biography about coco chanel

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Fashion empire

Chanel no. 5, world war ii.

What is Coco Chanel known for?

How did coco chanel become famous, what was coco chanel’s family like.

Coco Chanel

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• Table Of Contents

When was Coco Chanel born, and when did she die?

Coco Chanel was born on August 19, 1883, in Saumur, France, and she died on January 10, 1971, in Paris, at the age of 87.

Coco Chanel was a fashion designer who ruled Parisian haute couture for almost six decades. She is known for the Chanel suit, the quilted purse, costume jewelry, and the “little black dress”—all now-classic innovations. Her designs stressed simplicity and comfort, and they revolutionized the  fashion industry . Chanel also introduced the iconic perfume Chanel No. 5.

Coco Chanel began working as a seamstress in her teens, and she opened a small millinery shop in Paris about a decade later, in 1910. In 1912 she established a boutique in Deauville, France. Her practical, elegant designs attracted influential women, and Chanel was soon heading a thriving couture house. “My life didn’t please me, so I created my life,” she said.

Coco Chanel’s parents were Eugénie Jeanne Devolle Chanel, a laundrywoman, and Albert Chanel, a street vendor. The Chanels had a total of six children, and the family lived in poverty in rural France. When she was 11, she was sent to live in an orphanage in Aubazine after her mother’s death. She moved to Moulins at age 18, and she lived in a convent while attending school. She was born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. The origin of her nickname “Coco” is uncertain.

Coco Chanel (born August 19, 1883, Saumur , France—died January 10, 1971, Paris) was a French fashion designer who ruled Parisian haute couture for almost six decades. Her elegantly casual designs inspired women to abandon the complicated, uncomfortable clothes—such as petticoats and corsets —that were prevalent in early 20th-century dress . Among her now-classic innovations were the Chanel suit, the quilted purse, costume jewelry , and the “ little black dress.” She also was known for the iconic perfume Chanel No. 5.

She was born Gabrielle Chanel, although her surname was misspelled (Chasnel) on her birth certificate. Her parents were Eugénie Jeanne Devolle Chanel, a laundrywoman, and Albert Chanel, who worked as a street vendor. The family—which eventually included six children—lived in poverty while moving throughout the French countryside. After her mother died in 1895, 11-year-old Gabrielle Chanel was sent to a convent-run orphanage in Aubazine. It was there that she learned to sew.

At age 18, Chanel moved to Moulins , where she attended school while living in a convent. In 1902 she struck out on her own and became a seamstress. During this time Chanel also worked as a café singer. Although not a particularly gifted singer, she was a popular performer, known for her charisma . While the origin of her nickname “Coco” is uncertain, some believe it is a reference to several songs she performed: “Ko Ko Ri Ko” (“Cock-a-doodle-doo”) and “Qui qu’a vu Coco?” (“Has anyone seen Coco?”).

“My life didn’t please me, so I created my life.”

Chanel enjoyed an active social life and had affairs with various wealthy men, notably Arthur (“Boy”) Capel, with whom she had a relationship until his death in 1919. With his financial assistance, she opened Chanel Modes, a tiny millinery shop in Paris , in 1910. Two years later she established a boutique in Deauville , France . There she later sold simple sportswear, such as jersey sweaters. At the time jersey was an inexpensive fabric commonly used in men’s undergarments. However, Chanel transformed the fluid material into practical but elegant designs, many of which were inspired by menswear.

Within five years her original use of jersey to create a “poor girl” look had attracted the attention of influential wealthy women seeking relief from the prevalent corseted styles. Faithful to her maxim that “luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury,” Chanel’s designs stressed simplicity and comfort, and they revolutionized the fashion industry .

In 1926 Chanel continued to transform fashion by introducing the so-called “little black dress” (commonly called LBD). While Chanel was not the first fashion designer to use black, the color was commonly reserved for mourning attire or more formal wear. Chanel’s black dress, however, was incredibly versatile, easily transitioning from day to evening with the right accessories—such as the costume jewelry she often wore. The LBD was hailed for both its simplicity and mass appeal. Alluding to Henry Ford ’s revolutionary Model T car, American Vogue called the little black dress the “Ford of Fashion,” and it quickly became a fashion staple.

“A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.”

While Chanel found immense success as a designer, the financial basis of her empire was Chanel No. 5. She developed the phenomenally successful perfume in 1921 with the help of Ernest Beaux, one of the most talented perfume creators in France. It has been said that the perfume got its name from the series of scents that Beaux created for Chanel to sample—she chose the fifth, a combination of jasmine and several other floral scents that was more complex and mysterious than the single-scented perfumes then on the market. Others, however, have noted that Chanel was superstitious and considered five to be her lucky number. That Chanel was the first major fashion designer to introduce a perfume and that she replaced the typical perfume packaging with a simple and sleek bottle also added to the scent’s success. The bottle’s top featured interlocking Cs, which later became the Chanel brand’s insignia.

Chanel then partnered with businessmen Théophile Bader of the Galeries Lafayette department store and the brothers Pierre and Paul Wertheimer of the Bourjois cosmetics company to distribute Chanel No. 5. The men agreed to help her produce more of her fragrance and to market it in exchange for a share of the profits. After signing a contract wherein she received only 10 percent of the royalties, Chanel enacted a series of lawsuits in the ensuing decades to regain control of her signature fragrance. Although she was never able to renegotiate the terms of her contract to increase her royalties, Chanel nonetheless made a considerable profit from the perfume.

Chanel closed her couture house in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II . At the time she was living at the Ritz Paris hotel, which became Nazi headquarters after France fell to Germany in 1940. There she began a romantic relationship with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a German diplomat and Gestapo spy.

While researchers and biographers have demonstrated that Chanel was a collaborator, there is disagreement over the extent of her involvement with Nazis. Some allege that she only socialized with Germans, turning a blind eye to their activities. Others, however, assert that she was a Nazi agent. Of particular note is a trip she took to Madrid with a German intelligence agent in 1941. It is believed that she had entered into a deal with the Nazis to secure the release of her nephew, who was a prisoner of war in a German detention camp. Although it is unknown what she did in Madrid, soon after Chanel returned to France, her nephew was freed.

The Nazis reportedly gave Chanel the codename “Westminster,” likely alluding to her earlier affair with Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd duke of Westminster.

Less uncertain is Chanel’s support of some Nazi policies. Anti-Semitic , she petitioned Nazi officials for sole control of Chanel No. 5, arguing, among other things, that the Wertheimers were Jewish, which would preclude them from owning property. However, the Wertheimers had earlier turned their shares over to a non-Jewish businessman, and Chanel’s efforts were unsuccessful.

Soon after the Nazi occupation ended in 1944, Chanel was arrested by French authorities. However, no charges were brought, and Chanel later claimed that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill , a longtime friend, had intervened. She subsequently moved to Switzerland .

The Wertheimers acquired Chanel’s couture house for an undisclosed sum in 1954. The family remains the sole owners.

In the early 1950s Chanel began to contemplate a return to fashion. At the time French fashion had undergone a seismic change led by Christian Dior . He had created the widely copied New Look, a style defined by ultrafeminine, elaborate, and highly sculptured clothing. Chanel, who favored simpler and more comfortable designs, was derisive of the look, and at one point she claimed, “Dior doesn’t dress women, he upholsters them.”

In 1954 Chanel staged her first fashion show in some 15 years. Although the French press had negative reviews, the collection proved popular in the United States . That year Chanel also introduced her highly copied suit design: a collarless, braid-trimmed tweed jacket with a graceful skirt. By the end of the 1950s, she had also debuted several other iconic items, notably a quilted purse with gold chains and two-toned shoes. These creations helped Chanel reclaim her position as one of fashion’s most influential designers.

After her death in 1971, Chanel’s couture house was led by a series of designers, with Karl Lagerfeld ’s tenure (1983–2019) being the longest and most influential. Under their direction, the Chanel brand has remained one of the most influential and iconic. Coco Chanel’s shrewd understanding of women’s fashion needs, her enterprising ambition, and the romantic aspects of her life—her rise from rags to riches and her sensational love affairs—continue to inspire numerous biographical books, films, and plays. Notable examples include the 1969 Broadway musical Coco , which starred Katharine Hepburn as the legendary designer, and Coco avant Chanel (2009; Coco Before Chanel ), a biopic with Audrey Tautou in the title role.

Biography Online

Coco Chanel Biography

Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chane l (19 August 1883 – 10 January 1971)

“Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.”

– Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel was a leading French modernist designer, whose patterns of simplicity and style revolutionised women’s clothing. She was the only designer to be listed in the Time 100 most influential people of the Twentieth Century.

“Fashion has become a joke. 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. ”

She also created her famous Chanel No.5 scent, and this has become a lasting trademark.

The early life of Coco Chanel

Most sources suggest Gabrielle Chanel was born in 1883, though this was a closely guarded fact – with Coco not keen on revealing her birth date. Her mother was unmarried and her upbringing was marked by poverty and uncertainty. Aged 12, her mother died, and her father sent his three daughters including Gabrielle to a convent in Correze. Life in the religious institution was strict and frugal, but she did learn to sew and gain a rudimentary knowledge of creating clothes.

At the age of 18, she left the convent and moved to Moulins. She gained work as a seamstress and pursued a secondary career singing at cabaret events; however, her singing was not good enough to enable a stage career. Around 1908, Chanel began an affair with Étienne Balsan, a rich aristocrat. This enabled Chanel to become acquainted with many wealthy aristocrats and a different social circle.

Early Chanel Casual wear – 1917

In 1913, with financial aid from a lover Arthur Capel, Chanel opened a boutique selling fashionable clothes in Deauville. She made innovative use of jersey fabric – a manufactured cloth which proved useful during the shortages of the First World War. She quickly gained a rising reputation for being on the forefront of fashion, and her initial success encouraged her to start another shop in Biarritz which prospered as a venue for the wealthy during the First World War.

By 1919, Chanel was able to open her first boutique in Paris on 31 rue Cambon, at the heart of the most fashionable area of Paris.

“In 1919 I woke up famous. I’d never guessed it. If I’d known I was famous, I’d have stolen away and wept. I was stupid. I was supposed to be intelligent. I was sensitive and very dumb.”

– Coco Chanel : Her Life, Her Secrets (1971), p. 95

In the post-war period, she felt the need for a revolution in women’s clothes. She began by liberating women from the bondage of the corset and encouraged a casual but elegant range of clothes.

“With a black sweater and 10 rows of pearls Chanel revolutionized fashion”

– Dior on Coco Chanel.

The 1920s were a significant period of liberation for women. It was a decade where women received the vote in several western countries. It was also a time when women were increasingly seen in professions and jobs, previously the reserve of men. Her fashion symbolised some of these social and political changes.

Significant items of clothing Coco Chanel helped pioneer included:

• the collarless cardigan jacket
• the bias cut dress – labelled a Ford by one critic because everyone had one.
• The shoe string shoulder strap.
• The floating evening scarf
• The wearing together of junk and real jewels.

Chanel in sailors outfit 1928

In 1938, she retired from the fashion business. However, 16 years later, she made a determined comeback after becoming fed up with seeing French fashion become dominated by men.

Her first post-war collection was not well received by the critics, but it proved immensely popular with the general public. Rich and famous women once again adopted the Chanel look, and she had shown her lasting influence on the industry.

“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.”

She prided herself on her great taste, fashion and practicality combined with an awareness of what people wanted. It was this that made her the most recognisable name in world fashion.

Chanel 2.55

Chanel was an innovator in many aspects of fashion. She developed a new kind of jewellery which imitated much more expensive jewellery. It enabled wealthy people to keep their expensive jewellery at home.

In 1929, she developed the iconic Chanel bag. Like other Chanel creations, it combined beauty, fashion and practicality. The thin strap – enabling hands to be kept free. In 1948, she updated the design to become the Chanel 2.55

Coco Chanel during World War Two

At the start of the Second World War in 1939, Chanel closed her shops, stating that war was not a time for fashion. Three thousand of her workers lost their jobs – it was seen partly as retaliation for previous conflicts with workers, where her workers had sought better wages and conditions.

Other declassified information shows that in 1943/44 Chanel was to be used as a courier for the SS to pursue a separate peace deal with Churchill and the Allies. The plan never succeeded.

In September 1944, Chanel was interrogated by the Free French Purge Committee, the épuration. She was released due to lack of evidence . Some sources suggest that Winston Churchill directly intervened to make sure Chanel was released – Churchill was possibly worried that if sent to trial, Chanel would embarrass the government with her links to top-ranking Nazi’s and sympathisers in the British establishment.

In the climate of post-war interrogations, Chanel moved to Switzerland where she resided until 1954. The post-war period saw the emergence of new male designers, such as Christian Dior, who began to eclipse Chanel’s branding. However, in 1954, she returned to Paris and reopened her couture house. Her post-war label was successful in America and Britain, but less so in France. Many Frenchmen continued to hold her war record against her.

Chanel never married or had children. During her life, she had numerous relationships with influential men. This included poet Pierre Reverdy and the designer Paul Iribe.

Many biographers have said that Coco Chanel remains an enigma – a life full of contradiction and hard to ascertain her real motives.

“Despite the work of a dozen biographers … Chanel remains an enigma.”

David Downie, in Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light‎ (2005)

She died on 10 January 1971, aged 87 at the Hotel Ritz, where she had resided for more than 30 years.

In the 1960s, a Broadway musical was made about her life starring Katharine Hepburn.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Coco Chanel”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net 26 Oct. 2009. Updated 1st March 2018.

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Coco Chanel Biography

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel (August 18, 1883 – January 10, 1971) Born in Saumur, France. French designer considered one of the most representative and influential figures in the fashion world of the twentieth century. The promoter of the garçonne-style renovator and vindicator, Coco Chanel became known as a designer in the 1910s, after buying and renovating a line of hats that she sold with the support of her lover Étienne Balsan. Upon gaining the recognition he opened numerous stores and began producing everything from shoes, suits, and dresses to perfumes and accessories. One of the greatest contributions that this revolutionary designer left was the liberation of the woman from the rigid and stoned wardrobe of the belle époque, thus reflecting the struggle for equality and women’s rights initiated by the women of the time.

