In 1931, Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel was 47 years old and had been a household name in Europe and America since the age of 30. She had been raised in an orphanage after her mother died. As a young woman, she had worked as a shop assistant and a cabaret singer before becoming a designer of hats, setting her on a path to being the most famous of the Parisian couturiers. Employing hallmarks of early-20th-century modernism in her designs—she knew many of the godfathers of modernism, including Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Cocteau, even Picasso—Chanel reimagined haute couture. A line of costume jewelry and her famous perfume, Chanel No. 5, made up the Chanel brand, which became synonymous with high style, privilege, and good taste. Her signature initials—gold, interlocking C’s—continue to exert global influence today, well over 100 years after her birth. Last year, Chanel, valued at $7.2 billion, was No. 80 on Forbes’s list of the world’s most valuable brands. Today, a bottle of Chanel No. 5—the first synthetic perfume ever created—is sold somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.

In 1931, Chanel didn’t need Hollywood. Hollywood, however, needed Chanel. Or so thought movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, who ran United Artists. He believed that “women went to movies to see how other women dressed,” according to A. Scott Berg in his 1989 biography, Goldwyn. Film designers, unlike couturiers, were really theatrical costumers, whose designs, it was widely felt, “lacked elegance and mimicked fashion without being so itself,” in the words of film scholar Kristen Welch. As movie audiences dwindled after the Wall Street crash of 1929, Goldwyn was looking for new ways to bring in moviegoers—especially women. In Chanel he saw his chance. With her designs, Goldwyn felt, Chanel would bring “class” to Hollywood.

Only the big stars had been actually designed for, and that had not always gone well. Lillian Gish had rejected the clothes designed for her by Erté, whom Louis B. Mayer had brought to Hollywood. Greta Garbo had difficulties with MGM designer Gilbert Clark. But Goldwyn felt that Chanel would be irresistible, so he offered her a guaranteed $1 million to come to Hollywood twice a year, to “dress his stars, both onscreen and off . . . . Chanel was to put the actresses in styles ‘six months ahead’ of fashion, in order to offset the inevitable delay between filming and release,” according to Rhonda K. Garelick in her 2014 biography, Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History.

With offscreen clothes designed for stars such as Gloria Swanson and Norma Talmadge, the stars’ images would meld seamlessly with their screen glamour.

Goldwyn reportedly told French journalists, “I think that in engaging Mme. Chanel I have not only solved the difficult problem of how to keep clothes from being dated, but also there is a definite service rendered American women in being able to see in our pictures the newest Paris fashions—sometimes even before Paris sees them.”

Glove Story

Like Chanel, “starting at an early age, Samuel Goldwyn invented himself,” wrote Berg. Born Schmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, Poland, in 1879, he had to support his mother and five siblings after his father died young. To escape life in the Jewish ghetto and the prospect of conscription into the czar’s army, Gelbfisz turned his “doleful eyes” toward America. On New York’s Lower East Side, he found that he had merely exchanged one crowded ghetto for another, so he took a train to Gloversville, in upstate New York, a mecca for Jewish immigrants, who had forged the glove-manufacturing business there. He found success as the premier salesman for the Elite Glove Company, but it was an alliance with his brother-in-law, Jesse L. Lasky, of Lasky Feature Play Company, that brought him into the moving-picture business. By 1924, after changing his name to Goldwyn, he had become a major movie producer, among the tough, immigrant moguls who created Hollywood. Unlike Chanel, Samuel Goldwyn loved the movies.

Initially, Chanel refused Goldwyn’s generous offer. She had a number of reservations. First and foremost, she didn’t want to be seen as Goldwyn’s employee or as a United Artists contractee. When, after a year, she finally accepted, she made it clear to the press that she was an autonomous agent, telling The New York Times that she wasn’t becoming a “costume designer,” and that in Hollywood she would “not make one dress. I have not brought my scissors with me. Later, perhaps when I go back to Paris, I will create and design gowns six months ahead for actresses in Mr. Goldwyn’s pictures.”

She arrived in New York in early March of 1931 and, before continuing on to Hollywood, holed up at the Pierre hotel with a bad case of “the grippe.” Nonetheless, she endured a press reception in her honor in a suite bursting with flowers. Greeting reporters in a rose-red jersey with a white knit blouse and a long string of pearls looped around her neck, she brought out an atomizer and generously spritzed the group with a not yet numbered new scent, according to Chanel biographer Hal Vaughan. (Chanel numbered rather than named her perfumes, because she thought naming them vulgar.) Not an avid moviegoer, she told the press she was heading to Hollywood to work on an idea, not a dress. When asked by The New York Times what she expected to find in Hollywood, she answered, “Nothing, and everything. Wait and see. I am a worker, not a talker, and I am going to my work.”

