in the following years: a Chanel presentation was held in Grosvenor Square in 1932.

What the London salon offered its clients was the Chanel style of the late 1920s: jersey day clothes, simple evening dresses and the short black dress. For a London society used to more elaborate dressing, the plainness was the point.

The country wardrobe

The British influence ran the other way as well. In the Duke's houses Chanel took part in hunting, shooting and fishing, and contemporary accounts describe her borrowing tweed jackets and knitwear from his wardrobe. Churchill, who stayed with the couple, wrote to his wife in 1927 that "Coco fishes from morn till night".

Chanel was already working with tweed. From 1924 she collaborated with the Linton mill in Carlisle, near the Scottish border, on lighter and softer versions of the cloth. In the Highlands she saw tweed worn as it was meant to be worn, outdoors and in all weathers, by men who did not think of it as fashion. Tweed became one of the materials most associated with her house, and the Chanel suit of the 1950s, made in soft, loosely woven tweeds, drew on this country vocabulary.

What London gave her

The British years gave Chanel more than a market. They gave her a model of ease: the clothes of people who dressed well without appearing to try, in practical cloths, cut to be moved in. She translated this into clothes for women. The Mayfair salon was a passing episode in the history of the house, but the society she met through it, and the wardrobes she observed there, remained part of the Chanel style.