Family and beginnings

Born into a humble family, Chanel had as parents the farmer Eugénie Jeanne Devolle and the seller Albert Chanel. Her childhood was marked by poverty, the alcoholism of her father and the illness of her mother, who left six orphaned children when she died in 1895. After the death of her mother, her father tried to leave the children to the care of their grandparents, but they refused, so he accommodated the three boys in farmers’ homes and the girls sent them to an orphanage. At twelve, Chanel was left in the care of the nuns of the monastery of Aubazine (Corrèze), where she was strictly educated, learning to sew, embroider and iron.

During the six years that she remained in the monastery, Chanel was trained as a seamstress and began to create a fictional story about her birth and her family, which she hated after abandonment; She spent most of her life denying them and hiding any record that existed about them, as her past embarrassed her. Anxious to start a new life, she left the orphanage and began working as a saleswoman in a sewing shop and singer in La Rotonde, an entertainment place for army men, where she performed songs such as Ko ko ri ko and Qui qu’a vu Coconut?. It was in this place that she started being called Coco , a name she would use later to make herself known as a designer.

At age 22 she fell madly in love with Étienne Balsan, a wealthy young man who ripped her out of provincial life and introduced her to the world of the upper class, parties, and leisure, however, Chanel wanted to work, so he spoke with Balsan to finance the opening of her first business, a millinery. Well, by then she had started selling her first hats to wealthy ladies and ladies on the ground floor of Balsan’s apartment, making himself known for her talent and particular informal and elegant style. In 1910, while Balsan was thinking about the project, Chanel ran away with Arthur Boy Capel, a polo player friend of Balsan, with whom she lived in Paris for a while. That same year she opened her first store in Paris, Chanel Modes , which was supported by Balsan and Capel.

The start of a dream

After opening her first store in Paris, Chanel began to gain recognition as a designer, reforming hats she bought at the Galeries Lafayette. Given the success achieved with the hats, Chanel decided to expand her business by designing her fashion line, which was well-received by her clients, who were mostly known from Balsan. In a short time, the fashion house attracted the attention of women of the time with its informal, elegant and revolutionary fashion, away from the bell-shaped and saturated style of the belle époque. The success of her designs led her to open more branches and hire more than 4000 workers, with whom she managed one of the biggest changes in the fashion world. With her stores on rue Cambo, Deauville, and Biarritz, Chanel imposed a new fashion style, between feminine and chic, which completely changed the way women of the time dressed, reflecting to some extent the change in the times and the struggle initiated by female activists in search of equal rights.

Being a model of her designs, Chanel became the image of the young and successful woman of the time: thin, stylized, with short hair, androgynous figure, and garçonne style. While her business was growing, Chanel was going through difficult moments in the love field, as she was abandoned by Capel, who married an aristocrat in 1919. At the end of World War I, Chanel settled in Hotel Ritz and focused entirely on her business, which prospered rapidly thanks to the dissemination of her designs and style in fashion magazines and newspapers around the world. The recognition she had gained allowed her to innovate and create new styles for the modern, elegant and free woman such as short skirts, female pants, Scottish tweed costume jewelry, round toe shoes a, the beach pajamas and her iconic bag with golden chains.

In 1929, the Wall Street crack forced Chanel to reduce the number of workers and the cost of their designs, however, this did not save the signature of the closure. Overwhelmed by loss, she moved to North America, where she began working designing clothes for big movie stars with the support of producer Samuel Goldwyn. After reopening the fashion house with the support of her new lover Duke Pierre Wertheimer and revolutionizing the world of perfumes with Parfums Chanel, the designer had to face the closing again due to the outbreak of World War II. She subsequently went into exile in Switzerland and stayed away from the world of fashion while attending the creation of the new Dior and Balenciaga look. She reopened her home in 1954, seventy-one years old and continued working on her designs even when her rheumatism and arthritis beset her. This prominent French designer died on January 10, 1971, in her bed at the Hotel Ritz, Paris.

Her funeral was attended by important figures such as designers Paco Rabanne, Balenciaga, and Yves Saint Laurent and the painter Salvador Dalí , among others. Three years after her death, Alain Wertheimer took command of the brand, skillfully leading the company and greatly promoting the sale of Chanel Number 5 and its different editions. Currently, the Wertheimer family are the owners of the company, which they have managed to keep up thanks to the work of great designers and the renewal of Coco Chanel’s style. Among the designers that marked the history of the company is Karl Lagerfeld, who was responsible for recovering the brightness and importance of the brand.

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Fernando Botero Angulo (April 19, 1932 – September 15, 2023) was a sculptor, painter, muralist, and draftsman, hailing from Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia. He was a Colombian artist known and celebrated for infusing a substantial volume to human and animal figures in his works.

Early Years and Beginnings

Fernando Botero was born into an affluent Paisa family , composed of his parents, David Botero and Flora Angulo, along with his older brother Juan David, who was four years his senior, and his younger brother, Rodrigo, who would be born four years after Fernando, in the same year that their father passed away. In 1938, he enrolled in primary school at the Ateneo Antioqueño and later entered the Bolivariana to continue his high school education. However, he was expelled from the institution due to an article he published in the newspaper El Colombiano about Picasso , as well as his drawings that were considered obscene. As a result, he graduated from high school at the Liceo of the University of Antioquia in 1950.

In parallel to his studies, Fernando attended a bullfighting school in La Macarena at the request of one of his uncles. However, due to an issue related to bullfighting, Botero left the bullring and embarked on a journey into painting. In 1948, he held his first exhibition in Medellín. Two years later, he traveled to Bogotá where he had two more exhibitions and had the opportunity to meet some intellectuals of the time. He then stayed at Isolina García’s boarding house in Tolú, which he paid for by painting a mural. Once again in Bogotá, he won the second prize at the IX National Artists Salon with his oil painting “Facing the Sea” .

“Ephemeral art is a lesser form of expression that cannot be compared to the concept of art conceived with the desire for perpetuity. What many people fail to understand is that Picasso is a traditional artist”- Fernando Botero

Due to the prize from the IX Salon and the sale of several of his works, Fernando Botero traveled to Spain in 1952 to enroll at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. There, he lived by selling drawings and paintings in the vicinity of the Prado Museum. In 1953, he went to Paris with filmmaker Ricardo Irrigarri, and later, they both traveled to Florence. Here, he entered the Academy of San Marco, where he was heavily influenced by Renaissance painters such as Piero della Francesca, Titian, and Paolo Uccello.

Career and Personal Life

In 1955, Botero returned to Colombia to hold an exhibition featuring several of his works created during his time in Europe, but it was met with a lukewarm reception from the public.

Woman With a Mirror / Foto:Luis García (Zaqarbal) / Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Spain (CC BY-SA 3.0 ES)

In 1956, he married Gloria Zea, with whom he would later have three children: Fernando, Juan Carlos, and Lina. The couple traveled to Mexico City, where Fernando Botero was eager to see the works of Mexican muralists, but this experience left him disillusioned. Consequently, he began searching for his own artistic style, drawing influence from both the Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo and the Colombian artist Alejandro Obregón . In this quest, he started experimenting with volume, initially in still lifes, and gradually extending this approach to other elements.

In 1957, he successfully exhibited in New York, showcasing his new artistic sensibility. The following year, he returned to Bogotá, where he was appointed as a professor at the School of Fine Arts at the National University of Colombia . He presented his work “La Camera Degli Sposi” at the X Colombian Artists Salon , winning the first prize and becoming the country’s most prominent painter. This piece sparked some controversy as it was initially censored for being almost a parody of Andrea Mantegna’s “La Cámara de los Esposos”. However, it was later reinstated in the exhibition on the advice of Marta Traba. Subsequently, Fernando Botero exhibited his works in various spaces in the United States, where a businessman from Chicago purchased “La Camera Degli Sposi” .

“Fernando Botero and his works are the finest ambassadors of our country in this land of navigators and discoverers, of poets and fado singers”- Juan Manuel Santos

In 1960, Botero separated from Gloria Zea and traveled to New York. He led a modest life here as the New York art scene was primarily inclined towards abstract expressionism. Consequently, Botero was influenced by artists like Pollock, which led him to experiment with color, brushwork, and format, to the point of nearly abandoning his distinctive style characterized by the manipulation of volume. Aware of this, Botero returned to his usual style of flat colors and figurative representations.

Starting in 1962, he began a series of exhibitions in both Europe and the United States, as well as in Colombia. By 1970, the year his son Pedro was born to his second wife, Cecilia Zambrano, Fernando Botero had already become the world’s most sought-after sculptor. However, in 1974, his son Pedro tragically died in a traffic accident, leading to his second divorce and leaving significant marks on his artistic endeavors.

In 1978, the Colombian painter married Sophia Vari , a renowned Greek artist with whom he shared a significant part of his life, until sadly, she passed away in May 2023.

Since 1983, Fernando Botero has been exhibiting his works and donating them to various cities around the world. As a result, we can find his pieces in the streets of Medellín, Barcelona, Oviedo, Singapore, and Madrid, among others. In 2008, the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in Mexico conferred upon him an honorary Doctorate.

Renowned Colombian artist, Fernando Botero, died on September 15, 2023 , in Monaco at the age of 91 due to pneumonia . His artistic legacy will endure forever. In his hometown, seven days of mourning were declared.

Pedrito a Caballo, Fernando Botero (1975).

Top 10 Famous works by Fernando Botero

Some of the most recognized works by Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero:

• “Pedrito on Horseback” / “Pedrito a Caballo” (1974): This is an oil painting on canvas measuring 194.5 cm x 150.5 cm. For Botero, this work is his masterpiece and a refuge during a personal tragedy. The child depicted is Pedro, his son from his second marriage, who tragically passed away in an accident when he was young.
• “Mona Lisa at 12 Years Old” / “Mona lisa a los 12 años” (1978): This piece stands out as a unique version of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, the Mona Lisa . Painted in oil on canvas and measuring 183 cm x 166 cm, Botero incorporates his characteristic style of voluptuous and rounded figures into this work, which has become one of his most distinctive pieces.
• “Woman’s Torso” / “Torso de Mujer” (1986): It is a majestic bronze sculpture that rises to an impressive height of approximately 2.48 meters. It is often affectionately referred to as “La Gorda” (“The Fat One”). This artwork finds its home in Parque de Berrío, located in the captivating city of Medellín.
• “Woman with Mirror” / “Mujer con Espejo” (1987): An imposing bronze sculpture weighing 1000 kg. It is located in Plaza de Colón, in the heart of Madrid, Spain. The artwork captivates the gaze with the portrayal of a woman peacefully lying face down on the ground, holding a mirror in her hands. Her expression reflects deep introspection and enigmatic melancholy.
• “The Orchestra” / “La Orquesta” (1991): In this oil on canvas artwork, measuring 200 cm x 172 cm, Botero presents a band of musicians with a singer, all immersed in a spirit of celebration. The artist aims to convey a sense of harmony and joy through his portrayal.
• “Woman Smoking” / “Mujer Fumando” (1994): It is a creation executed in watercolor, spanning dimensions of 122 cm x 99 cm. In this work, Maestro Botero skillfully captures the essence of a woman elegantly holding a cigarette between her fingers. His meticulous focus on voluptuous forms, posture, and the serene expression of the figure masterfully combine to emphasize the sensuality and profound intimacy of the moment captured in the artwork.
• “Man on Horseback” / “Hombre a Caballo” (1996): This bronze sculpture is one of the most iconic works in the artist’s career. It depicts a rider in a majestic and proud posture. Over the years, this imposing work has been exhibited in multiple cities around the world, solidifying its place as a prominent piece in the sculptor’s body of work.
• “The Horse” / “El Caballo” (1997): This iconic sculpture showcases a horse of majestic presence and a distinctive rounded form, sculpted in bronze and measuring approximately 3 meters in height. This masterpiece reflects Botero’s profound passion for horses while also serving as a powerful representation of the mythical Trojan Horse.
• “The Death of Pablo Escobar” / “La muerte de Pablo Escobar” (1999): This artwork, created using the oil on canvas technique, has dimensions of 58 cm x 38 cm. While not considered a masterpiece, this artistic piece represents one of the most significant moments in Colombia’s history. Fernando Botero captures, in his distinctive style, the moment of the death of the drug lord Pablo Escobar , addressing issues related to violence and criminality that have marked the country’s history. An interesting detail is that, although Pablo Escobar admired Fernando Botero’s art, it cannot be said that the admiration was mutual. The painter created two works depicting the death of the drug trafficker.
• “Boterosutra Series” / “Serie Boterosutra” (2011): This work by Botero is part of an erotic art collection called Boterosutra , marking a milestone in the history of Colombian art as the first artistic representation of sexual intimacy between lovers. This series comprises around 70 small-sized pieces created using various techniques, including colored drawings, watercolors, brushstrokes, and also black and white, all of which constitute one of the most contemporary works by the painter.

Ryan Reynolds

Biography of Ryan Reynolds

Ryan Rodney Reynolds was born on October 23, 1976 in Vancouver, Canada, and he is a well-known actor. When Ryan was born, his mother, Tammy, was a student and a salesperson, while his father, Jim, worked in wholesale food sales and also excelled as a semi-professional boxer. In addition, Ryan has three older siblings.

He studied in his hometown of Vancouver until 1994 when he decided to join a theater group as an extracurricular activity while attending Kwantlen College. However, his passion for acting became a vocation, and Ryan dropped out of college to devote all his time and energy to his acting career.