With her were two traveling companions: Misia Sert, a well-known patron of avant-garde artists, who had posed for Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Renoir, and Vuillard, and had been painted in prose by Proust (she was a model for Madame Verdurin and Princess Yourbeletieff in Remembrance of Things Past); and Maurice Sachs, a young writer and secretary to the avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau. The three boarded a luxury express-train car to Los Angeles, commissioned just for them, with an all-white interior, for the nearly 3,000-mile, four-day journey, amid buckets of champagne.

When Chanel arrived at Union Station in Los Angeles, Greta Garbo was there to greet her, with a European kiss on both cheeks. But Chanel eventually found herself more impressed with a haughty, angular, auburn-haired beauty named Katharine Hepburn.

At a reception in Chanel’s honor held at Goldwyn’s lavish, Italianate house in Hollywood, there to greet her were such local luminaries as Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, Garbo again, Fredric March, and directors George Cukor and Erich von Stroheim, who clicked his heels while kissing Chanel’s hand, asking, “You are a . . . seamstress, I believe?” according to Axel Madsen in his 1991 book, Chanel: A Woman of Her Own. (She forgave him that remark, later uttering, “Such a ham, but what style!”)

VIDEO: The Evolution of Chanel

The New York Times generally welcomed Chanel to America, whereas the Los Angeles Times got its back up at the implied suggestion that Hollywood needed European fashion to give it a boost. The local press was devoted to the idea that Hollywood was already a major influence on American fashion. Who needed Paris? WORLD’S STYLE CENTER SHIFTS FROM EUROPE TO LOS ANGELES was how the newspaper announced Chanel’s visit to Hollywood. The implication was that Chanel was coming to Hollywood not to lend her brand of chic to the industry but because Hollywood had replaced Paris as the center of fashion, and its gravitational pull had brought her to its shores.

United Artists set up a lavishly decorated salon equipped with a sewing machine and dress mannequins for Chanel to use, in the hope that she would be making a long-term commitment to Hollywood. But she refused to use it, a situation the local press picked up on, describing her as a snob disdainful of Hollywood, rather than the exemplar of European sophistication that Goldwyn had thought he was buying.

The future director Mitchell Leisen and his assistant, Adrian, were both assigned to help Chanel on Palmy Days, her first film for Goldwyn. Adrian, born Adrian Adolph Greenberg, affected a French name and Continental manners, but he was sure to be found out by a true Frenchwoman. However, it didn’t matter to Chanel—a shape-shifter herself—because she saw that Adrian was quite a good designer, and she respected that. She particularly admired the wardrobe he’d designed for Garbo in Mata Hari, in 1931, which seemed to anticipate Chanel’s own collection for that year.

Goldwyn had chosen Palmy Days, an Eddie Cantor-Busby Berkeley musical, as Chanel’s first assignment because frothy song-and-dance movies were wildly popular during the Depression, as moviegoers sought escape from their troubles in cinematic fantasies. It was Chanel’s job to design dresses for Palmy Days’ star, Charlotte Greenwood, as a “physical culturist,” i.e., a gym instructor. As sportswear was one of Chanel’s métiers, that wasn’t a problem, but the Busby Berkeley production numbers featuring the Goldwyn Girls—especially in a pre-Code, rollicking gym routine called “Bend Down, Sister”—stole the show. Though the wobbly tale was one of the most popular musicals of the year, Chanel’s small contribution played little part in its success.

Adrian tried to explain to Chanel that film wardrobes had to be “photogenic” and that subtlety would not translate to the screen. There was another difference: in couture, the mannequins were meant to enhance and show off the design; on-screen, the design was meant to show off and enhance the actresses.

French Leave

Chanel found more acclaim with her next picture, Tonight or Never, starring Gloria Swanson as an opera diva. Swanson was already celebrated as one of “the Top Ten Best-Dressed Women in the World,” but there was a problem: the actress already had a designer she preferred to work with, René Hubert, and she resisted Chanel. Goldwyn pointed out to Swanson that she didn’t have the contractual right of refusal, so Chanel was brought in. With the imperious Swanson as her mannequin, Chanel designed a wardrobe that managed to be both beautiful and understated, particularly a stunning white gown. But by then Chanel was no longer in Hollywood.

