COVER STORY:Catherine Leterrier had the daunting job of costume designer for 'Coco Before Chanel', a new film about the iconic fashion designer. She tells DEIRDRE MCQUILLANabout Chanel's gift for simplicity
COCO CHANEL ONCE said that costume designers "work with a pencil; it is art. Couturiers with scissors and pins; it is a news item." In an interview with Catherine Leterrier, the distinguished French costume designer of the new Chanel film, Coco Before Chanel, I asked what she felt about this distinction. "Ah, but she was talking about haute couture," she retorted. "The main difference between costume and fashion is that designing costume is more intellectual. When you do period, you have to recreate the time, you have to go backwards, you have to imagine what the character thinks, to do what the director wants, but fashion design has to do with buying."
Creating costumes for a movie about a fashion designer was a doubly demanding challenge, akin, according to Leterrier, to an actor playing a well-known role from Shakespeare or Molière. “Chanel’s codes (tweeds, quilted bags, matelot sweaters) are instantly recognisable. What Karl Lagerfeld did in adapting the style of Chanel to the future, I did backwards to the past. I went back in time. How the dresses moved on the body had to be perfect. I am very interested in historical research and I wanted it to be accurate, but I also wanted to create what nobody can see now, what has disappeared.”
Coco Before Chanelis a brilliantly realised portrait of a woman once described as one of the hundred most important icons of the 20th century. Made in France by the French director Anne Fontaine, with French actors and a riveting and uncannily realistic performance by Audrey Tautou as Chanel, it recreates the period and the woman with extraordinary style and exactitude. The writer Colette once described Chanel as "a little black bull in her butting energy" and Tautou's huge black eyes, and gaze that takes in everything around her with intensity and intelligence, are mesmerising. Production designer Olivier Radot said that when he saw Tautou wearing the new fingerwave hairstyle with a cigarette in her lips, adjusting the trimmings of a hat, "I had the impression I was really looking at Coco Chanel. It was incredible. Tautou's petite, slim figure reinforces the point."
Chanel’s radical approach to dress is illustrated in one of the most revealing episodes in the movie where, as the mistress of the eccentric aristocrat Étienne Balsan, she is taken to the races. Among the huge crowd of people, the men dressed formally in black and white, the women in long, hourglass dresses weighed down with jewellery and artfully elaborate hats, the contrast with this young, boyish woman with her straw boater and simple woollen jacket and skirt could not be more marked. Says Leterrier: “The difficulty for me was to contrast the elegance of Chanel’s simple and fluid style with the fashion in 1900. I wanted to keep its beauty with its ribbons, laces, feathers and frills while showing its excessive and impractical side, so I could make the contrast with Chanel’s pure, flowing lines.” Milliners were kept busy; nearly 800 different hats had to be made for the movie.
Chanel, Leterrier says, wasn’t the only designer to do away with corsets or to use the bias cut, but what made her special, she argues, is that she was her own muse. “Now, people like Galliano and Lagerfeld work on their image, but she worked on her own image and people wanted to copy her because she was very attractive and beautiful and that was what made her special. Among all those other couturiers of the time like Paul Poiret and Dior, Chanel was the star.”
In the episode where Chanel meets Boy Capel – the British entrepreneur later to become her lover – for the first time, she appears in a doorway of the château straight from the bedroom, lounging in Balsan’s silk pyjamas, another example of her famously purloined male attire. “She made pyjamas – which was a new thing from India for men at the time – stylish for women. She made pyjamas to go to Deauville and I thought that with her spirit and good eye she could see that a woman could be sexy in men’s pyjamas. They fall so beautifully, but then she was the first to make being tanned stylish; the first to look sportif and to wear flat shoes.”
Award-winning Leterrier, who comes from a long line of well-known antique dealers in Paris, studied history of art at Columbia University in New York before returning to Paris and working on Marie Claire magazine. Later, she studied fashion design at the distinguished Chambre Syndicale de la Couture in Paris, where YSL and Lagerfeld were also students, and spent some time working as a fashion designer with Rodier, Pull and Lacoste. When she married film director Francois Leterrier, she started making costumes for his small-budget movies, a career that gradually burgeoned over the years. Since then, she has collaborated with acclaimed film-makers such as Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, Luc Besson, Ridley Scott and Robert Altman. The actor Stephen Rea remembers her from Prêt-à-Porter. “I was dressed in Agnes B and she arranged it so that I got to wear stacks of stuff, even sweaters in summer – and got to keep everything afterwards. She would put a lot of things together and then say: ‘That’s the practical stuff; now let’s think about the theory.’ ”
Her latest project has been designing a hugely successful La Traviatafor open-air performances in a Roman theatre in Orange, for daily audiences of 8,500 people. In September, after holidays in Tuscany and Brittany, she will travel to the UK, where her son Louis Leterrier will be directing Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson in The Clash of the Titans. In the meantime, she has fond memories of handling some of the later Chanel dresses from the archive in Paris. "I could see how she could sew from these dresses, they are stitched with the tiniest pieces of black thread – it is incredible how simple yet sophisticated they are, the real things are incredible, magical." For one whose art is illusion, that is some compliment.
Coco Before Chanelgoes on general release in cinemas on Friday