A sale to remember: The Personal Collection of Chanel, 2 December 1978

Walking out of a basement viewing room at King Street in London, John Herbert, Christie’s public relations director at the time, asked the wine department for champagne, and sent to Wiltons, the famous St James’s restaurant, for smoked salmon. ‘To hell with expense,’ he said.

He’d left behind him a room full of fashion models, all rejected by Coco Chanel’s closest associate, Madame Lilian Grumbach. Just when it seemed that everyone had given up hope, one more model came running up from where she worked at Christie’s South Kensington saleroom. Victoria Wolcough quickly dressed herself in a beige tweed suit, bound with braid and pink silk, a personal favourite that Chanel had designed for her own use.

‘Bravo… elle est magnifique,’ said Madame Grumbach when she saw Wolcough. It was those words that triggered the call for salmon and champagne, and from that session began a campaign that would see Christie’s host the most renowned fashion sale of the 20th century.

Coco Chanel had died in 1971, leaving a collection of her wardrobe to Madame Grumbach. Seven years later, in 1978, Madame Grumbach approached Christie’s in Paris to enquire about selling the 40 suits and dresses and 44 items of costume jewellery that made up the collection.

Paris contacted London, and Susan Mayor, who had set up the costume sales at Christie’s, travelled over to view it. Mayor’s first encounter with the collection was in the vault of a bank. Then, later, it was taken to Madame Grumbach’s apartment for closer inspection. Mayor still recalls her reaction: ‘I was wildly excited, because Chanel meant the most important thing ever… I couldn’t believe my eyes.’

Costume wasn’t being sold at Christie’s when Mayor joined in 1964. But in 1967, a collection of dresses, mainly the property of the late Princess Marie Elisabeth of Wied of Schloss Monrepos, was consigned. Because the consignors were dealers in pictures, it was assigned to the Modern Art department. Mayor, working in the warehouse opposite, was asked if she would like to catalogue it, because the specialist ‘knew she rather liked fashion’. Madeleine Ginsburg, the first specialist curator of dress at the Victoria and Albert Museum, was invited to help go through the lots with her.

The dresses were from a family that had married into ‘all the kings of Europe, and were really the grandest dresses you could possibly get’. Mayor modelled some of them for promotional photographs, alongside the future Lady Michael Pratt, who worked in the books department, plus the wife of another specialist. The catalogue put the dresses second to the Blanche Barnett Collection of Automata Toys.

‘Madame Grumbach was beaming with pleasure’

Was the foundation of Christie’s costume department a happy accident? Perhaps, but it was a more than successful one, and Mayor’s costume sales won her an impressive reputation. It’s notable that when Madame Grumbach decided she wished to sell Chanel’s collection, she walked into Christie’s, and not what was then the larger Parisian office of our competitor.

Madame Grumbach first approached Christie’s in May 1978. By October, the collection was ready to be announced in a press conference. As Herbert later wrote, ‘Madame Grumbach was beaming with pleasure at the interest of the world’s media.’ A video from the French Institut National de l’Audiovisuel records the event, showing models wearing Chanel’s suits among the Old Master pictures, tapestries and furniture of Christie’s King Street salerooms.

Vast bouquets of white flowers dressed the space, mirroring the sales of Chanel’s own collections. The perfect saleroom, a testament to the taste of the designer, would become a recurring element in Christie’s famous sales of the great haute couturier collectors, including Yves Saint Laurent and Hubert de Givenchy.

The Personal Collection of Chanel sale was held on 2 December 1978, at 7pm. Christie’s doors opened an hour earlier for a champagne reception. The New York Times led with a description of how crowded it was: ‘a demonstration of the discomforts people will endure in the search for glamour’. Space had been made for 1,000 people, but half that many again turned up — along with TV crews from no fewer than 13 networks. Herbert describes using techniques learned on the rugby field to create a path for the VIPs to get to their seats in the Great Room.

‘It won’t end up in drawers’

The sale opened with costume jewellery, which Chanel not only popularised but loved to wear herself. Madame Grumbach had wanted to sell everything, but decided to retain a couple of items at the last minute. From Byzantine-inspired brooches with exquisitely complex encrustations of giant cabochons in simulated stones, to strings of pearls that Chanel had worn layered in multiple necklaces, the jewellery embodied her extraordinary style. Of the pearls, Christian Dior had once said, ‘With a black sweater and ten rows of pearls Chanel revolutionised fashion.’

From jewellery, the auction moved on to fashion, and if a black sweater wasn’t included in the catalogue, one of Chanel’s famous little black dresses certainly was. Lot 68, a short evening dress of black pleated silk chiffon with bootlace straps, sold for £1,500 to Baroness de Rothschild, according to The New York Times.

The tweed suit that Victoria Wolcough had worn at the first modelling session was bought by the National Museum in Oslo. It remains in its collection, with its Christie’s lot tag, as well as the silk label that Madame Grumbach had had sewn onto each suit and dress, reading ‘CHANEL Vente chez CHRISTIE’S 2 décembre 1978’.

Oslo’s was just one of the many museums that acquired Chanel’s wardrobe that night. Others included the Smithsonian, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of Costume (now the Fashion Museum Bath). That these highly prized pieces would go to museums and institutions was important to everyone involved in the sale. In the press call, Madame Grumbach had said of the collection, ‘It won’t end up in drawers… If it goes to museums, everyone will be able to admire it, everyone will be able to go see it.’

The V&A bought the cover lots, a black sleeveless dress with a three-quarter length belted coat, and a hat, which together made up Look 21 from the Autumn/Winter 1969 collection. The museum’s catalogue note lists it as ‘a timeless ensemble, as relevant and wearable today as it was when first created’.

The legacy continues

Mayor described her excitement that the V&A was able to win it during our conversation at Christie’s King Street, while the saleroom was being transformed to host Vivienne Westwood: The Personal Collection. Almost 50 years after Chanel, the wardrobe of another world-changing designer was coming up for auction at Christie’s. ‘We did sell quite a few of [Westwood’s] things,’ Mayor said, talking about her Street Style sales in the 1990s. Was Mayor a fan of punk fashions herself? ‘I quite like earlier things,’ she said, ‘like Biba. Biba things were sort of terribly wearable.’

Just like the Chanel auction before it, the sale of Vivienne Westwood’s collection reinvented Christie’s London headquarters. Both sales are part of an enduring tradition of stewardship exemplified by Christie’s Private & Iconic Collections, which continue to celebrate the historical resonance of figures who have made their mark in global arts and culture.

The Chanel sale helped to solidify the designer’s place in cultural history, as well as creating some memorable moments. During the auction, The New York Times reported that a man ‘wearing gold corduroy trousers and a gold turtleneck shirt wrapped in knitted ropes… bought a piece of jewellery halfway through the auction, then rose, and with some time and care put on a plaid overcoat, a fur hat and fur gloves. He apologised to the customers in the surrounding seats, saying he had to go to a party for Liza Minnelli.’

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