Vogue Australia 2015-05...

VOGUE.COM.AU – 75

IMAGES COURTESY OF CHANEL

inVOGUE

EDITOR: ALICE BIRRELL

Garments were

embellished with

meticulously

hand-sewn details.

Extravagance, artistry and

that little black jacket were

REVERED at Chanel’s

Métiers d ’Art in Salzburg.

Magic

kingdom

WORDS: ALICE CAVANAGH

rue visionaries in the fashion

world know the secret to success

is not just about creation but

re-appropriation. Take Coco

Chanel, for example, and that famous little

black jacket, arguably one of the most

influential garments of 20th-century

fashion: so revered, so coveted – the stuff

of legends. But where did the idea come

from? If I told you the uniform of an

Austrian bellboy, you’d scarcely believe it.

Let’s go back to the 1930s and Austria’s

Tyrolean Alps. The scene is the Mittersill

hotel, a fairytale castle nestled above a

valley in the picturesque Pinzgau region,

and a hotel that a 1936 issue of US Vogue

called “the most talked-of place in Austria”.

Here, guests such as Cole Porter and

Marlene Dietrich took in the fresh air and

drank glühwein with Europe’s dilettante.

Coco was there, of course – she had

a  dalliance with the hotel owner, the

dashing Baron Hubert von Pantz – and it

was during one of her stays here she took

note of a  collarless, straight-cut jacket

worn by one of the bellboys. In 1954 that

idea took on a life of its ow n, cut in Scot tish

tweed, with pockets and buttons stamped

with those emblematic double Cs.

T

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