Debut as an actor

He quickly landed small roles in successful and memorable TV series such as “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and “The X-Files”. In 1998, his big break came with the series “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place”, which ran until 2001 and catapulted him to fame. The show became very popular thanks to its great comedic content, an area where Reynolds demonstrated perfect skill, but this was not the first time that Ryan had made a name for himself in a Hollywood comedy, as he had already been in “Life During Wartime” in 1997.

After working in several minor jobs, Ryan got his first major role as a protagonist in the crazy “Van Wilder – Animal Party”, where he played a college party organizer. The success of the film opened doors for him to work alongside Michael Douglas in “Till Death Do Us Part”, support Wesley Snipes in “Blade Trinity” or star in the horror movie “The Amityville Horror”. However, at this stage of his career, Ryan stood out mainly as a protagonist in comedies such as “Just Friends”, “Waiting” and “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle”. This led him to want to leave his comedic side behind, getting involved in different projects such as the thriller “Smokin’ Aces”, the independent film “Adventureland” and the action film “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”. Later on, he also participated in romantic films such as “The Proposal” and “Definitely, Maybe”. However, recognition of his acting ability did not come until Ryan was nominated for a Goya Award for his demanding role in “Buried”. It is worth noting that he also brought to life the comic book hero “Green Lantern” and the renowned “Deadpool”.

Contracts, curiosities

Prestigious brands like Hugo Boss have not been oblivious to Ryan Reynolds’ popularity, charisma, and good looks, offering him contracts to be the face of one of their fragrances : Boss Bottled Night, a fragrance that, through great advertising, managed to convey an irresistible seductive effect.

Two curiosities can be highlighted from his work: first, the nearly 10 kilos of solid muscle he gained thanks to rigorous physical training to bring Hannibal King to life in “Blade: Trinity”; and second, his appearance on the animated TV series Zeroman, in which he lent his voice to the character Ty Cheese. In addition, like many Hollywood stars, Ryan Reynolds has an eccentricity outside the world of entertainment: a great passion for motorcycles , of which he owns three collector’s items, one of which was designed exclusively for him and is none other than a Harley Davidson.

Romantic relationships

Regarding his personal life, Ryan Reynolds was in a romantic relationship with singer Alanis Morissette from 2002 to 2007. The couple got engaged in 2004, but in July 2006, People magazine reported that they had separated, although neither of them officially confirmed the news. Shortly after, in February 2007, they decided to end their engagement by mutual agreement. In May 2008, Reynolds announced his engagement to actress Scarlett Johansson , and they got married on September 27 of the same year. However, in December 2010, the couple announced in a statement to People magazine that they had decided to end their marriage.

So, on September 9, 2012, he married the actress Blake Lively in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. In October 2014, they announced that they were expecting their first child, and in December of that same year, Ryan Reynolds and his wife Blake Lively became parents with the birth of their daughter: Ines. Later, on April 14, 2016, his wife’s second pregnancy was confirmed, and on September 30, 2016, he became a father for the second time to a boy named James.

Biography of Tom Hanks

Thomas Jeffrey Hanks, born July 9, 1956 in Concord, California, United States, is an actor known as Tom Hanks. Hanks was raised by his father Amos Mefford Hanks, who worked as a cook of English food, and his mother Janet Marylyn, a nurse. He was raised with the values of the Catholic and Mormon religion. During his time at Skyline High School in Oakland, he attended theater classes with his best friend. During his adolescence, Hanks demonstrated his acting talent and won the Best Theater Actor award at his institute. Later, he enrolled in Chabot College in Hayward, California and two years later did a exchange at California State University, Sacramento.

1981 – Debut as an actor

In 1979, the Hanks family moved to New York, which gave Tom the opportunity to debut as a supporting actor in the horror film “Sabe que estás sola” in 1981. Two years later, he landed a lead role in another film. Additionally, he did his first television work in the comedy series “Bosom Buddies.” Later, he decided to move to Los Angeles to participate in “Despedida de soltero” in 1984, although the film was not very successful, it allowed him to be discovered by Ron Howard, who later contacted him to offer a role in “Splash” in 1984.

Since then, Tom starred in several comedy films such as “Amigos del alma” (1980), “Esta casa es una ruina” (1986), “Big” (1988), “No matarás… al vecino” (1989), “Socios y sabuesos” (1989), and “Joe contra el volcán” (1990). His father was always very important in his career, constantly encouraging him to keep fighting for his dream. On several occasions, he helped him to get small roles. He also supported his participation in the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. Tom had already made some appearances in series like “Vacaciones en el mar”, “Happy Days”, “Taxi”, or “Family Ties”.

“The King of Comedy”

After a small role in the horror film “He Knows You’re Alone” (1980) directed by Armand Mastroianni, he starred in several comedies that typecast him in comedic roles. His charming personality and natural talent contributed to his growing popularity. Definitely his consecration came in the eighties, he was cataloged as the king of comedy . Thanks to “Big” (1988), he achieved great success for his performance, receiving the Los Angeles Critics Award and an Oscar nomination . Although he had a bit of a downfall after that, he regained momentum as a disillusioned former baseball pitcher who trains a women’s team in “A League of Their Own” (1992).

Tom considered it appropriate to change direction and tackle other stories, to move away from comedy a little. So, he eagerly sought more intense themes where he could showcase his versatility. With his work in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1989), directed by Brian de Palma, he attempted to take the first step to break away from light comedies, but the result was not as expected. However, his career took off again with his portrayal of an AIDS-stricken lawyer in “Philadelphia” (1992), directed by Jonathan Demme, an intense character that was quite a challenge. His effort was rewarded with an Oscar. He renewed his commercial success with “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), directed by Nora Ephron, where he teamed up with Meg Ryan, and worked with her again in “You’ve Got Mail” (1998).

Some of his most acclaimed performances

In the mid-90s, Hanks established himself as one of Hollywood’s brightest stars. It’s worth mentioning that his career enjoyed significant success. For his role in Robert Zemeckis’ “ Forrest Gump ” (1994), this has been one of the most striking films of the decade, he was again deserving of an Oscar , a prize that increased, turning him into one of the best-paid actors in Hollywood. With the comedy “The Wonders” (1996), he made his directorial debut.

Later, he did the same in the field of production with the TV series “From the Earth to the Moon,” a work that took him several years. Hanks had the lead role in the feature film “Saving Private Ryan” (1997), directed by Steven Spielberg , with this role he was nominated for the Academy Award, although the film received five Oscars. In 2000, he worked with Robert Zemeckis again in the film “Cast Away,” a film in which his solo performance was praised, for which he received an Oscar nomination.

Between 2003 and 2004, he repeated his collaboration with Spielberg in “Catch Me If You Can” and also in “The Terminal.” In 2006, he starred in the hit film “The Da Vinci Code,” the cinematic version of Dan Brown’s controversial work. Starting in 2014, Hanks’ films have grossed over 4.2 billion in countries such as the United States and Canada, and over 8.4 billion in the rest of the world, he is definitely an actor who ensures great success for films. His fame is such that the asteroid (12818) Tomhanks bears his name.

Marriages, children.

The actor has had several marriages throughout his life. His first marriage was to Samantha Lewes in 1978, from which two children were born: Colin Hanks in 1977 and Elisabeth Ann in 1982. However, the couple divorced in 1985. Later, in 1988, he married actress and producer Rita Wilson , with whom he had two additional children: Chester Marlon in 1991 and Truman Theodore in 1996. In recent years, the actor has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which requires a strict diet and daily care to maintain his health.

Marc Anthony

Biography of Marc Anthony

Marc Anthony (born September 16, 1968) is an American salsa singer and actor , born in New York. His real name is Marco Antonio Muñiz Rivera . From a young age, he has been involved in music, growing up with rock and rhythm & blues. His parents, Felipe Muñiz and Guillermina Rivera, discovered his passion and musical ability when he was a child. During his teenage years, to earn money, he began singing at bars and nightclubs , and quickly gained popularity. He was contacted by one of the members of the Latin Rascals group, and their producer Louie Vega invited him to record several albums with the Atlantic Records label.

Beginnings as a singer

One of Marc Anthony’s most successful musical products was the album “Rebel”, which achieved some success on the disco music charts. In 1992, his career in the salsa world took off when the famous Tito Puente took him as an opening act for a concert at Madison Square Garden. A year later, he recorded a salsa version of a song by Juan Gabriel that received excellent reviews and great popularity in the musical circles of New York. Soon, Marc Anthony appeared in several television productions and began to receive offers for concerts. After a few years, he was recognized as the new “king of salsa”. During the 1990s, his lyrics occupied the top position in Latin America and also in the United States.

The new “musical phenomenon”

Marc Anthony became a massively successful musical phenomenon , comparable to the success of Héctor Lavoe. At the same time, he continued to develop his acting career, appearing in films such as “Bringing out the Dead” directed by Martin Scorsese; “Big Night” directed by Stanley Tucci; “Hackers,” and “The Capeman,” a Broadway musical directed by singer and songwriter Paul Simon. He also performed the main theme of the soundtrack of “The Mask of Zorro” (1998), in which Antonio Banderas was the lead actor.

Third salsa album “Against the Stream”

That same year, he worked on the production of his third salsa album: “Contra la Corriente,” undoubtedly many salsa critics and aficionados affirm that it was the best album of his career, for which he received a Grammy for Best Latin-Tropical Album. In 1999, he released the album “Marc Anthony” to the market, this album undoubtedly demonstrates a new stage in his musical career, as it combined salsa with pop and also featured songs in English, in order to reach and conquer the Anglo-Saxon audience and market.

The first single, “I Need to Know,” put him in the top positions of the North American charts: it remained in the Top 10 of the Billboard for eleven weeks and eight more weeks in the Top 40. He also released the Spanish version, titled “Dímelo.” With this song, he won the Grammy for Best Latin Song of the Year and was number one on the Latin Billboard chart. He quickly released the second single, “You Sang to Me,” repeating the success of the previous one and selling over two million copies of the album.

Starting the new millennium, he released a greatest hits salsa album titled “Desde el principio.” After that, Marc Anthony went on a extensive tour that took him through the United States. All magazines and press talked about his triumphant concert at Madison Square Garden. Then he was in Canada and Central America. At that time, Marc Anthony received the admiration of his fans when he helped with his charitable work for the victims of Hurricane George, in sum, he founded a foundation that bears his name.

International tours

In 2011, he started the Dos Mundos Tour, with the company of Alejandro Fernández , a concert across Latin America. The following year, he was in Colombia at the Manacacías Summer Festival, many people from different parts of the country traveled to attend his concert. He had a significant participation in the 53rd International Song Festival of Viña del Mar, Chile, where he sang the song “¿Y cómo es él?” from his album “Iconos”. He received the highest distinction.

On March 3, 2012, Marc returned to Uruguay after 17 years and gave his performance at the Charrúa Stadium in Montevideo with an attendance of 25,000 spectators. In the GIGANT3S TOUR, he performed in several North American cities alongside Chayanne and Marco Antonio Solís . In 2013, he released his album 3.0. In 2014, he was the big winner of four of the five awards for which he was nominated at the Premios Lo Nuestro. Additionally, his career was recognized as one of the most successful Latin music artists. In 2016, he released a song called “Deja que te bese” with the collaboration of Spanish singer Alejandro Sanz, the song has over 50 million views on Youtube.

In September 2016, he carried out his “Marc Anthony Live” tour which included 5 dates at Radio City Music Hall. His private life has been somewhat controversial and has been exposed to various comments. He had his first daughter in 1994, Arianna Rosado-Muñiz, a product of his relationship with a former police officer from New York. In 2000 he married for the first time to Dayanara Torres, with whom he had two children. He later helped Jennifer Lopez in the production of the song “Sway” for the soundtrack of the movie Shall We Dance?. They then fell in love and after only one month of relationship, they got engaged in March 2004.

The couple had twins and Jennifer sold the exclusive photos of the children to People Magazine. However, after a few years, the couple decided to end their marriage on April 9, 2012. It is said that everything started when Jennifer Lopez met dancer Casper Smart and began a relationship with him two months after her separation from Marc. Later, Marc started a relationship with Venezuelan model Shannon de Lima, whom he married in 2014. Despite this, his relationship with Jennifer, the mother of his children, is harmonious, and he even participated in her song “Olvídame y pega la vuelta” in 2016. Two years earlier, the Puerto Rican singer made an impact with the hit song “Flor Pálida”.

On January 28, 2023, he married Nadia Ferreira in an incredible wedding surrounded by stars from film, music, and sports. The ceremony took place at the Perez Art Museum in Miami, with David Beckham as the best man.

  Ver esta publicación en Instagram   Una publicación compartida por Nadia Ferreira (@nadiatferreira)

Paul McCartney

Biography of Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney (born June 18, 1942) is a singer. He was born in Liverpool, England. His mother, Mary Patricia, was a nurse, while his father, James McCartney, was a volunteer firefighter. During Paul’s birth, his father was not present as he was fighting in the Battle of England during World War II. Paul grew up in a religious and strict environment, with his mother Catholic and his father Protestant, but later became agnostic. After returning from the war, his father devoted himself to selling cleaning products and, in his free time, played in bars.

Death of his mother

That’s why his son developed a deep love for music. He stood out in school for his intelligence and discipline and studied at Liverpool Institute secondary school, a good free secondary school. In 1954, he met George Harrison, with whom he quickly formed a strong friendship. At the time, McCartney’s mother was the one who kept the household and for work reasons they moved to Allerton, where they lived until 1964. On October 31, 1956, when McCartney was 14 years old, his mother died from a stroke.

After his mother’s death, McCartney was devastated. It took some time for him to return to normal. H is father saw music as a refuge to help his son feel better, so he took him to listen to the Jim Mac’s Jazz Band, where his father played trumpet or piano. He also gave him a trumpet, but when rock and roll became popular, he chose an acoustic guitar. The first song he composed was “I Lost My Little Girl” on that guitar, a Zenith. He also composed “When I’m Sixty-Four” on the home piano.

