Chanel
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Bottom of Form * Born: August 19, 1882 in Saumur, France * Died: January 10, 1971 in Paris, France * Nationality: French * Occupation: Fashion designer
Legend. Coco Chanel once declared, "Legend is the consecration of celebrity," and no other fashion designer in history has exceeded either Chanel's celebrity or her legend. She was a fiercely independent lover of dukes, industrialists, and artists; a confidante of many of the creative geniuses of her day—among them, writer Jean Cocteau, painter Pablo Picasso, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, and composer Igor Stravinsky; and a self-created image of the free-spirited "new woman" of the 1920s. Through her personal example and the fashion empire she established, Chanel launched and sustained the movement toward simplicity, practicality, and unfussy elegance in women's clothing. "A fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion," she said, and by the early years of the 1920s, Chanel fashion had reached streets throughout Europe and the United States.
Early Life. Chanel both obscured and embroidered upon the facts of her early life; as one of her biographers declared, "She was herself a Chanel creation." Though she claimed to have been born in Auvergne in 1893, records show that she was actually born in the poorhouse of the town of Saumur ten years earlier. Her mother, a poorhouse employee, and her father, an itinerant tradesman, were not married until fifteen months after her birth. Her mother died when Chanel was six, and her father disappeared after placing his five children under the care of relatives. Chanel and her two sisters seem to have spent most of their adolescence as nonpaying residents of a religious, orphanage-like boarding school in Moulins, but by 1903, when she was twenty, Chanel had become the mistress of a well-to-do young military officer, Etienne Balsan. In 1907 she fell in love with Balsan's friend, Arthur "Boy" Capel, a wealthy English industrialist, and around 1910 Balsan and Capel helped Chanel set up a millinery shop at 21 rue Cambon in Paris. Her simple, elegant hats charmed the society women to whom Balsan and Capel introduced her, and by 1915 she was able to open additional shops in the resort towns of Deauville and Biarritz. In that year she also moved into couture, designing dresses, skirts, and sweaters in jersey, a fabric not previously used in the French fashion houses. Legend has it that during the war years Chanel put on a polo player's or sailor's sweater, belted it around her waist, pushed up the sleeves, and liked the effect so much that she produced smaller-sized versions for women. Whatever the facts of the sweater's origin, it became a staple of Chanel's house and remained popular through the 1920s and beyond.
The Chanel Look. In December 1919 Boy Capel was killed in an automobile accident, and a grievingChanel threw herself even more fervently into her work. By the early 1920s she was directing a huge staff in four buildings on the rue Cambon, had introduced the simple chemise dress that became the embodiment of her "garconne," or "little boy," look, and had started a vogue for bell-bottom pants and lounging pajamas. In 1922 she began to market Chanel No. 5 in its simple, square bottle; the perfume became the most popular and one of the most prestigious scents in the world. Chanel favored sweater sets—a cardigan worn over a matching or contrasting round-necked sweater—with short, loosely fitted straight or pleated skirts. Her simple, youthful daytime attire usually came in neutral colors—beige was a favorite—and her more elaborate evening wear normally appeared in pastels. In 1925 she produced her short, open, collarless cardigan jacket, which became a signature of the classic Chanel suit, and in 1926 she brought out her little black dress, which Vogue labeled a "Ford" for its serviceable and enduring quality. Chanel's personal tastes set the style of the decade, both in Europe and America: she adored mixing costume jewelry—lots of it—with authentic gems; she bobbed her hair and was among the first women to sunbathe; she wore strapped sandals and low beige pumps; and she smoked cigarettes in public. Chanel both embodied, and in many ways dictated, the revolution in women's fashion that occurred in the 1920s.
Connections. Chanel's influence was in part the result of the personal and social contacts she made in postwar Europe. In 1917 she became a protégée of the wealthy, beautiful Misia Edwards—later Misia Sert—who introduced her to the circle of avant-garde writers and artists with whom Edwards associated. During the 1920s Chanel herself hosted parties for these intellectuals as well as for the wealthiest and best-known members of European and American society. In 1924 she designed the costumes for Diaghilev's ballet Train Bleu, for which Cocteau had written the story and Picasso had designed sets. During the 1920s and early 1930s Chanel also formed intense but generally brief liaisons with fascinating men: Russian Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, who had participated in the assassination of the mad Russian monk Rasputin; Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster, among the wealthiest men in England; brooding French poet Pierre Revedy; and French artist Paul Iribe. Each of these men seems to have proposed marriage, butChanel—always protective of her independence—declined. Most biographers agree, however, that her often-repeated retort to the duke of Westminster's proposal—"There are already three Duchesses of Westminster, but there is only one Coco Chanel"—is almost certainly apocryphal.
