Gabrielle Bonheur ‘Coco’ Chanel, 19th August 1883 - 10th January 1971
A woman ahead of her time; ahead of herself. She was fiercely independent, worked her way up from the bottom, and fought against paralyzing constraints against women at the turn of the 20th century, by mixing up the vocabulary of male and female clothes and created fashion that offered the wearer feeling of hidden luxury rather than ostentation are just two examples of how her taste and sense of style overlap with today’s fashion.
Gabrielle was sent to the Aubazine orphanage run by strict nuns, where she spent time as a ward of the state after her mother died and her father ran off. She hated her years there, yet, inspired by her memories of the nuns who had raised her, and by servants’ uniforms, she decided to make black more chic by adding white at the neck and the cuffs. Then her signature monochrome look was born. No doubt the sisters at the convent in Moulins, who took her in when she was 17, raised their eyebrows when the young woman left the seamstress job they had helped her get to try for a career as a cabaret singer.
“I have already said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute.“
She had picked up the nickname Coco while singing in local nightclubs aged 18, where her favourite song was about a missing dog called Who’s Seen Coco In The Trocadero?. It stayed with her forever.
This stint as a performer — she was apparently charming but no Piaf — led her to meet millionaire socialite,
take up with the local swells and become the backup mistress of heir Etienne Balsan, a playboy who would finance her move to Paris and the opening of her first hat business, lifted her into the world of the upper classes to which she desperately wanted to belong.
“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.”
She was one of the first designers to adapt typically masculine clothing for women’s fashion, using elements from each of her lovers’ wardrobes. Wearing her own distinctive styles, Coco stood out from the other ladies in Balsan’s group and caught the eye of the man who was to become the love of her life, wealthy English polo player Arthur “Boy” Capel. He financed her first boutique in Paris’s Rue de Cambon in 1910.
Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster and Coco Chanel
As business grew she opened three more shops in rapid succession. The American fashion press was crazy about Coco’s daringly simple style and she became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Her success was meteoric and she soon paid back Boy every penny he had lent her.
Chanel would not have defined herself as a feminist — in fact, she consistently spoke of femininity rather than of feminism — yet her work is unquestionably part of the liberation of women. She threw out a life jacket, as it were, to women not once but twice, during two distinct periods decades apart: the 1920s and the ’50s. She not only appropriated styles, fabrics and articles of clothing that were worn by men but also, beginning with how she dressed herself, appropriated sports clothes as part of the language of fashion. One can see how her style evolved out of necessity and defiance. She couldn’t afford the fashionable clothes of the period — so she rejected them and made her own, using, say, the sports jackets and ties that were everyday male attire around the racetrack, where she was climbing her first social ladders.
It’s not by accident that she became associated with the modern movement that included Diaghilev, Picasso, Stravinsky and Cocteau. Like these artistic protagonists, she was determined to break the old formulas and invent a way of expressing herself. Cocteau once said of her that "she has, by a kind of miracle, worked in fashion according to rules that would seem to have value only for painters, musicians, poets."
Throughout the ’20s, Chanel’s social, sexual and professional progress continued, and her eminence grew to the status of legend. By the early ’30s she’d been courted by Hollywood, gone and come back. She had almost married one of the richest men in Europe, the Duke of Westminster; when she didn’t, her explanation was, "There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel." In fact, there were many Coco Chanels, just as her work had many phases and many styles, including Gypsy skirts, over-the-top fake jewelry and glittering evening wear — made of crystal and jet beads laid over black and white georgette crepe — not just the plainer jersey suits and "little black dresses" that made her famous. But probably the single element that most ensured Chanel’s being remembered, even when it would have been easier to write her off, is not a piece of clothing but a form of liquid gold — Chanel No. 5, in its Art Deco bottle, which was launched in 1923. It was the first perfume to bear a designer’s name.
Coco Chanel at Lido Beach in 1936
The pre-war years in France from 1935-1940 were rich in the decorative arts, putting trendy fashion designers front and center. It was a time when Gabrielle Coco Chanel was “rethinking the suit” to allow for the way women really move.
“Look for the woman in the dress. If there is no woman, there is no dress.”