1957 – Met John Lennon

He met Lennon on July 6th, 1957. McCartney joined The Quarrymen, a school band led by Lennon, in 1958 as the lead guitarist. The band mixed rock and roll and skiffle, a popular music style, with jazz and blues. After several name changes, the band decided to call themselves The Beatles in August 1960 and recruited drummer Pete Best for their move to Hamburg. In 1961, one of its members, Sutcliffe, left the band and McCartney was forced to take over as bassist. They recorded as a backing band for English singer Tony Sheridan on the single My Bonnie.

1963 – “Beatlemania”

They managed to attract the attention of Brian Epstein, who became their manager in January 1962 and a key figure in their later success. With their first hit, “Love Me Do” in 1963, the “Beatlemania” began. John Lennon and Paul wrote a large number of songs together, but later their egos collided and they preferred to write separately. In 1970, The Beatles disbanded. But Paul continued his successful career with songs that reached number one. He recorded his first solo LP, “McCartney”, with songs very different from those that Lennon would write, with commercial melodies for varied tastes.

1980 – Paul McCartney Guinness Records

In 1980, he entered the Guinness Book of Records as the highest-selling songwriter in the world. His theme Yesterday , one of the most celebrated by The Beatles , has around 2,500 versions in the most diverse musical styles. Some of his solo hits are: Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, Live and Let Die for the James Bond film received the Oscar for best musical theme; Coming Up from his solo album Paul McCartney II. He joined George Martin and Ringo Starr in 1982 for the recording of Tug of War. On Press to play, his next album, was recorded with Eric Stewart.

Awards, arrest, record.

Winner of 18 Grammy Awards, including two Lifetime Achievement Grammy Awards (one with the Beatles and another as a solo artist). He is a vegetarian and an animal rights advocate. He was arrested for marijuana possession in Tokyo in 1980 and was briefly in jail. He participated in the “Live Aid” concert against hunger in Ethiopia in 1985. I n 1990, he achieved the record for the largest attendance at a concert with 184,000 people in Rio de Janeiro. Since 1997 he is Sir Paul McCartney, invested as a knight by Queen Elizabeth II.

2013 – Other awards, marriages.

On February 10, 2013, he received a Grammy for “Best Traditional Pop Album” for his album “Kisses On The Bottom”. Later, he received a special award from PRS for Music in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the composition of his most famous song, “ Yesterday “. These songs, as well as “And I Love Her,” “You Will Not See Me,” and “I’m Looking Through You,” were written inspired by his relationship with British actress Jane Asher. After five years of engagement, the couple broke up due to his infidelity with Francie Schwartz. He married Linda Eastman on March 12, 1969, and together they formed the musical group Wings after the dissolution of the Beatles . In 1999, he presented his collection of poems entitled “Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics (1965-1999)”. After the death of his wife, McCartney experienced deep sadness.

In 2002, Paul McCartney married former model Heather Mills in an Irish castle. After a long legal battle in the London Supreme Court, in 2008 Mills was authorized to collect one fifth of the 250 million dollars she had demanded from McCartney for their four-year marriage. In 2011, McCartney married Nancy Shevell in a civil ceremony in London on October 9th of that year.

Relevant aspects of his life and musical career

• With 60 gold records and the sale of over 100 million albums and singles as a solo artist and with The Beatles, McCartney is recognized as one of the most successful composers and artists of all time.
• As a solo artist in 1999 and as a member of The Beatles in 1988, he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice.
• As a solo artist and with The Beatles, he has been recognized with twenty-one Grammy Awards.
• 32 of the songs that McCartney has written or co-written have reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
• As of 2014, he had sold over 15 million certified units by the RIAA in the United States.
• In 1997, McCartney was elevated to the rank of knight for his services to music.
• In 1965, McCartney, Lennon, Harrison and Starr were named members of the Order of the British Empire .
• He has been married three times and is the father of five children.
• He has participated in projects to help international charities related to issues such as animal rights, seal hunting, landmine cleaning, vegetarianism, poverty and musical education.
• He ranks 11th on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Singers.
• He ranks first on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Artists as a member of The Beatles.
• He ranks third on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Bassists.
• Only surpassed by Bob Dylan , he ranks second on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Songwriters.

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Biography of Coco Chanel, Famed Fashion Designer and Executive

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Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (August 19, 1883–January 10, 1971) opened her first millinery shop in 1910, and in the 1920s she rose to become one of the premier fashion designers in Paris. Replacing the corset with comfort and casual elegance, her fashion themes included simple suits and dresses, women's trousers, costume jewelry, perfume, and textiles.

She is particularly known for introducing the world to the iconic little black dress as well as a perfume, Chanel No. 5, in 1922. It is, to this day, one of the most famous perfumes of all time.

Fast Facts: Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

• Known For : Founder of the House of Chanel, creator of the Chanel suit, Chanel jacket, and bell bottoms, Chanel No. 5 perfume
• Also Known As : Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel
• Born : August 19, 1883 in Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, France
• Parents : Eugénie Jeanne Devolle, Albert Chanel
• Died : January 10, 1971 in Paris, France
• Awards and Honors : Neiman Marcus Fashion Award, 1957
• Notable Quotes : "A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous." ... "Fashion fades, only style remains the same." ... "Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear."

Early Years and Career

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel claimed to be born in 1893 at Auvergne, but she was actually born on August 19, 1883, in Saumur, France. According to her version of her life story, her mother worked in the poorhouse where Chanel was born and died when she was only 6, leaving her father with five children whom he promptly abandoned to the care of relatives.

She adopted the name Coco during a brief career as a cafe and concert singer from 1905 to 1908. First a mistress of a wealthy military officer and then of an English industrialist, Chanel drew on the resources of these patrons in setting up a millinery shop in Paris in 1910, expanding to Deauville and Biarritz. The two men also helped her find customers among women of society, and her simple hats became popular.

The Rise of a Fashion Empire

Soon, Coco was expanding to couture and working in jersey, a first in the French fashion world. By the 1920s, her fashion house had expanded considerably, and her chemise set a fashion trend with its "little boy" look. Her relaxed fashions, short skirts, and casual look were in sharp contrast to the corset fashions popular in the previous decades. Chanel herself dressed in mannish clothes and adapted these more comfortable fashions, something that other women also found liberating.

In 1922, Chanel introduced a perfume, Chanel No. 5, which became and remained popular, and remains a profitable product of Chanel's company. Pierre Wertheimer became her partner in the perfume business in 1924, and perhaps also her lover. Wertheimer owned 70% of the company; Chanel received 10 percent and her friend, Théophile Bader, 20 percent. The Wertheimers continue to control the perfume company today.

Chanel introduced her signature cardigan jacket in 1925 and iconic little black dress in 1926. Most of her fashions had a staying power and didn't change much from year to year—or even generation to generation.

World War II Break and Comeback

Chanel briefly served as a nurse during World War II . Nazi occupation meant the fashion business in Paris was cut off for some years; Chanel's affair during World War II with a Nazi officer also resulted in some years of diminished popularity and an exile of sorts to Switzerland.

In 1954, her comeback restored her to the top ranks of haute couture. Her natural, casual clothing including the Chanel suit, once again caught the eye—and purses—of women. She introduced pea jackets and bell bottom pants for women.

In addition to her work with high fashion, Chanel also designed stage costumes for such plays as "Cocteau's Antigone" (1923) and " Oedipus Rex " (1937) and film costumes for several movies, including Renoir's "La Regle de Jeu." Katharine Hepburn starred in the 1969 Broadway musical "Coco" based on the life of Coco Chanel. A 2008 television movie "Coco Chanel" starred Shirley MacLaine portraying the famous designer around the time of her 1954 career resurrection.

Death and Legacy

Chanel worked right up to the time she died. Though she was ailing and in declining health by the early 1970s, she continued to direct her company. In January 1971, she began preparing the spring catalog for her firm. She took a long drive on the afternoon of January 9 and then went to bed early, feeling ill. She died the next day, January 10, 1971, at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, where she had lived for more than three decades.

Chanel was worth a reported $15 billion when she died. And though her career had its ups and downs, her legacy in the fashion industry is assured. In addition to perfumes and the little black dress, Chanel helped popularize costume jewelry, trousers, tweed jackets, and short hair for women—all of which were considered fashion no-no's before Chanel came onto the scene. The company also created such iconic items as black bouclé jackets, two-tone ballet pumps, and an array of quilted handbags.

Designer Karl Lagerfeld took the reins at Chanel in 1983 and lifted the company back to prominence. He ran Chanel right up until his death on Februry 19, 2019, as the company's creative director. Virginie Viard, Lagerfeld's right-hand woman for more than three decades, was named to succeed him. Chanel is a private company owned by the Wertheimer family and continues to thrive; it reported sales of nearly $10 billion for the 2017 fiscal year.

• Alkayat, Zena.  Library of Luminaries: Coco Chanel: An Illustrated Biography . Illustrated by Nina Cosford. 2016.
• Garelick, Rhonda K.  Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History.  2015.
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Gabrielle “coco” chanel (1883–1971) and the house of chanel.

• House of Chanel

Evening dress

Attributed to House of Chanel

Evening ensemble

Cocktail ensemble

Jessa Krick The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Early Success Among the key designers who made a bold and lasting impression on women’s fashion in the twentieth century, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883–1971) deserves special recognition. Born in Saumur, in the Loire Valley of France, Chanel survived an impoverished childhood and strict convent education. The difficulties of her early life inspired her to pursue a radically different lifestyle, first on the stage, where she acquired the nickname “Coco,” and then as a milliner.

With the help of one of the male admirers who would provide key financial assistance and social connections over the course of her career, Chanel opened her first shop in Paris in 1913, followed by another in the resort town of Deauville. Selling hats and a limited line of garments, Chanel’s shops developed a dedicated clientele who quickly made her practical sportswear a great success. Much of Chanel’s clothing was made of jersey, a choice of fabric both unusual and inspired. Until the designer began to work with it, jersey was more commonly used for men’s underwear. With her financial situation precarious in the early years of her design career, Chanel purchased jersey primarily for its low cost. The qualities of the fabric, however, ensured that the designer would continue to use it long after her business became profitable. The fabric draped well and suited Chanel’s designs, which were simple, practical, and often inspired by menswear, especially the uniforms prevalent when World War I broke out in 1914.

As her fashion-conscious customers fled Paris at the beginning of the war, Chanel’s boutiques in Deauville and Biarritz flourished. Chanel’s uncluttered styles, with their boxy lines and shortened skirts, allowed women to leave their corsets behind and freed them for the practical activities made necessary by the war. Elements of these early designs became hallmarks of the Chanel look ( 1975.7 ; 1984.28a–c ; 1976.29.7 ) Chanel took great pride as a woman in designing for other women, and by 1919, at the age of thirty-two, she enjoyed huge success, with clients around the world. Soon after, she relocated her couture house in Paris to 31 rue Cambon, which remains the center of operations for the House of Chanel today.

A Style Icon Chanel’s own lifestyle fueled her ideas of how modern women everywhere should look, act, and dress. Her own slim boyish figure and cropped hair became an ideal, as did her tanned skin, active lifestyle, and financial independence. Throughout her career, Chanel succeeded in packaging and marketing her own personal attitudes and style, making her a key arbiter of women’s taste throughout the twentieth century.

The designer’s passionate interests inspired her fashions. Her apartment and her clothing followed her favorite color palette, shades of beige, black, and white ( 1978.165.16a,b ; 1984.30 ). Elements from her art collection and theatrical interests likewise provided themes for her collections ( C.I.65.47.2a,b ). When Chanel attended a masquerade ball dressed as a figure from a Watteau painting , she later reworked the costume into a woman’s suit ( C.I.54.16.1a,b ). She hired Russian émigrés from her circle of friends to work in her embroidery workshop, creating designs to her exacting specifications. Known for a relentless drive for perfection, whether in design or fit, and strong opinions in all matters of taste, Chanel backed her clothing with the authority of her personal conviction.

Chanel continued to create successful looks for women through the 1920s and ’30s. In 1926, American Vogue likened Chanel’s “little black dress” to the Ford, alluding to its almost universal popularity as a fashion basic. In fact, the concept of the dress suitable for day and evening did become both a staple for Chanel throughout subsequent seasons and a classic piece of twentieth-century womenswear ( 1984.28a–c ). The designer also used colorful feminine printed chiffons in her daywear designs ( 1984.31a-c ). Evening ensembles followed the long slim line for which the designer was known, but also incorporated tulle, lace, and decorative elements that soften and romanticize the overall look of the garment ( 1978.165.16a,b ; C.I.46.4.7a-c ).

The Closure and the Comeback Despite her great success, Chanel closed the doors of her salon in 1939, when France declared war on Germany. Other couturiers left the country, but Chanel endured the war in Paris, her future uncertain. Following the end of the hostilities and resolution of some personal difficulties, Chanel found she could not idly stand by and observe the early success of Christian Dior , whose “New Look” prevailed in the postwar period. While many admired Dior’s celebration of femininity, with full skirts and nipped-in waists, Chanel felt his designs were neither modern nor suitable for the liberated women who had survived another war by taking on active roles in society. Just as she had following World War I, Chanel set out to rescue and reinvigorate women’s fashion.

The designer faced challenges in this endeavor: securing finances, assembling a new staff, seeking out new fabrics, competing at age seventy against a new generation of designers. Chanel’s comeback collection of couture debuted in 1953 (1976.370.2a-c). Although it was not a critical success, the designer persevered. Within three seasons, Chanel was enjoying newfound respect. She updated her classic looks, reworking the classic tweed designs until wealthy women and celebrities returned to the showroom in droves. The Chanel suit became a status symbol for a new generation, made of solid or tweed fabric, with its slim skirt and collarless jacket trimmed in braid, gold buttons, patch pockets, and—sewn into the hem—a gold-colored chain ensuring it hung properly from the shoulders. Chanel also reintroduced her handbags, jewelry, and shoes with great success in subsequent seasons.