Retirement and Comeback. In 1938 Chanel retired from the couture scene and lived comfortably in Europe—during World War II under the protection of a German officer, a situation which earned her the contempt of many of her countrymen and led her to self-exile in Switzerland. In 1954, angered by the constrictions on women of Christian Dior's "New Look"—tightly pinched waists, padded busts, long bouffant skirts—she decided, at the age of seventy, to try a comeback. "Fashion has become a joke," she said. "The designers have forgotten that there are women inside the dresses. Most women dress for men and want to be admired. But they must also be able to move, to get into a car without bursting their seams! Clothes must have a natural shape."
Later Years. In 1954 Chanel said her competitive spirit was aroused because Parisian high fashion had been taken over by men. "There are too many men in this business," she told a magazine interviewer in May 1954, "and they don't know how to make clothes for women. All this fantastic pinching and puffing. How can a woman wear a dress that's cut so she can't lift up her arm to pick up a telephone?" She had a knack for knowing what women wanted, and women responded enthusiastically. In the 1950s her famous Chanel suit—a collarless, braid-trimmed cardigan jacket and slim, graceful skirt—was an enormous hit. She also popularized pea jackets and bell-bottom trousers plus magnificent jewelry worn with sportswear. Her 1954 collection was greeted by lukewarm reviews from the critics but by enthusiastic responses from women around the world. Once again her casually elegant attire, epitomized by updated versions of the Chanel suit, had succeeded in liberating women from repressive fashion norms. In 1957 Chanel was presented with the Neiman-Marcus Award. In 1969 Coco Chanel's life was the basis for Coco, a Broadway musical starring Katharine Hepburn. Chanel died in 1971, working to the end on a new collection. * Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994-2001 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, Cengage Learning.
Source Citation:
Baughman, Judith S., and Jan Collins Stucker. "Coco Chanel." American Decades. Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Gale Student Resources In Context. Web. 5 Mar. 2012
The inescapable Coco Chanel; Style icon's death has not stopped her ability to captivate an audience
Nathalie Atkinson Nathalie Atkinson; Canwest News Service
Ottawa Citizen
11-11-2009
The inescapable Coco Chanel; Style icon's death has not stopped her ability to captivate an audience
Byline: Nathalie Atkinson Nathalie Atkinson; Canwest News Service
Edition: Final
Section: Arts & Life
Type: News
Is there such a thing as Chanel fatigue?
Since her death nearly 30 years ago, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel has become a public domain icon as much as Marilyn, Audrey and Jackie O.
Today, Chanel is everywhere, yet on evidence, very little remains of that woman except a pastiche of symbols and a scrap of tweed.
Chanel, the original French paradox. She wore her brows as angular slashes but adorned her emancipated bob with a coquettish ribbon bow. She was single, a feminist, yet the fashion modernist was financially supported by men.
She threw aside Edwardian propriety and excess and ushered in an era of luxe austerity with casual, body-skimming, corset-free dresses of knitted jersey. Her mousy grey and sober little black dresses flew in the face of Belle Epoque opulence and archrival Paul Poiret sniffed they were "le miserabilisme de luxe." (She charged a fortune for them, clever girl.)
She was a living rebuke of the adornments that turned women into mere decoration yet wore long ropes of real and fake pearls, the wit of good junk mixed with the good stuff.
Anyone can drip in double Cs, though the impeccable cut of a simple black dress is much harder to achieve.
What would Coco the iconoclast make of the ridiculous concept cars, travelling art installations and so-called "luxury" skis and bicycles festooned with the branded shorthand of "Chanel?"
The endless interlocking Cs, number 5s, quilted leather and her personal emblem, the camellia blossom (from her one true love Boy Capel, who first wore a white camellia blossom in his lapel at the Deauville casino).
Even the company's cheek rouge is painstakingly sculpted to look like the signature boucle tweed. Who knows, perhaps Coco would have loved the cynical genius of Karl Lagerfeld.