If the couturier had been trumped by the costumer, Chanel would be reassured of her importance when she returned to New York on her way back to France. She toured the city’s major department stores—Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s—but was most impressed by what she saw downtown on Union Square. Arriving at the discount store S. Klein there, she found cheap knock-offs of her designs being sold in warehouse-like surroundings, where women pawed through merchandise without the help of salesladies and tried on dresses straight off the rack. A designer dress that sold for $20 on Fifth Avenue could be had for $4, in cheaper fabric, at S. Klein. In huge, communal fitting rooms, women tried on dresses beneath signs that warned, “Don’t Try to Steal. Our Detectives Are Everywhere,” posted in several languages. Most of her contemporaries would have been appalled, but seeing that piracy was the ultimate compliment paid to success, Chanel loved it. Then, she decamped to Paris. She had been unimpressed by the luxuries of Hollywood—“Their comforts are killing them,” she would later say, according to Garelick—and she may have harbored a vestigial resentment against America because that is where her father had drifted when he abandoned the family. “[Hollywood] was like an evening at the Folies Bergère,” she said. “Once it is agreed that the girls were beautiful in their feathers there is not much to add.”

Back in Paris, Chanel modified the terms of her agreement with Goldwyn, telling him that she would be designing for Hollywood from Paris, and that his female stars would simply have to travel to Europe. Swanson was already in London at the time, so it was easy for her to be fitted at Chanel’s atelier on the Rue Cambon, this time for an orchid-hued gown trimmed with mirrors. However, when Chanel discovered that the actress had gained weight between fittings, she was furious and demanded Swanson lose five pounds. What she soon found out was that Swanson was secretly pregnant by her Irish lover, playboy Michael Farmer. The actress insisted on wearing a stiff rubber corset to hide her pregnancy, which Chanel thought would destroy the lines of the dress, but the designer managed to conceal the weight gain and was able to introduce her signature look to American audiences by dressing Swanson not only in gowns but in ropes of pearls worn over a tailored suit. In some scenes, the dark-haired Swanson even “bears a striking resemblance to Chanel herself,” as Kristen Welch has observed, turning Swanson “into the embodiment of the Chanel ideal.”

Tonight or Never was meant to take Swanson from being a silent-movie star into the era of sound. Photographed by the great Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) and directed by Mervyn LeRoy (Little Caesar), the movie didn’t garner the attention Goldwyn had hoped for, in part because the sensational news of Swanson’s personal life—her divorce from Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye and rushed marriage to Michael Farmer—overshadowed the publicity for the movie. But Chanel’s designs won acclaim.

In her third and final film for Goldwyn, The Greeks Had a Word for Them, three ex-showgirls rent a luxury apartment to attract potential millionaire spouses. The story would be remade several times, most memorably in 1953, as How to Marry a Millionaire. Chanel’s fame eclipsed that of the picture’s stars, Joan Blondell, Madge Evans, and Ina Claire. Movie posters announced that the gowns were by “Chanel of Paris,” and reviews of the film praised them. Although four of her gowns would be made available for sale to the public, the film was not a hit, and Chanel’s designs couldn’t save it.

Haute and Cold

The collaboration between Chanel and Goldwyn was deemed less than successful by the press, on both coasts. The New Yorker reported that her costumes were not showy enough; she “made a lady look like a lady. Hollywood wants a lady to look like two ladies.” Depression-era films glittered with silk gowns and feathers and sparkled with diamonds; Chanel’s muted tweeds and jerseys didn’t have the same pizzazz.

“The most elegant Chanel . . . was a washout on the screen,” complained one Hollywood costumer, according to Garelick. After all, the designer had told The New York Times on first arriving in America that “real chic means being well-dressed, but not conspicuously dressed. I abhor eccentricity.” Not fully grasping, perhaps, that she needed to go over the top, she didn’t want her designs to overshadow the actors. The begrudging Los Angeles Times had been right all along: the American public looked to Hollywood, not to Paris, as the center of world fashion.

It would be another 22 years before haute couture would come back to Hollywood, this time in the form of Hubert de Givenchy’s designs for Audrey Hepburn in the 1954 Billy Wilder film Sabrina. His costumes for that movie and Audrey Hepburn’s seven subsequent films launched a waifish yet chic postwar look that still resonates today.