The Legacy Continues Following Chanel’s death in 1971, several of her assistants designed the couture and ready-to-wear lines until Karl Lagerfeld (born 1938) took over the haute couture design in 1983 and ready-to-wear in 1984. Lagerfeld, like Chanel at the time of her comeback, looked to past designs for the secret to his success. His designs incorporated signature Chanel details, tweed fabrics, colors, gold chains, quilt-stitched leather, and the linked “CC” logo. In later collections, Lagerfeld became more irreverent, deconstructing some of the ladylike polish of Chanel’s 1960s looks. Playing with the fact that Chanel’s favorite jersey fabric had been used for men’s underwear at the turn of the twentieth century, Lagerfeld even incorporated men’s T-shirts and briefs into his designs ( 1993.104.2a–j ). Nonetheless, Lagerfeld’s ability to continuously mine the Chanel archive for inspiration testifies to the importance of Gabrielle Chanel’s contributions to women’s fashion in the twentieth century.

Krick, Jessa. “Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883–1971) and the House of Chanel.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/chnl/hd_chnl.htm (October 2004)

Additional Essays by Jessa Krick

• Krick, Jessa. “ Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895) and the House of Worth .” (October 2004)
• Krick, Jessa. “ Shoes in The Costume Institute .” (October 2004)

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Artist or Maker

• Chanel, Gabrielle "Coco"
• Dior, Christian
• Lagerfeld, Karl
• Watteau, Antoine

Coco Chanel Biography

Birthday: August 19 , 1883 ( Leo )

Born In: Saumur, France

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French Celebrities Born In August

Also Known As: Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel

Died At Age: 87

father: Albert Chanel

mother: Eugénie

siblings: Alphonse Chanel, Antoinette Chanel, Augustin Chanel, Julia Chanel, Lucien Chanel

Fashion Designers French Women

Died on: January 10 , 1971

place of death: Ritz Paris, Paris, France

awards: 1957 - Neiman Marcus Fashion Award

You wanted to know

What was coco chanel known for in the fashion industry.

Coco Chanel was known for revolutionizing women's fashion by introducing comfortable and practical designs, such as the little black dress and the Chanel suit.

Where did Coco Chanel open her first boutique?

Coco Chanel opened her first boutique in Paris, France, on Rue Cambon in 1910.

What is the significance of Chanel No. 5 perfume?

Chanel No. 5 perfume, created by Coco Chanel in 1921, is one of the most iconic and bestselling perfumes in the world, known for its timeless and elegant fragrance.

How did Coco Chanel influence women's fashion during World War II?

During World War II, Coco Chanel adapted her designs to reflect the practical needs of women, such as creating suits with military-inspired details and promoting a more casual and functional style.

What impact did Coco Chanel have on women's fashion in the 20th century?

Coco Chanel's influence on women's fashion in the 20th century was profound, as she challenged traditional gender norms, introduced sportswear elements into high fashion, and popularized a more relaxed and modern aesthetic.

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Coco Chanel was known for her love of wearing men's clothing, often incorporating traditional menswear pieces into her own wardrobe and designs.

She popularized the "little black dress" as a versatile and essential piece in a woman's wardrobe, revolutionizing fashion at the time.

Coco Chanel was a trailblazer for women in the fashion industry, breaking barriers and paving the way for future female designers.

She had a unique sense of personal style, often seen sporting her signature pearls and a classic tweed jacket.

Coco Chanel was a lover of animals, particularly her pet dog named "Choupette," who became a fashion icon in her own right.

See the events in life of Coco Chanel in Chronological Order

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Tell Me More Celebrates Women's History Month

Coco chanel: the unlikely fashion icon.

Bridget DeChagas

Coco Chanel

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Fashion designer Coco Chanel has been credited with developing the "modern woman." She once said, "I had rediscovered honesty, and in my own way, I made fashion honest." By loosening waistlines, shortening hemlines and embracing pants, Chanel redefined women's style. She was inspired by men's wear: shirts with clean collars, simple sweaters and loose belted jackets. She liberated women from constrictive clothing by making clothes that women could move in. Her designs were a symbol of the independent woman she was.

How she would become one of the most influential fashion icons of all time is the subject of Lisa Chaney's biography "Coco Chanel: An Intimate Portrait." The book was discussed on NPR's Tell Me More as a part of the program's biography series for Women's History Month.

Chanel was born into dire poverty and orphaned at age 11. "By the time I was 12, I realized that money is freedom," she said. She would eventually become the mistress of powerful men – one of the few options available to poor women in early 20th century France to escape poverty. What she never escaped though was the fear of her early life.

Chaney describes for Tell Me More host Michel Martin how very complex Chanel was: Her heart was broken when the love of her life died in a car accident; and she had romances with artist Salvador Dali, a Duke of Westminster, composer Igor Stravinsky and even a Nazi spy. That affair, during WWII, is still a point of criticism as some claim Chanel was an anti-Semite. She has also been criticized for her treatment of employees when she closed her salon during the war. "I think it was a terrible, terrible thing to do. But she was hard. She was hard but she wasn't only hard. And I try really hard in the book to paint a nuanced picture of a woman who was deeply complex and who could be very hard but wasn't only hard," said Chaney.

After the war, Chanel's comeback is credited to the United States. In 1954, the American edition of Vogue magazine lauded the redesigned Chanel suit. While many women will never have the financial means to afford couture Chanel, her influences are seen in today's shoulder bag, sling back shoes and the little black dress.

"She was a force of nature. She was very impressive in many, many ways," Chaney said. "And I think she gave women – all of the 20th and 21st century – I think she gave us an enormous amount. It really wasn't just the clothes. The clothes were a reflection of her life."

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the founder

“May my legend prosper and thrive. I wish it a long and happy life!”* *The Allure of Chanel by Paul Morand, Hermann, 1996 © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP Paris 2016

Gabrielle Chanel lived her life as she alone intended. The trials of a childhood as an orphan and the successes of an accomplished businesswoman gave birth to an extraordinary character\u003b daring, free, and ahead of her time. Faithful friendships and passionate love affairs, as well as a thirst for culture, discovery and travel helped shaped her personality. A wardrobe freed from constraints and superfluity, tweaked with masculine accents, created a visionary allure that has become timeless and yet wildly modern. Pearls and diamonds casually paired with iconic perfumes have created a signature style... That of an avant-garde woman, a pioneer whose lifestyle and multiple facets forged the values of the House she founded, and who remains an inspiration for all women.

coco in words

We see her again in 1930, wearing trousers and a sailor's shirt, with her short hair blowing in the wind. For quite some time, Gabrielle had done nothing like anyone else. For quite some time, she had discovered the happiness of letting her skin darken under the sun's caress while spending time in 1920 on Lido’s beaches in Venice in the company of Misia Sert. A life lived in the open air, punctuated by the discovery of sport and leisure, which she indulged in with pleasure: golf, skiing, yachting, fishing, etc.\u000d\u000aAnd of course, horseback riding, a passion that began with Étienne Balsan in 1906, which continued with Boy Capel, a distinguished polo player, and the Duke of Westminster.

Activities that inspired her to create a wardrobe that was not yet called sportswear, but which laid a foundation that was more current than ever. “I invented the sports dress for myself\u003b not because other women played sports, but because I did. I didn’t go out because I needed to design dresses, I designed dresses precisely because I went out, because I lived, for myself, the life of the century.”*\u000d\u000a* The Allure of Chanel by Paul Morand, Hermann, 1996.

Gabrielle Chanel and her dog Gigot at La Pausa, 1930

© All rights reserved

Instinctive

Her first hat boutique, which she opened in 1910 and which drew in the entire city of Paris, was the cornerstone of her legacy. Two years later, with her instinct sensing the rise of seaside resort towns, she set up a second boutique in Deauville.

It was then in Biarritz, another city that would soon become in vogue, that she opened her couture house in 1915. Gabrielle Chanel took over 31 rue Cambon in 1918. She then created N°5 in 1921, the first perfume by a dressmaker, which overturned the codes of perfumery of the era with its trail and refined bottle. In 1937, she herself posed to create advertisements, an innovation and an act of boldness, again... And then there was the fine jewelry collection “Bijoux de Diamants” in 1932, which stirred up and sparked scandal in the subdued world of fine jewelry, and showed, once more, how she rendered everything that had been done previously out of fashion. And how she was a formidable businesswoman, the first of her kind to build an independent and international company, whose keen instinct has never failed her.

Mademoiselle Chanel at work, 1937

© Photo Roger Schall / Collection Schall

\u0022Jersey, the sailor shirt, the tweed suit and jacket, knit twin sets, the little black dress, the two-tone pump, the shoulder bag in quilted leather, pearl necklaces... Gabrielle Chanel invented an allure and created a grammar of style, an eternal reference in the contemporary wardrobe.

Her vision of a simple wardrobe with understated, refined lines, and, most importantly, which would not restrict women's movement and would suit their daily lives, was followed by other innovations. \u000d\u000aThe first dressmaker to create a perfume in 1921, she had the instinct that would help her conquer the world. She stated, “Perfume is luxury.”* For her fine jewelry, she did not hesitate to once again strip away the superfluous, to lighten rigid settings, and invent ways of wearing it in the hair. Taking away the sacred nature of the most precious jewels was again a vision with surprisingly modernity. Gabrielle Chanel was also innovative in her way of speaking to women. When she agreed to work in Hollywood and dress American actresses in 1931, it was because she understood, as she said herself, that, “It is through cinema that fashion can be imposed today.” **\u000d\u000a*Answer to an Interview with Jacques Chazot for the show DIM DAM DOM, Film by Guy Job, 1969 \u000d\u000a**La Revue du Cinéma, September 1, 1931\u000d\u000a\u000d\u000a

Gabrielle Chanel in garden of La Pausa villa in Roquebrune, 1938.

© Photo Roger Schall - Schall Collection

“I am the only volcanic crater in the Auvergne that is not extinct,”* Gabrielle Chanel playfully said. One of the hallmarks of the designer's fiery temperament was never to be confined by anyone, let alone by men. This is one of the paradoxes of this great lover. Independent in her personal life, Gabrielle Chanel was just as much so in her business life.

Although she was financially supported by Boy Capel in the beginning, who helped her open her Parisian hat shop in 1910 as well as the Deauville boutique in 1912, Gabrielle made a point of paying him back every cent. A question of principle, as well as almost a survival instinct: to not depend on anyone, ever, and to remain free at all costs. Impelled by this very desire for freedom, she became the owner of the Bel Respiro villa in Garches, near Paris, and had the La Pausa villa built in Roquebrune Cap-Martin, on the Riviera. And of course, 31 rue Cambon in Paris, where she set up her apartments. To be free and independent was one of the finest examples she set for women.\u000d\u000a* The Allure of Chanel by Paul Morand, Hermann, 1996.

Gabrielle Chanel in her “La Pausa” villa, 1938

“It was the artists who taught me rigor,”* A patron, muse, and sometimes a real pygmalion\u003b a costume designer for theater, ballet and cinema, an avid reader, and passionate about Baroque and Byzantine art and Slavic culture, Gabrielle Chanel built deep friendships with many artists. Misia Sert, her closest friend, introduced her to this world of constant creativity. Together, their paths crossed with those of Diaghilev, Cocteau, Stravinsky and Dali… Gabrielle Chanel would financially support Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and would design the costumes for his ballet, Le Train bleu (The Blue Train). For Cocteau, who considered her to be “the greatest dressmaker of her era,”** she designed costumes for his plays Antigone, Orphée and Œdipe Roi. She invited Stravinsky to her Bel Respiro villa and supported his musical works.

As for Salvador Dali, Gabrielle Chanel lent him her La Pausa villa for more than six months in 1938 so that he could work on an exhibition of paintings that he was showcasing in New York the following year. Dancer Serge Lifar, Jacques Lipchitz and Picasso were also among her close friends. As were poets Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob, as well as writer Paul Morand, who devoted a book to her, The Allure of Chanel, and was loosely inspired by the relationship she had with Boy Capel in writing his novel Lewis et Irène. “She, by some sort of miracle, operated in fashion by following rules that seemed only to apply to painters, musicians, poets. She imposed the invisible, she imposed the nobility of silence on the furore of high society,”** Jean Cocteau stated. Gabrielle, an artist among artists. \u000d\u000a* The Allure of Chanel by Paul Morand, Hermann, 1996\u000d\u000a**With thanks to the Jean Cocteau Committee

Gabrielle Chanel and her friend the dancer, Serge Lifar, 1937

Jean Moral 1938 © Brigitte Moral SAIF Paris

“Books have been my best friends,”* Gabrielle confided to Paul Morand one day. They never left her, starting with her reading of Psalms at Aubazine Abbey. At Rue Cambon, in her apartments, shelves bend under the weight of books. One of them lays open near a pair of glasses... Lying on her beige suede sofa, on her quilted pillows, Gabrielle reads everything.

Sophocles, Homer, Plutarch and Virgil are displayed next to Rabelais, Dante, Shakespeare, and Montaigne. La Bruyère, Molière, Cervantes sit next to Rousseau, Voltaire, and Pascal. We also find Proust, Brontë, Stein, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And then there are the poets: Rilke, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Verlaine, Cocteau, Max Jacob and Reverdy.\u000d\u000a* The Allure of Chanel by Paul Morand, Hermann, 1996

Gabrielle Chanel in her apartment - 31 rue Cambon in Paris, 1937

Photo Jean Moral © Brigitte Moral

Gabrielle helped reveal talent. Naturally, she connected her friends together, inventing the notion of a network well before its time...\u000d\u000aIn 1936, she introduced young Luchino Visconti to director Jean Renoir who, immediately seeing the potential of this young Italian aristocrat who was mad about cinema, hired him as assistant director.

A few years later, Visconti sent Franco Zeffirelli to Paris and asked Chanel to help him enter the world of French cinema. Chanel introduced him Brigitte Bardot and Roger Vadim, thus launching the career of the Italian director.