One could say perfume helped keep Chanel’s name pretty throughout the period when her reputation got ugly: World War II. This is when her anti-Semitism, homophobia (even though she herself dabbled in bisexuality) and other base inclinations emerged. In 1939, at the onset of World War II, Chanel closed all her shops, claiming that it was not a time for fashion.
Then Hitler invaded Poland and World War II shattered the dream world of endless cocktail parties and silk and organza gowns made to order. The Germans invaded and occupied France.
Hooking up with Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a Nazi officer whose favors included permission to reside in her beloved Ritz Hotel Paris, where she stayed for more than 30 years. (She would die of a heart attack in her private suite here in 1971.) During this time she was widely criticized for having an affair with a German officer and Hans Gunther von Dincklage, the Nazi spy who arranged for her to remain at the hotel during the Nazi occupation of Paris.
In 1943, after four years of professional separation, Chanel contacted Vera Bate Lombardi, who had been her muse and public relations liaison to a number of European royal families since 1925.
Coco Chanel and Vera Bate at the Duke of Westminster’s, Scotland, 1925
Lombardi had offered Chanel the highest connections possible to build the House of Chanel. These connections allowed for the fashion house, and the designer herself, to rise to creative, romantic, social and political power. The guise for Chanel’s 1943 contact with Lombardi was for her original muse to return to work at Chanel, but there was much suspicion surrounding the real reasons. When Lombardi refused to comply with the request to come to Paris, she was arrested as an English spy and thrown into a Roman prison by the Gestapo. After the war was over, Chanel was arrested by the free French for suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis. She purportedly offered this explanation for sleeping with the enemy:
“Really, sir, a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover.”
Coco Chanel with Winston Churchill
It is generally believed that
Winston Churchill intervened with the French government, convincing them to let his old friend Coco Chanel escape to Switzerland. She moved to Switzerland in 1945, but returned to Paris in 1954, the year she also returned to the fashion world.
Due to her much publicized relationship with the German officer, her new collection was not popular with Parisians. However, it was much applauded by the Americans, who would become her most loyal customers.
“There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time!”
She invented the classic look, the slick elegance which was later adopted by American business women. Coco Chanel believed in an unmistakable look. This look is not subject to eccentricity and fashion. This look is flattering woman and is easy to wear.
“Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics.”
Coco was not just a fashion trendsetter, but a tough businesswoman. She believed her job – above everything – was simply to sell clothes. And, unlike most other designers, she was happy when she saw cheap copies of her clothes on the streets of Paris.
According to Chanel, the biggest mistake for a woman is in trying to change herself. Because the real happiness is in not changing.
She once said,
“I do not like when people speak of the Chanel fashion. Chanel is, above all, a style. Fashion passes, style remains.”
By the late ’60s, Chanel had become part of what she once rebelled against and hated — the Establishment. But if one looks at documentary footage of her from that period, one can still feel the spit and vinegar of the fiery peasant woman who began her fashion revolution against society by aiming at the head, with hats. Her boyish "flapper" creations were in stark contrast to the Belle Epoque millinery that was in vogue at the time, and about which she asked, "How can a brain function under those things?" Something that Chanel can never be accused of is not using her brain. Her sharp mind is apparent in everything she did, from her savvy use of logos to her deep understanding of the power of personality and packaging, even the importance of being copied. And she was always quotable: "Fashion is not simply a matter of clothes. Fashion is in the air, born upon the wind. One intuits it. It is in the sky and on the road."
It is fitting, somehow, that Chanel was often photographed holding a cigarette or standing in front of her famous Art Deco wall of mirrors. Fashion tends to involve a good dose of smoke and mirrors, so it should come as no surprise that Gabrielle Chanel’s version of her life involved a multitude of lies, inventions, cover-ups and revisions. But as Prada said to me: "She was really a genius. It’s hard to pin down exactly why, but it has something to do with her wanting to be different and wanting to be independent."
Certainly her life was unpredictable. Coco dedicated her life to the pursuit of style and never lost her love for clothes. In 1971 Coco Chanel died at Paris’s Ritz hotel, where she had lived for more than three decades.
“If you’re born without wings, do everything you can to grow some.”
“Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.”
“I love luxury. And luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity. Vulgarity is the ugliest word in our language. I stay in the game to fight it.”
“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.” – Coco Chanel
Coco Chanel and Jeanne Moreau, Paris, 1957
In her life, you see reality in style more than fantasy in fashion!
