A HISTORY OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN 50 OBJECTS Edited by CLAUDY OP DEN KAMP and DAN HUNTER 30 Chanel 2.55 Jeannie Suk Gersen REUD SAID THE purse was a symbol of than half a century, invading not only our Ffemale anatomy, a receptacle for the wardrobes but our cultural consciousness mysterious and hidden. A woman who as well.” went out into society carrying one was The bag was part of Coco Chanel’s clutching her womb, so to speak. fraught 1950s comeback, 15 years after she The Chanel 2.55 bag—timeless object closed her business as World War II began. of purse-envy—was a kind of rebirth. It proved to be an emblem of Chanel’s own It was not the first bag created by Coco ability to rise again, unscathed, after her Chanel. Her first, in 1929, caused scandal. wartime collaboration with the Nazis. In a Having become “fed up with holding my social set in which anti-Semitism was pro- purses in my hands and losing them,” and nounced, Chanel had been a secret agent inspired by military satchels, she sewed for the Germans and mistress to a German on an extended strap to allow women to intelligence officer. She had also tried to carry the bag hands-free and over the exploit the Nazi Aryanization of property, shoulder. Making a shoulder bag socially by suing her Jewish business partner and acceptable for ladies offered new freedom backer, Pierre Wertheimer, in an attempt of movement and a nod to sexual liberation to legally exclude his rights to the Chanel in Jazz Age Paris. No. 5 perfume empire—unsuccessfully, Chanel was famous for many things, as he’d already signed over control to a including her romantic liaisons with the non-Jewish proxy before fleeing France likes of Stravinsky and British royalty. for New York so the company wouldn’t be Her 2.55 bag, named for its appearance considered Jewish or abandoned. in February 1955, had a secret zippered After the war, Chanel was somehow compartment in its front flap for keep- spared the public shaming, to which many ing love letters. The bag’s long shoulder French women who’d slept with the enemy straps were made of linked metal chains, were subjected, with head-shaving and and its quilted leather body resembled the forced march in the streets. After brief pattern on jockey jackets. Its inner lining investigation by French authorities of her was the burgundy color of Chanel’s child- wartime activities, and following a post-war hood Catholic-school uniforms. Inspired Swiss self-exile, she was back in Paris at the by her girlhood impressions of horses’ bri- age of 71 reviving the House of Chanel. The dles and harnesses, and of the keychains ease of Chanel’s reintegration into French of the caretakers at her orphanage, the society has struck many as puzzling, with bag expressed both freedom and restraint, some crediting the possible intervention of mastery and submission. As Vogue noted in her friend Winston Churchill, her name’s 2013, “The genius of the Chanel bag can close association with French chic, and be found in its versatility—it has managed the desire of postwar France to forget and to be the perfect accessory, be its wearer move on. But it was, most practically, her in jeans or black-tie, artfully disheveled former partner Wertheimer’s decision to or painstakingly put together, for more financially back her again, despite her wartime conduct, that enabled Chanel’s Street. “If people can’t afford to buy a real reestablishment. (The Wertheimer family Chanel,” she said, “I’d rather they bought owns the controlling interest in the Chanel a fake Chanel with the idea of Chanel in company today.) mind.” Her preference was realized with For all the French forgiveness, it was the a vengeance. Americans who rapturously embraced her As the popularity of fake Chanel bags return. Life magazine declared that “Chanel rose in the 1980s, Chanel, Inc. was much is bringing in more than style—a revolu- less forgiving of copyists than Chanel tion,” and the New York Times remarked herself had been. By the mid-1990s, the that “the look of her return collection was company was spending millions annually just what American women wanted.” Hers to fight counterfeiting, and has since con- was the look of modernity, combining sim- sistently pursued alleged infringers of plicity, ease, line, and movement. If the Chanel’s more than 50 registered trade- French found it somewhat familiar by then, marks, on handbags and other goods, the American reception gave Chanel a through litigation, private investigations, second life. and cease-and-desist letters. The com- The French Syndicate of Haute Cou- pany has even successfully sued an Indi- ture was the association that controlled ana beauty- salon owner named Chanel who was permitted to use