Actress Jeanne Moreau and Gabrielle Chanel in Hollywood, 1960

© Giancarlo BOTTI/GAMMA RAPHO

Lover of the Arts

To learn, to discover, to nurture both her soul and her creativity through the arts: this was a motto that Gabrielle Chanel lived by her entire life. Passionate about painting, sculpture, architecture and history, Gabrielle fell in love with Slavic culture and charm in the company of Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. From then on, Russian-style blouses, pelisses, multicolored cabochons and Byzantine crosses adorned her collections.

Accompanied by José Maria Sert, the husband of her friend Misia, she traveled through Rome and Venice, finding herself in awe of the beauty of the churches, and the magnificence of Baroque art. The templates of Antiquity, as well as the adoration of gold, appeared organically in her stylistic vocabulary. In her home, Gabrielle collected Chinese Coromandel lacquer screens (she owned about thirty of them, a rarity!) which also provided her with inspiration. The \u0022bivouac of luxury\u0022 that she created in her houses and apartments without worrying about perfectly marrying styles and eras is an infinite source of creativity: the rock crystal balls, chandelier pendants, opulent mirrors, muted colors, bronze accents, and the marriage of East and West are some of the many influences that are found in CHANEL style.\u000d\u000a

Gabrielle Chanel in front of her Coromandel lacquer screens - 31 rue Cambon in Paris, 1937

© Boris Lipnitzki / Roger-Viollet

Avant-garde

Breaking down codes, tearing down gender boundaries to launch a classic future for fashion, that of “masculine-feminine,” Gabrielle Chanel dared to do everything. She stole tweed from menswear, and turned humble jersey knit into a privileged material\u003b she designed pajamas for the beach, and dresses that erased the waist.

She was not afraid of anything when she decided, “These colors are impossible. I’m just going to dress these women in black.”* Transgressive in her style, her fashion and her personality. With her short hair, she tanned in the sun, and drew inspiration from the jackets worn by lads on the racetracks to create the quilted effect on her iconic handbags. With enthusiasm, she hurtled down the ski slopes, fished, golfed or galloped for hours. Making the headlines never caused her to panic, nor did creating shock waves with her lovers, or her independent attitude and free spirit. And even less with her commitment to working hard and fighting to be the only one to decide her destiny, to be the only one to run her business. In the article “We nominate for the Hall of Fame” in June 1931, Vanity Fair summarized her as such: “Gabrielle Chanel was the first to apply the principles of modernism to dressmaking\u003b because she numbers among her friends the most famous men of France\u003b because she combines a shrewd business sense with enormous personal prodigality and a genuine enthusiasm for arts’’. Avant-garde in every way.\u000d\u000a* The Allure of Chanel by Paul Morand, Hermann, 1996\u0022\u000d\u000a

Gabrielle Chanel in the garden of her “La Pausa” villa, 1938 \u000d\u000a\u000d\u000a

When creating N°5, her first perfume, Gabrielle Chanel had to choose between various work samples, and she decided on the fifth sample that was presented to her. To the question, “What should I name it?” she answered: “I’m presenting my collection of five dresses on May 5th, the fifth month of the year, we will therefore give it the number that it's wearing, and the number 5 will bring it luck.”* Luck was the theme of a note that Jean Cocteau wrote to her one day... It was again luck and good fortune that she willed by cherishing the symbolism of the ear of wheat, cast in bronze on a coffee table base by goldsmith Robert Goossens in her rue Cambon apartment or painted for her by Salvador Dali.

Superstitious Gabrielle… Even though she alone shaped her destiny, the designer was in any case attentive to signs and symbols throughout her entire life. Therefore, her birthday, August 19th, became another legendary fragrance, N°19. And the lion, in honor of her astrological sign Leo, was found with many objects that never left her. It took up residence with royal presence in her apartment at 31 rue Cambon…As for the symbol of the star, which was paved in the floor tiles of Aubazine, it followed her throughout her life and was transformed into a flamboyant diamond star in her jewelry collection “Bijoux de Diamants,” presented in 1932. \u000d\u000a*Ernest BEAUX, “Souvenirs d’un parfumeur” (Memories of a Perfumer), Industrie de la Parfumerie, volume 1, N°7, October 1946, pp 228 to 231

Print of Gabrielle Chanel’s left hand, with her signature.

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Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life Paperback – Illustrated, August 23, 2011

Filled with fresh new research and never-before-seen photos, this updated edition of the definitive biography of Coco Chanel deepens our understanding of the history and legacy of the incredible woman who shaped modern fashion and created an empire of haute couture.

Coco Chanel was an extraordinary inventor, conjuring up the little black dress, bobbed hair, trousers for women, contemporary chic, bestselling perfumes, and the most successful fashion brand of all time. But she also invented herself, fashioning the myth of her own life with the same dexterity as her couture; and what lies beneath her own glossy surface is darker, more mysterious, and far more intriguing.

Uncovering remarkable new details about Gabrielle Chanel’s humble early years, Justine Picardie picks up the legend Chanel where it began—in orphanhood and poverty. Throwing new light on her passionate and, at times, dark relationships and providing profound insights into her connections with Cocteau, Diaghilev, Picasso, and Dali, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at what made Coco Chanel the strong-spirited and powerful presence she became. An authoritative account, based on personal observations and interviews with Chanel’s last surviving friends, employees, and relatives, the book also unravels her coded language and symbols and tracks the influence of her formative years on her legendary style.

Feared and revered by the rest of the fashion industry, Coco Chanel died in 1971 at the age of 87, but her legacy lives on. This special new edition has been extensively revised and updated and offers a uniquely authoritative account of the world’s greatest designer. Adding fresh new insights and discoveries, it comes complete with a compelling array of previously unseen images from the Chanel archives.

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher It Books
• Publication date August 23, 2011
• Dimensions 1 x 6.5 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0062074172
• ISBN-13 978-0062074171
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

“Fascinating. . . . Intriguing reading. . . . In researching this book, Justine Picardie has shown as much doggedness in uncovering her subject’s life as Chanel did in disguising it.” — Edwina Ings-Chambers, Sunday Times

“I thought there was nothing more to say about Coco Chanel, but Picardie’s recent book does a great job of depicting a difficult and compelling 20th-century icon.” — Kate Betts, The Week

“Gripping. . . . In the deftest prose, Picardie lots one of the most extraordinary lives of the 20th Century. The book is lavishly illustrated, too, with images of iconic outfits and intimate photos from Chanel’s private albums.” — Mail on Sunday

“Picardie reveals a fascinating insight into the woman who created the Little Black Dress and who freed women from the constraint of corsets. . . . By using the archives of the House of Chanel, of course, but also those of the Duke of Westminster and Winston Churchill, Picardie has managed to create a truly three-dimensional portrait of an enormously complex woman.” — Claire Black, The Scotsman

“Elegant.” — ARTnews

“Captivating. . . . Wonderful photos and illustrations.” — ARTnews

“Picardie’s biography on Chanel is not only stunningly presented—it features photos, pictures and fashion drawings by Karl Lagerfeld on almost every page—but brilliantly written.” — ARTnews

From the Back Cover

Sleek. Chic. Notoriously guarded. Welcome to the secret world of Gabrielle Chanel.

The story of Chanel begins with an abandoned child, as lost as a girl in a dark fairy tale. Unveiling remarkable new details about Gabrielle Chanel’s early years in a convent orphanage and her flight into unconventional adulthood, Justine Picardie explores what lies beneath the glossy surface of a mythic fashion icon.

Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation. An authoritative account, based on personal observations and interviews with Chanel’s last surviving friends, employees and relatives, it also unravels her coded language and symbols, and traces the influence of her formative years on her legendary style.

Feared and revered by the rest of the fashion industry, Coco Chanel died in 1971 at the age of eighty-seven, but her legacy lives on. Drawing on unprecedented research, Justine Picardie brings her fascinating, enigmatic subject out of hiding and uncovers the consequences of what Chanel covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and myth in a story that reveals the true heart of fashion.

About the Author

Justine Picardie is an acclaimed author and journalist. She has written six books, including her critically acclaimed memoir, If The Spirit Moves You: Life and Love After Death. Her most recent book was Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture, a biography of the sister of legendary fashion designer Christian Dior. Having started her career at The Sunday Times Justine went on to become a columnist for The Telegraph, editor of the Observer Magazine, and features director of British Vogue. Today, Justine Picardie is a contributing editor to Harper's Bazar, having previously been its editor-in-chief.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ It Books; Illustrated edition (August 23, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062074172
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062074171
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.95 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 1 x 6.5 x 9 inches
• #327 in Fashion History
• #785 in Fashion Design
• #3,459 in Women's Biographies

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Justine Picardie is the author of four books, including her critically acclaimed memoir If the Spirit Moves You and her most recent novel, Daphne. The former features director of British Vogue and editor of the Observer magazine, she is currently a fashion columnist for the Sunday Telegraph, and also writes for several other newspapers and magazines, including Harper's Bazaar and the Times of London. She lives in London with her two sons.

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Customers find the book's content in depth, unbiased, and fascinating. They also appreciate the author's ability to tell Coco's story without embellishing. Readers also find the biography interesting and entertaining. They say the book is a reliable resource with well-rounded views.

"...The illustrations are luscious. This is a well-researched study - the author seems to have dipped into every possible source, from the records of..." Read more

"...What Picardie has achieved is a comprehensive and in-depth gathering of the different tidbits of Chanel's life and brought it together in a..." Read more

"...This is an in depth book . Picardie understands the complexity of Chanel's character and the tenacious and driven capability of one woman to succeed...." Read more

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Customers appreciate the craftsmanship in the book. They also say it's of great quality and a great story about a strong, independent woman.

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Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel Haute Couture Anarchist

Oct 10, 2008

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

Founder of the House of Chanel Founded: 1913

"Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable."- Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

Born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel , "Coco's" first customers were princesses and duchesses, but she dressed them like secretaries and stenographers in faux pearls, trench coats, simple knits, turtleneck sweaters, and "little black dresses." By thumbing her nose at the haute couture styles of the 19th century, Coco Chanel freed women from the suffocating clutches of corsets and bustles and created a fashion revolution that would influence every designer that came after her. In fact, her signature Chanel suit - a collarless cardigan jacket trimmed in a braid with an elegantly straight skirt - is the single most copied women's fashion design of all time.

But perhaps this entrepreneurial dilettante's true genius lay in her shrewd recognition of the value of spinning off her name - a name that would remain one of the most famous and revered in the fashion world, even 50 years after her death.

Chanel's rags-to-riches story reads like a Harlequin romance novel. The illegitimate daughter of a poor French peddler, Albert Chanel, and a shop-girl, Jeanne Chanel, Gabrielle Chanel was born in 1883 in the Auvergne region of France. After her mother died and her father ran off, Chanel spent much of her early life in a convent. When she was 17, the nuns who ran the convent helped Chanel get a job as a seamstress. But the beautiful young woman secretly yearned to escape the humdrum life of provincial France and ran off to the garrison town of Moulins to become a cabaret singer.

While she never found stardom as a chanteuse, she did find Etienne Balsan, a rich young playboy who took her in as his "back-up" mistress and moved her to Paris. Always the rebel, Chanel refused to dress her part. Instead of the extravagant satin dresses that were de rigueur for coquettes of the day, Chanel wore plain, dark-colored dresses that marked the beginning of the fashion trend that would make her name famous throughout Europe.

To keep her busy while he attended to his other mistress, Balsan helped Chanel open her hat and dress shop, called Chanel Modes, located at 21 rue Cambon, Paris. That arrangement led to bigger and better things when Chanel left Balsan for his friend Arthur "Boy" Capel in 1913. A wealthy English businessman, Boy Capel, who is claimed to have been the true love of her life, provided the capital for Chanel to open two additional boutiques in the coastal towns of Deauville and Biarritz.

Chanel had always loved wearing men's clothing, which she borrowed freely from her lovers' closets, so it's no surprise that the inspiration for her early designs came from menswear. She even made many of her creations out of traditionally masculine materials, such as wool jersey fabric, which had never before been employed for women's clothing. Almost at once, her simple, yet elegant designs began to alter the way women of style looked and dressed. Urged by Chanel, women around the world over cut their hair and discarded their corsets in favor of loose-fitting sweaters, blazers, simple knit skirts, pea jackets, and Chanel's trademark "little black dress," which appeared in a sketch in an early edition of American Vogue. Chanel was so successful that she was able to pay back Capel in full, just four years after he set her up in business. Their affair continued, even after he married another woman, and did not end until Capel died in a car crash on his way to join Chanel for New Year's Eve in 1919.

Throughout the 1920s, Chanel's social, sexual, and professional progress continued, and her eminence as a fashion icon grew to the status of legend. Her growing fame made her one of the "in crowd." She befriended Igor Stravinsky, Picasso, and other members of Paris' exclusive art clique, and she designed costumes for Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and French filmmaker Jean Cocteau. (Known for her generosity to her friends, Chanel paid for Diaghilev's funeral when he died penniless in Venice.) She was also known for her longtime friendship with confidant Paul Morand.

During this time, Chanel experimented with many different styles, including Gypsy skirts, costume jewelry, and glittering evening wear made of crystal and jet beads. It was also during the '20s that Chanel introduced the product that would ensure her immortality. After the death of Capel, Chanel became the mistress of Russian Grand Duke Dmitri. Through him, she met Ernest Beaux, a perfumer whose father had worked for the Czar. Beaux was working on an essence for French perfume maker Francois Coty. According to legend, after sampling the scent, Chanel made a few suggestions, then convinced Beaux to give it to her.

In 1924, she released it as Chanel No 5 perfume , the first ever to bear a designer's name. Boldly advertised as "A very improper perfume for nicely brought-up ladies," the dark, leathery, distinctly masculine blend in its Art Deco bottle proved to be liquid gold.

