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become like them? A kept woman? But this is appalling!’ I didn’t want it.” Etienne and Boy agreed. “You have no idea how amusing it was,” Coco recalled with a smile, “that three-sided discussion that started up fresh every day.”
    Coco didn’t have to wait long for success to beckon. Headquartered just blocks from the Greek Revival columns of the Madeleine, Chanel found that her quirky style might be out of pace with old Paris, but it was right in step with the modernist sensibility that was taking hold among the fashion-conscious New Women of France, England, and America. Within months, the business was booming.
    It was the beginning of the House of Chanel.
    Years later, when asked how she emerged from obscurity to become the world’s most important designer of women’s clothes, Chanel said it was simple.
    “Two gentlemen were outbidding each other over my hot little body.” 14

 

    The silhouette of the 1920s flapper emphasized grace and slenderness.

 

    Standing outside the Rainbow Fashion Show in Chicago, 1926, two flappers enjoy the democratizing effects of the ready-to-wear revolution.

 

    Fashion artist Gordon Conway, 1921, introduced millions of magazine readers in Europe and America to the visual style of the New Woman.

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10,000,000 F EMMES F ATALES
    “H APPY DREAMS AND illusions”—that’s what magazine advertisements and illustrations offered to American women, or so said Frank Crowninshield, the legendary editor of Vanity Fair.
    “Such pages spell romance to them,” he observed. “They are magic carpets on which they ride out to love, the secret gardens into which they wander in order to escape the workaday world and their well-meaning husbands … after a single hour’s reading of the advertising pages, 10,000,000 housewives, salesgirls, telephone operators, typists, and factory workers see themselves daily as femmes fatales , as Cleopatra, as Helen of Troy.” 1
    In the pages of the slick new consumer magazines lay the images that American women increasingly aspired to imitate, and by the 1920s, arbiters of culture like Frank Crowninshield enjoyed considerable influence in crafting popular tastes and styles. Illustrated magazine covers depicting sleek, angular women with skirts flapping in the wind, legs bared to the elements, and elegant garments falling naturally along their silhouettes dictated the image of the modern woman no less than the glossy advertisements nestled inside the front and back pages.
    One of Crowninshield’s star cover artists, Gordon Conway, wielded more influence than most. No fewer than 110 fashion houses—including all of the leading Parisian couture shops—invitedher to sketch their work. Department stores commissioned her for print advertisements. Broadway directors hired her to design sets and costumes. Filmmakers in London and Paris turned to her expertise when they outfitted their silent screen actresses. Though few people outside the art and publishing worlds knew her name, anyone who subscribed to Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Home Companion, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Judge, Town & Country, Metropolitan, Country Life— virtually every major fashion magazine of the era—knew her work. Anyone who saw a European film or took in a local production of a London or Broadway play saw her style.
    Conway’s flapper was slender, sleek, and brilliantly aloof. Her clothes were rendered with tremendous precision, yet her facial expressions and features were often distant and even obscure. For Conway, the New Woman’s grace and being came from her willowy outline and modern attire.
    Born in 1894 to John Conway, a prominent lumberyard owner, and Tommie Conway, his world-wise wife, Gordon spent the first years of an unusually privileged childhood roaming the grounds of her family’s handsome Queen Victoria frame house in Cleburne, Texas. Marked out from all the other neighborhood homes by its distinctive, fish-scale shingle facade and the rows of books and