the designa- Jones, to demand that she change the tion of “Haute Couture,” and organized name of her business, Chanel’s Salon. protection of those fashion houses from Ads in Women’s Wear Daily have warned design piracy. Soon after her comeback, against using the Chanel name, in terms Chanel resigned her membership in the like “Chanel-ized,” “Chanel-ed,” or organization because of an intense feud on “Chanel-issime,” saying “we are flattered the issue of design copying. The Syndicate by such tributes to our fame,” but “our had strict rules to restrict copying. Her lawyers positively detest them.” fellow couturiers went to great lengths to The fame of the Chanel bag, though, guard against piracy, even requiring steep is largely attributable to the widespread security deposits from potential buyers imitation and accessibility encouraged before allowing them to view collections. by its creator. A Chanel bag seen on a But Chanel had perennially thumbed her woman is more likely assumed a fake than nose at such anxieties by releasing draw- a genuine article. At the same time, the ings of her designs to the press, inviting resale market for an original 2.55 bag is seamstresses to come sketch and take very robust; its value has risen more than notes, and openly encouraging the copy- 200-fold in the past 15 years. The bag is ing of her work. “Let them copy. I am both the paradigmatic original and the on the side of women and seamstresses archetypal copy—an embodiment not only not the fashion houses,” she proclaimed. of authentic and rarified luxury, but also “What rigidity it shows, what laziness, of fakeness, repetition, reproduction, and what unimaginative taste, what lack of substitution. faith in creativity, to be frightened of Amidst the proliferation of copies, the imitations!” bag’s duality—going high and low, old The 2.55 bag’s iconic status through and young, prim and louche, class and the decades is evident in photographs of mass—has made it an ever-present, if its various versions on Jackie Kennedy, ambivalent, receptacle for cultural mean- Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, ing. In 2005, after decades of permuta- Brigitte Bardot, Jane Fonda, Mia Farrow, tions of the design, the bag was reissued and Princess Diana. Chanel is reported to in near-original form for its 50th anniver- have said both that “Fashion must come sary under the name, “Reissue 2.55”—as up from the streets,” and that “Fashion if to commemorate its origin as always does not exist unless it goes down into already a rebirth. To mark the occasion, the streets—without imitation there is no in 2008, the House of Chanel, helmed success.” And down into the streets the by Karl Lagerfeld, held an exhibition of bag has gone—as counterfeits on Canal art inspired by the bag and contained in a mobile structure, designed by architect Further Reading Zaha Hadid, that traveled to Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, London, Moscow, and Hamish Bowles (2005) “The Chanel Paris. The artworks, commissioned from Century,” Vogue (US), May. contemporary artists, included a gigantic reproduction of the 2.55 bag, and the Lisa Chaney (2011) Coco Chanel: An Intimate soundscape featured Jeanne Moreau Life. New York: Viking. talking about the secrets inside a wom- an’s purse. In the blurring of fashion, C. Scott Hemphill and Jeannie Suk (2009) art, architecture, and advertisement, the “The Law, Culture, and Economics of commercialization of the 2.55 as aesthetic Fashion,” Stanford Law Review, 61(5), object was a kind of rejoinder to Chanel’s pp. 1147–1199. 50-year-old derision of “dressmakers who consider themselves artists.” C. Scott Hemphill and Jeannie Suk (2014) If the ongoing debate about copying in “The Fashion Originators’ Guild of fashion could have its own trademark, it America: Self-help at the edge of IP and would likely be the 2.55 bag. Coco Chanel’s antitrust,” in Rochelle Dreyfuss and Jane philosophy favoring copying, expressed in C. Ginsburg (eds.) Intellectual Property at the her famous quip that “imitation is the high- Edge: The Contested Contours of IP. Cambridge: est form of flattery,” has often been invoked Cambridge University Press, pp. 159–179. to rebuff arguments supporting intellectual property protection for fashion design, cur- rently lacking in the United States. Referring to fashion cycles in which today’s objects of Caroline Palmer (2013) “Visual History: desire are doomed to be replaced by tomor- 50 Years of the Chanel Bag on the Street,” row’s, she once said, “The more transient Vogue, 4 December. fashion is the more perfect it is.” But the Chanel 2.55’s power is in its resuscitated longevity, if not immortality—evoking the enduring present of memory, and of forgetting.