Chanel's fame continued to grow throughout the 1930s, as Hollywood courted her services and she nearly married one of the richest men in Europe, the Duke of Westminster. (In later years, explaining why she chose not to marry the duke, Chanel replied, "There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel.") Chanel's confidence, some say arrogance, was hard-won. She'd worked her way up from literally nothing to become one of the most popular fashion designers in the history of the fashion industry. But with the coming of World War II, her fame would turn into infamy.

During the war, Chanel's fashion house became mired in controversy concerning her intimate life. When the Nazis marched on Paris, Chanel responded by shutting down her business and becoming involved with Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a Nazi officer 13 years her junior. In return, von Dincklage allowed Chanel to continue to reside in her beloved Ritz Hotel.

Believing her career as a designer was over, Chanel stayed out of the public eye for the next decade and a half, relying on the sales of her perfume as her main source of income. Then in 1954, at the age of 71, Chanel announced she was making a comeback.

Depending on the source, Chanel's return to the fashion world has been attributed to falling perfume sales, disgust at what she was seeing in the fashion world of the day, or simple boredom. Some say she became jealous of Christian Dior's growing fame and returned to fight for her fashion crown.

Regardless of why she returned, reactions to her return were decidedly mixed. In Europe, her comeback was initially deemed an utter failure. Fashion critics were less than impressed with Chanel's designs, which merely reiterated her message of casual chic clothes. But in New York, Americans couldn't buy her suits fast enough. Both Europe and the critics soon relented to Chanel's success in America.

Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, Chanel once again found herself at the forefront of fashion by following the same simple yet radical philosophy with which she started: It is possible to be comfortable and chic at the same time. While it did not destroy Dior, by the time of her death in 1971, Chanel's remarkable comeback had earned her the title of "the best designer of her time."

The French fashion designer continued her legacy after her death by handing over the reins of her empire to designer Karl Lagerfeld. Following his death in 2019, the Chanel brand has been overseen by Virginie Viard. Chanel remains not only one of the oldest, but also one of the world's most prestigious fashion houses still active. A tribute to her unique vision, the designs of the woman who carried fashion into the 20th-century promise to remain just as popular well into the 21st century.

Alternately the toast and scourge of Paris, Coco Chanel's reputation never fully recovered from her affair with a Nazi intelligence officer during World War II. But according to one historian, Chanel may have been more of a war hero than a war criminal. Edmonde Charles-Roux, considered the most reliable of Chanel's biographers, has offered circumstantial but credible evidence that Chanel was sent by Walter Schellenberg, a ranking officer in German intelligence, on a peace mission to British prime minister Winston Churchill. Schellenberg was reportedly acting on behalf of Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler, who attempted to offer secret peace initiatives to the Allies toward the end of the war.

After the liberation of France, French resistance forces arrested Chanel for her wartime activities. But Churchill, a close friend of one of Chanel's former lovers, the Duke of Westminster, is said to have intervened on her behalf. Chanel was released just 24 hours after her arrest and immediately left France for Switzerland.

Rumor Has It One of the enduring mysteries surrounding Coco Chanel is exactly how she got her nickname. Some of her biographers go along with the story that her father nicknamed her "Coco." Others contend that Chanel came by the name during her brief stint as a cabaret singer because her repertoire consisted of only two songs: "Ko ko ri Ko" and "Quiqu `a vu Coco?" But according to one source, Chanel herself once explained that the name was nothing more than a shortened version of "coquette," the French word for "kept woman."

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Books Of Style

The Many Faces of Coco

By Lauren Lipton

• Dec. 2, 2011

LET the Coco catfight begin.

“I have to be careful not to trash another writer,” said Lisa Chaney, the author of “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life,” a new biography of the French fashion icon. Then she proceeded to throw down the gauntlet. (One imagines a tweed-embellished lambskin glove from Chanel’s fall/winter collection.) Over the phone from her home in York, England — and in a press release from her publisher — she ticked off a litany of beefs with another recent Chanel book, Hal Vaughan’s “Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War.”

Mr. Vaughan’s biography, which posits that Chanel was a Nazi agent during World War II, “is written in a highly inflammatory style,” Ms. Chaney declared. “From the first few pages, it’s insinuation and leaping to conclusions. It’s pretty underhanded, what I think he’s done.”

 Mr. Vaughan said he thought that it was Ms. Chaney who was leaping to conclusions.

“I’m surprised that Chaney would say such a thing,” he said. “I find it quite shocking.” Down came another gauntlet: “Say, ‘Produce the damn document,’ ” Mr. Vaughan challenged, “and I will produce it.”

Mr. Vaughan, an American who lives in Paris, said he had not yet read Ms. Chaney’s book; he was waiting for Amazon to deliver it. But he had questions about a third new biography, “Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life,” by Justine Picardie, which reads to him, he said, as if it were written to please the late designer’s namesake company. “I don’t know whether it was subsidized, but it’s clearly a Chanel book,” he said.

Ms. Picardie, a British writer, had her own potshots for the other biographers.

“I presume it was Lisa Chaney who said to you that my book is authorized by Chanel,” she said. As for Mr. Vaughan’s book? “The title is an instant sound bite.”

At least seven Chanel books have been published in the past 18 months. It was almost inevitable that the books would end up pitted against one another in reviews, but now some of the authors are going after each other in real life. At stake are not just sales or bragging rights. The true battle is over what Mr. Vaughan contended is an almost institutionalized refusal to delve into Chanel’s dark side.

“The thing that really bothers me is that no one will address the facts,” he said.

What the writers do not dispute is that Gabrielle Chanel (1883-1971), known as Coco, was a fascinating, prickly character, equal parts diva, social climber, femme fatale and genius. She was born into poverty and abandoned to an orphanage. Through hard work, talent and a series of affairs with rich, well-placed men, she rose to become arguably the most important fashion designer of the 20th century.

All three writers also agree on something uglier: in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, Chanel was a collaborator — a loaded wartime term for a citizen who cooperated with the enemy. It’s the degree of Chanel’s collaboration that is at issue.

Mr. Vaughan’s book details Chanel’s long love affair with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a Nazi spy, and her dealings with Nazi higher-ups. Chanel, Mr. Vaughan writes, was a willing agent for the enemy, introducing Germans to her well-placed friends. In 1944, Chanel embarked on a mission to deliver a message to her friend Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, that said some high-ranking German officers wanted to end hostilities with Britain.

In return, he writes, she expected — and got — favors. Those included the release of her nephew from a German prisoner-of-war camp, and an apartment in the luxurious Ritz hotel in Paris during the German occupation of France. She also appealed to the Nazis to help her wrest control of her perfume business from the brothers to whom she had sold a majority stake years before.

 “Chanel was the consummate opportunist who was going to get what she wanted,” said Mr. Vaughan, who also paints his subject as a lifelong anti-Semite. “She knew exactly what she was doing. She didn’t see any harm in it.”

Ms. Chaney and Ms. Picardie write about the affair with Dincklage, as well, but they interpret Chanel’s behavior differently.

“There’s no question she was a collaborator of sorts, in that she had a lover who was a German, and he had an association with Nazis,” Ms. Chaney said. The question to her is how much Chanel knew, or chose to know, about Dincklage’s doings. Ms. Chaney suggested that her subject may have been blinded by love. At the start of their relationship, in 1940, Dincklage was 44 and Chanel was 57. “She was very conscious that this was a late affair,” the author said.

For her part, Ms. Picardie said Chanel “was involved in a German plot — but the German plot was to try and bring an early conclusion to the Second World War.”

Which account is accurate? Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, said she had read the Vaughan and Chaney books (and “glanced” at Ms. Picardie’s) and supported Mr. Vaughan’s theory.

“Chaney implies that Chanel was just guilty of horizontal collaboration; I think it was definitely more,” she said.

Ms. Steele and all three sparring authors agreed that it was unwise to judge Chanel’s wartime behavior without putting it in context.

Ms. Chaney said: “Chanel’s position in general was pretty reprehensible. But think about what it was actually like living in an occupied country. There are levels of collaboration. You could say everyone who stayed in France was a collaborator.”

The Chanel company is unsurprisingly vague about its founder’s wartime activities. A spokeswoman, Iana dos Reis Nunes, referred to Dincklage not as a Nazi but as “a German aristocrat.”

“The timing of this romance with a German was unfortunate even if Baron von Dincklage’s mother was English and she met him before the war,” Ms. dos Reis Nunes said via e-mail. The conflicting accounts, she added, “go to show the difficulties in differentiating fact from fiction.”

Both Ms. Picardie and Ms. dos Reis Nunes said that Chanel Inc. had neither authorized nor subsidized Ms. Picardie’s book. But Karl Lagerfeld, the current designer for Chanel, contributed an original drawing to the book.

In the end, determining whose version is the definitive one may not matter, said Rhonda Garelick, a professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and a Chanel scholar. She said she believed that Americans’ interest in this chapter of Chanel’s history had more to do with the current climate of political, social and economic upheaval.

“We have Occupy Wall Street — the 99 percent versus the 1 percent of super-elite multimillionaires — and we’re finally taking stock of what it means to have such discrepancy of wealth,” Ms. Garelick said. “We’re looking at an episode of Chanel’s life when people were picking through garbage looking for food, while she was living in the Ritz hotel as one of the richest women in the world. If during that period she was also betraying her country, that’s what piques our interest.”

It’s a good thing readers are so interested. Make room on the bookshelf for another biography of Chanel: “Antigone in Vogue,” by Ms. Garelick. She is working on her manuscript now.

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12 Facts About Coco Chanel, From Her Real Name to Her First Job

Eugène KAMMERMAN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Haute couture isn't everyone's forte, but even if you don't follow fashion religiously, there are some household names everyone just knows, like Prada, Gucci, Dior, and, of course, Chanel. We likely don't have to tell you that Coco Chanel is still a style icon: her designs were revolutionary and her signature fragrance is an all-time classic (even Marilyn Monroe was a fan). But, aside from her name, what do you really know about the woman behind the double-C?

Chanel is often attributed to a quote , "A girl should be two things, classy and fabulous." (Whether or not she actually did, however, is another story.) In her life, she was both. From her most famous designs to her style muse, here are a few need-to-know facts about the woman who blessed us with the little black dress.

When Was Coco Chanel Born?

Coco Chanel was born on August 19, 1883, in Saumur, France.

What Was Coco Chanel’s Childhood Like?

Unfortunately, the fashion designer's childhood was far from a fairytale. Chanel was born to Eugénie Jeanne Devolle, a laundress in the charity hospital run by the Sisters of Providence, and Albert Chanel, a peddler. Chanel was only 12 years old when her mother died from a combination of factors, including tuberculosis, poverty, pregnancy, and pneumonia, according to reports from The Telegraph UK. After her mother's passing, Chanel's father abandoned her and her two sisters, dropping them off at a convent-run orphanage where they were raised by nuns.

What Was Coco Chanel’s First Job?

Like many of the greats, Coco Chanel started from the bottom as a seamstress by day and a club singer by night in Moulins, a commune in France.

Where Did Coco Chanel Get Her Name From?

Coco Chanel was born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. She acquired the nickname 'Coco' during her brief stint as a cabaret singer. One theory is that Chanel was dubbed 'Coco' after the songs she sang ("Ko Ko Ri Ko" and "Qui qu'a vu Coco dans l'Trocadéro?"), but according to an article published in The Atlantic , Chanel claimed "Coco" was short for "'cocotte,' the French word for 'kept woman.'" Either way, it stuck.

When Was Chanel Established?

Chanel opened her very first shop in 1910. The brick-and-mortar was located on Rue Cambon in Paris, where the designer kickstarted her namesake brand selling hats.

What Was Coco Chanel’s Most Famous Design?

You can thank Coco Chanel for the little black dress hanging in your closet, even if the tag doesn't don the label's signature double C. The fashion icon introduced the now classic wardrobe staple early on in the 1920s, and it proved to be as revolutionary as the times.

Chanel is also known for its two-piece suits. The collarless tweed jacket and well-fitted skirt set give women a desirable, tailored fit but don't feel stiff on.

Where Did Coco Chanel’s Style Inspiration Come From?

Coco Chanel grew up in a time when women were expected to wear confining pieces, but she had another vision. Chanel's goal was to design classy garments that were as fashionable as they were comfortable, drawing inspiration from menswear and practical necessity.

When Did Chanel Create the Chanel No. 5 Perfume?

In 1921, Chanel released her first perfume with the help of perfumer Ernest Beaux. The name came from the fact that it was the fifth sample out of 10 created.

What Is Coco Chanel's Connection to Lions?

Lions are a symbol that is associated with the brand and included in collections. This is because Coco Chanel was inspired by the city of Venice, known as the City of the Lion, and was also a Leo.

Who Was Coco Chanel Married To?

Coco Chanel never married, but she did have suitors, and they played a significant role in her success. She was first linked to French textile heir and racehorse owner Etienne Balsan, who helped Chanel become a milliner (someone who sells hats) as her first real solo endeavor. However, it was Arthur 'Boy' Capel, a wealthy polo player, who helped Chanel set up shop on Rue Cambon, and eventually a boutique in Deauville. Capel is believed to be Chanel's one true love, not to mention quite the significant muse. After Capel died in a car accident in 1919, Chanel viewed men as a means to an end. She chose lovers based on their status and wealth in order to sustain her independence.

What Made Coco Chanel So Influential?

Coco Chanel was several things—wealthy, successful, and controversial—but what made her influential was her rebellious yet highly fashionable designs. Chanel approached fashion in a way that designers weren't at the time. She made clothes trendy, beautiful, and comfortable. She took mournful black and made it chic, she took menswear and applied it to womenswear. She defied limitations and encouraged women to do the same—in fashion, and beyond.

When Did Coco Chanel Die?

Coco Chanel died of a heart attack on January 10, 1971 in the Hotel Ritz in Paris. She was 87 years old.