Like Madonna, she was driven, a survivor and master of reinvention: Her 1954 comeback was engineered not so much for fashion's sake as to revive the Chanel brand's profile in order to drive lagging perfume sales.
Chanel's private apartment on rue Cambon in Paris is preserved, its ornate Coromandel screens still in place, as something of a sideshow attraction. Even Chanel's offhand remarks have, with the passage of time, become grand pronouncements as burnished and repeated as Nietzsche's aphorisms.
"Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity."
"Elegance is refusal."
"Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury."
"A woman who doesn't wear perfume has no future."
Ah yes, perfume.
Launched in 1921 in a crisply plain bottle, Chanel No. 5 is at first whiff pretty awful stuff. Strong and harsh (like the woman herself ) with sharp aldehyde notes that soften into florals only if you wait patiently enough, yet it's still the world's top-selling scent.
During my Chanel obsession years, I wore its sibling Coco, a heady oriental that was way too grown up for even my precocious 14- year-old self.
Today? The blockbuster Coco Mademoiselle has overtaken sales of the original Coco. Instead of haughty brunettes like model Ines de la Fressange, the ads now pander to the junior set with the blond starlet of the moment (most recently, Keira Knightley). The juice itself? Watered down with sugary notes and tinted bubble gum pink.
Pretty and pink is not the inscrutable Horst Chanel I fell for, or the stern woman of the Cecil Beaton portraits. It's her apple- cheeked impersonator Audrey Tautou who, instead of diffidence and steely determination, merely sulks, scowls and smokes her way through the movie Coco avant Chanel. Woefully miscast in Anne Fontaine's tepid biopic, Tautou is indolent and peevish. She dresses the part of garconne, sure, but has none of Chanel's mystique or brittle charm. It's like expecting Meg Ryan to be a good Bette Davis. It's beautiful to look at though, especially because Coco's well-worn cotton shirts and mannish tweed suits contrast nicely with the courtesans who wear "too much of everything."
Next to her purity of design, they're as ridiculous as macaroons trussed in taffeta. Right there onscreen is why Chanel's close friend and memoirist Paul Morand so aptly called her 19th-century style's "exterminating angel."
In April, after a lifetime of staring at her pictures in those Coco ads of the '80s, I finally met model Ines de la Fressange in person. It's uncanny that she shares both Chanel's coal-black eyes and intense, unflinching gaze.
Coco avant Chanel had just opened in France. What did she think? I asked. The one-time Chanel muse's answer was unnuanced, something between a snort and a harrumph. And in that moment, the Chanel of my teen dreams was alive again.
The Coco of Karen Karbo's The Gospel According to Coco Chanel or The Collection, Gioia Diliberto's not-so-flattering historical novel about Chanel's couture ateliers after the First World War. The Coco of that story is headstrong, demanding and shrill. She's a nasty bitch in a fabulous dress.
Now there's a woman I'd like to see a movie about.
Illustrations/Photos:
Photo: AFP/Getty Images / Coco Chanel, in her signature style, circa
1960, was a study of contrasts. The designer's style lives on in the quilted purse, Chanel No. 5 perfume and, of course, through fashion in an updated boucle tweed by German designer Karl Lagerfeld for
Chanel. ; Colour Photo: Coco Chanel in her signature style, circa
1960, was a study of contrasts. The designer's style lives on in the quilted purse, Chanel No. 5 perfume and, of course, through fashion in an updated boucle tweed by German designer Karl Lagerfeld for
Chanel. ; Colour Photo: Almost 30 years after Coco Chanel's death, a new movie starring Audrey Tautou, centre, does not capture the headstrong character, but the fashions are lovely to look at. ;
Colour Photo: Francois Guillot, AFP/Getty Images / Coco Chanel in her signature style, circa 1960, was a study of contrasts. The designer's style lives on in the quilted purse, Chanel No. 5 perfume and, of course, through fashion in an updated boucle tweed, above, by German designer Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. ;
2009
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Nathalie, Service, Canwest News. "The inescapable Coco Chanel; Style icon's death has not stopped her ability to captivate an audience." Ottawa Citizen. 11 Nov. 2009: E3. eLibrary. Web. 05 Mar. 2012.
Nathalie, Canwest "The inescapable Coco Chanel; Style icon's death has not stopped her ability to captivate an audience." Ottawa Citizen. 2009, November 11: E3. 