A second Coco Chanel?

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32702, 3 September 1971, Page 5

A second Coco Chanel?

Coco Chanel’s death in Paris at the age of 87 has left a void in the fashion business. The big question is: who will replace her? Whose will be the name that will spell enduring magic while others fall by the wayside?

In a couture world dominated by men, where do we even begin to look for a woman whose creative instincts, like Coco Chanel’s, can become legendary in her own lifetime?

Surprisingly, perhaps, observers close to the fashion scene are not looking to Paris, Rome or New York fo trite answer. Instead they are focusing their attention on London, to a woman whose name is still far from being a household word.

Her name is Thea Porter and her clients include Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Kent, Lady Harlech (formerly Pamela Colin, London fashion editor of American Vogue) and Elizabeth Taylor. UNIQUE STAND

The novelist Edna O’Brien who, until recently, regarded clothes as no more than a necessary evil, is so. entranced with the beauty and originality of Thea Porter’s designs that she has dedicated her latest book, “Zee and Co,” to her.

But her greatest success, and the factor that suggests a brilliant future, is that her work is so distinctive that influential fashion experts are actually telling at a glance that it is her work without reading the label. And that was the very hallmark of Coco Chanel’s fame.

Certainly, it will be no easy task for Thea, or anybody else for that matter, to follow in Coco Chanel’s footsteps. With her gifts of intelligence, personality and razor sharp wit, Coco Chanel might well have become an outstanding politician, or an architect, gone in to the world of big business, perhaps, or sought a career foi herself in films.

Instead, she chose fashion, and threw out the trappings of wealthy Edwardian women of leisure. She invented what has become almost a uniform for the working girl—the cardigan suit. Today it is still as pretty and as wearable and as easy for the busy, attractive, independent women who typified her clientele —women like Princess Paola of Belgium, Jeanne Moreau, Suzy Parker, and the writer, Francoise Though Coco is no longer there, the salon in the Rue Cambon will go on just as before, directed by a board of management which had the blessing of Chanel herself in the last years of her life. A board of management, however, is no real substitute for a name. Though Marc Bohan has kept alive the glitter of Dior, Chanel’s collections are largely in the hands of three women— Madame Lilou Grumbach, Madame Jacqueline Citroen and Madame Germaine. Whether any one of them will suddenly enjoy a meteoric rise to solo fame remains to be seen. It also remains to be seen whether the three biggest couturiers in the business—Valentino, Pierre

| Balmain, and Hubert de Givenchy—can command the incredible stature that Coco Chanel enjoyed practically all her life. But they are men. Chanel was always scathing about male designers. “Many of them do not like women,” she once complained. "And those who do not should have nothing to do with them because their only interest is to make them look ridiculous.” EASTERN INFLUENCE “it is here that Thea Porter comes in—the woman who started just five years ago selling Middle-Eastern antiques in London. She had lived in Beirut for 14 years, she said, so she knew what she was doing. Her first real breakthrough came in 1967 when she introduced the caftan to London. At first she bought them direct from such places as Damascus, Kuwait and Persia. But soon she was producing her own designs. And her little shop in Soho very quickly became a haven of Eastern promise with its vast piles of enormous plumped up cushions, and chaises longues draped in brilliant Eastern bridal covers. Hollywood film men would come in, not just to stand and stare, but to buy whole collections at a time. Britt Ekland, Natlie Wood, and Julie Christie were among , her devoted clientele. , Then Pamela Colin created a sensation shortly before she married Lord Harlech by modelling one of her stun-, ning see-through gowns in a charity fashion show. Today, Thea Porter, a tiny half-pint figure vivacious as , Chanel herself, is modest ] about her success.

Most certainly, 1971 is going to be a very big year for her. She is opening a “ready-to-wear” shop in Paris in the spring, and is currently planning to open another in New York. There is talk too, that she will launch a perfume. “You can spot a Coco Chanel creation from a long way off,” she says. “I am told people know my work merely by looking at it, too.” She also admits that there’s “nothing in Paris” at the moment, and says the shorts

vogue is scarcely new. “Women particularly elderly women—were wearing them well before the collections at a certain Parisian night club. I didn’t go much for the look then either.”

Neither, it seems, did Coco Chanel. Like Thea Porter, she preferred the “total look.”

It is not only preferences they have in common. Thea, like Coco Chanel, is a prefectionist. She has been making fashion really sit up in recent months with her designs—the top fashion houses in France and Italy in particular.

Thea herself has just one dictum: “I believe very strongly in clothes being casual,” she says. “I think they should be soft, and unpadded, and easy to wear.” Chanel said the same thing 50 years ago. It worked for her.—Features International.