The fashion buyers and journalists who were invited to view her comeback collection purportedly maintained a stony silence during its presentation. Undaunted, Chanel soon managed to regain much of her former momentum – in part because of the influence of Hélène Gordon-Lazareff, the influential editor of Elle magazine, who quickly recognized the potential of the designer’s chic yet unfussy suits for her audience of modern, forward-thinking women.

As the fashion writer Edmonde Charles-Roux observed, “For Hélène Lazareff, the [Russian] migrant, the Parisian of the suburbs, Chanel was a way of getting even with the grande bourgeoisie represented by that cosmopolitan aristocrat Christian Dior.”