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43 Classic Photographs That Prove Coco Chanel’s Taste Never Wavered

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was one of the 20th century’s most formative couturiers. Established first as a milliner, the French designer soon became synonymous with a new style of dressing that did away with corsets and layers of trimmings and tulles, instead embracing a more fluid silhouette shaped around a more androgynous ideal. 

Chanel, who passed away aged 87 in 1971, did nothing by halves. If her clothes have now become synonymous with a monochrome palette, then her life, by contrast, was a colourful one, filled with embellished truths and an ever-changing backstory. While she never married, Chanel’s love life was dramatic, making her personal affairs as much a topic of discussion as her collections. 

Today, Chanel’s legacy lives on in her namesake house, now under the design direction of Virginie Viard , after a 36-year custodianship by Karl Lagerfeld, who died in 2019 . The motifs that made up her work and her personal wardrobe — tweed suits, camellias, costume pearls and jewellery, a colour palette grounded in contrasting black and white and, of course, the interlocking CC insignia — remain just as pertinent, and are a testament to Chanel’s unwavering taste and forward-thinking vision. 

Here, British Vogue takes a look at Mademoiselle Chanel’s life in style.

An early portrait of Chanel showed the soon-to-be designer as a young woman wearing a peach, boat-necked dress, her long hair plaited across her head. 

Chanel was photographed in conversation with her lover, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, wearing her signature pearl necklaces.

The designer joined the Duke of Westminster at Chester Races wearing a loose silhouetted coat with a cloche-style hat, slingback heels and her pearls. 

The couple attended the 1925 Grand National together, with Chanel wrapping up in furs, an appliquéd hat and Mary-Jane shoes. Their relationship would endure for another 10 years.

Chanel was photographed in a belted, grey, knit cardigan, pearls and a matching hat.

In Biarritz, Chanel stepped into a town car wearing a drop-waist silhouette with piles of costume jewellery and Mary-Jane shoes.

Chanel went boar hunting with Winston Churchill and his son Randolph in the forests near Dieppe, France, wearing a typical hunting outfit. 

Outside her home on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris, Chanel was photographed wearing a patterned knitted dress with lengths of pearls and a matching cardigan.

Coco Chanel's other life

'Society people amuse me more than others,' Coco Chanel once said. 'They have wit, tact, a charming disloyalty, a well-bred nonchalance, and an arrogance that is very specific, very caustic, always on the alert; they know how to arrive at the right time and to leave when necessary.'

Coco Chanel is famous for many things - her style, her fashion empire, her extraordinary life - but just as important to her creativity were the people she surrounded herself with: an eclectic mix of aristocrats and artists. In the words of her biographer Lisa Chaney, Chanel inhabited 'two worlds that are, in many ways, mutually exclusive: the world of society, the haute monde, and the world of the artist'. But Chanel brought those two worlds together. Characters like the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Picasso, Stravinsky and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, grandson to Tsar Alexander II, populated her world and her parties. The film director Luchino Visconti said that her lunches - one of the most coveted invitations in Paris - were full of 'the most glittering, famous and interesting wits'.

'What really interested Chanel was influence,' says Chaney, author of Chanel: An Intimate Life . 'She wanted power, but not for power's sake. She wanted what power brought, which was independence.'

Born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in Saumur, France, in 1883 to a street vendor and a laundry woman, she was 11 when her mother died from bronchitis. Her father placed her and her sisters Julia and Antoinette in a convent orphanage in Aubazine. When she was 12, she came to the realisation that, as she said later, 'without money, you are nothing, that with money you can do anything… I would say to myself over and over, "Money is the key to freedom."'

After working as a seamstress and a cabaret singer - it's thought that one of the popular songs she sang in Moulins gave rise to her nickname Coco - Chanel met Etienne Balsan, heir to a textile fortune, who established her as his mistress in his chateau at Royallieu. It was Balsan who, in 1908, introduced Coco to her English lover, the polo-playing playboy Captain Arthur Edward 'Boy' Capel. 'He was my father, my brother, my entire family,' Chanel later said of him. Educated at Beaumont College, Berkshire, and then Stonyhurst, Lancashire, Capel was the dashing son of a rich shipping merchant. 'He was one of the most important people in her life, if not the key person,' says Chaney, who was the first biographer to have access to Capel's personal papers. It's generally accepted that the inspiration for many of Chanel's most iconic designs - including the CC logo, the design of the No. 5 perfume bottle and her use of unconventional fabrics such as jersey (previously used for men's underwear) - all had their roots in her affair with Capel. Her lover channelled money into Coco's first shop selling hats and within months Chanel's exquisitie creations were being featured in national magazines. Soon, Chanel opened a boutique, again financed by Capel, in the fashionable resort of Deauville, followed by one in Biarritz and then a store on Rue Cambon, in Paris.

During the first three decades of the 20th century, the French capital found itself at the epicentre of a creative explosion. Chanel witnessed a number of key cultural moments and counted many of the modernists as friends or lovers. 'My work came about as a reaction to my times,' she explained. She was in the audience at the first night, in May 1913, of Diaghilev's shocking new ballet The Rite of Spring , starring his lover, Vaslav Nijinksy.

Chanel had, according to Chaney, 'the character of an artist', and as such she felt at ease with the general spirit of bohemianism that infused her social circle. Sexual boundaries were fluid. Chanel also struck up a friendship with Count Etienne de Beaumont and his wife, Edith. Around the couple - who were both gay - flitted a heady crowd of artists, among them Satie, Braque, Cocteau and Picasso, with whom Chanel had an affair. 'He was wicked,' she said of him. 'He fascinated me the way of hawk would - he filled me with fear.'

Each spring, Etienne de Beaumont organised a month-long series of parties spread across Paris. In addition to the sumptuous dinners, the well-known 'fiendish social tyrant' hosted an extravagant costume ball. In 1919, the theme for the ball dictated that each guest should arrive in costume but 'leave exposed that part of one's body one finds the most interesting'.

Hedonism gripped Paris with the fervour of a new religion - and alcohol and drugs (particularly cocaine and morphine) were bountiful. At one event held on the day before New Year's Eve 1920, at Chanel's shop on Rue Cambon, the party started out civilly enough with a buffet in the fitting rooms, only to degenerate into debauchery. One of the composers of the group known as Les Six 'cracked his fingers on the piano, and there was blood running down the keyboard', remembered one observer. 'Jean [Cocteau] contorted, was initiating the Duchesse de Gramont in a broken can-can… Stravinsky [Chanel's lover at the time] was drinking his ammonia [booze]… Massine [the choreographer of the Ballets Russses] was doing things in the middle of the parquet floor, very quickly, on his own, then fell like a mass.' The friends congregated at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a bar on the Rue Boissy d'Anglas, known among the English as the Nothing Doing Bar. 'As well as beautiful women and men, and beautiful boys, and boys dressed as girls, and girls dressed as boys, there were the poets, painters, musicians, actors, dancers, the titled, the rich and the famous,' writers Lisa Chaney.

Throughout this time Chanel's closest female friend was Misia Sert, described by the writer Paul Morand, later the author of Chanel's memoirs, as a 'collector of geniuses, all of them in love with her'. Chanel had first met Misia, a pianist whose third husband was the Spanish painter Josep Maria Sert, in 1916. 'She was two-faced, conniving and manipulative,' says Chaney, 'and they loved and hated each other.' Many have assumed that it was Misia who was responsible for introducing Chanel into the rich diversity of the Parisiain scene. After all, Misia said, referring to Chanel: 'One could say that it is easy to help a beautiful diamond to shine. Still, it was my privilege to help it emerge from its rough state, and - in my heart - to be the first person dazzled by its brilliance.'

'Misia was a patron of the arts and, yes, she was frightfully sophisticated and gifted, but she never did anything with it,' she says. 'She was not driven in an artistic sense and, in the end, she could not bear it that Chanel outshone her. It was also obvious that Misia had a very serious issue with drugs. One day the two women were walking down the street and Misia took a syringe from her handbag and injected herself in the leg. Chanel was appalled.'

It would have been particularly easy for Chanel to lose herself in parties after the breakdown of her relationship with Boy Capel - in 1918 he married Diana Wyndham, a daughter of Lord Ribblesdale - and then his death, in a car accident, in December 1919. 'His death was a terrible blow to me,' she said later. 'I lost everything when I lost Capel He left a void in me that the years have not filled.' Yet Chanel busied herself with work and, after several months in mourning and then a trip to Italy with Misia and her husband, she returned to Paris ready to live again. Following an affair with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich - who introduced her, in 1920, to Ernest Beaux, the man who helped her create Chanel No. 5 - she embarked on a long relationship with the 2nd Duke of Westminster.

The designer met Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor in Monte Carlo, after an introduction by Chanel's friend and public-relations adviser, the socialite Vera Bate. Although Chanel was rich in her own right, this was nothing compared to the vast wealth of the 2nd Duke of Westminster, one of Europe's richest men and known to his friends as Bend'Or (from the family coat of arms). His seduction techniques included sending salmon, which he had caught in Scotland, by plane to be delivered to Coco in Paris, together with fresh flowers and fruit grown at his house, Eaton Hall. But she was far from intimidated by his wealth or social connections, and her insouciance attracted him even more.

The Duke introduced her to Winston Churchill, who regularly went salmon fishing with the couple at his friend's vast estate, Reay Forest, in Scotland. 'She [Chanel] fishes from morn till night, & in two months has killed 50 salmon,' Churchill wrote to his wife in 1927. 'She is vy [very] agreeable - really a gt [great] & strong being fit to a rule a man or an Empire. Bennie vy well & I think extremely happy to be mated with an equal.'

The couple created two houses together - Rosehall House, in Sutherland, and the celebrated La Pausa, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The house, near Monaco, was described by US Vogue editor Bettina Ballard as 'the most comfortable, relaxing place I have ever stayed in'. The routine was always the same: Chanel would remain in her own quarters during the morning, when she expected the villa to be bathed in silence, and she would emerge in time for lunch. 'No one missed lunch - it was far too entertaining,' wrote Ballard. 'The long dining room had a buffet at one end with hot Italian dishes, cold English roast beef, French dishes, a little of everything.'

In Paris, Chanel gave some of the most important parties of the era - one observer wrote of the 'white violence of the multitude of peonies - subtle, gay, moving parties which made several people envious'. Once she took over the Hôtel de Lauzun to mark the end of a Ballets Russes season. Music was provided by a jazz band, the gardens were lit by lanterns and guests ate from enormous dishfuls of caviar. 'We drank rivers of champagne and vodka,' recalled one guest. 'Coco drank as much as anyone else. As always, she flirted with the men. She was very kittenish, even purring, pretending she was completely captivated, when suddenly pfft! Nobody there! She was like a little Cinderella. She disappeared around two in the morning, so as not to miss her beauty sleep.' Throughout her life, Chanel maintained her slim figure, regularly visiting spas to keep in shape. 'Yes, she had invented the shift dress, but she always thought women should make an effort,' says Chaney.

Chanel's relationship with the Duke of Westminster ended when his head was turned by a series of younger women, including Loelia Mary Ponsonby, whom he married in 1930. When asked why she did not marry him, she is supposed to have said: 'There have been several Duchesses of Westminster - there is only one Chanel.' She went on to have relationships with the designer/illustrator Paul Iribe, who died while staying at La Pausa in 1945, and Salvador Dalí.

After the war, Chanel spent nine years in Switzerland before returning to Paris, where she lived at the Ritz. In 1954, she reopened her couture house, which she had closed at the onset of the war, but as she aged she became increasingly isolated and she died on 10 January 1971, aged 87. Today she is remembered not only for her style revolution - she gave the world the little black dress, the quilted handbag, the fashionable suntan - but also for a lifestyle from a lost, gilded age. 'I am not a heroine,' she once said. 'But I have chosen the person I wanted to be.'

Chanel with Randolph and Winston Churchill at a meet in France, 1928

With the 2nd Duke of Westminster at the Grand National, 1925

In New York, 1932

At her Paris home with her friend Lady Abdy, 1929

At her villa in the South of France with her friend Lady Dunn and her dog Gigot, 1931

An Illustrated Biography of Coco Chanel

In an imaginative new biography of Coco Chanel , illustrator Nina Cosford traces  the designer ’s astonishing life from convent orphanage to  31 Rue Cambon . You know the story: Née Gabrielle Chanel, Coco earned her nickname while singing in Parisian café concerts between billed acts. (Her signature song: “Qui qu’a vu Coco?”) Her life reads like an epic novel, from tormented love triangles to fatal car crashes and affairs with the likes of  Picasso ,  Dalí , and  Stravinsky . Her forward-thinking designs changed the industry forever.

The book  Library of Luminaries: Coco Chanel: An Illustrated Biography , out August 16 from Chronicle Books, narrates her life with sumptuous drawings by Cosford, text by Zena Alkayat, and excerpts from Chanel’s own letters and diaries.

Click ahead for a delicate glimpse into Chanel’s life — her early hat designs, the opening of her first store, and fishing ventures with  Winston Churchill .

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15 Things You Didn't Know About Coco Chanel

By jd rinne | feb 12, 2019.

Tweed jackets, the little black dress, menswear as womenswear: Coco Chanel is responsible for many of the innovations that still dictate women's fashion today. But there's a lot more to the designer than her gold-chained handbags, signature scent, and witty remarks —like her literal rags-to-riches story. Here are 15 things you might not know about the famed French fashion icon Coco Chanel.

1. Coco Chanel learned to sew at an orphanage.

Born Gabrielle Chanel on August 19, 1883, the future fashion designer came from humble beginnings. After her mother died when Chanel was around 12, her peddler father put her and her two sisters in a convent-run orphanage. The nuns there taught her to sew , and the stark black and white of their habits began to inform her design aesthetic.

2. Her nickname, Coco, most likely came from her brief time as a singer.

After leaving the orphanage at age 18, she worked in a tailor's shop during the day, and eventually began singing at French caf'concs , a sort of early-version cabaret show featuring bawdy verses sung in urban working class bars and restaurants. Chanel and her aunt Adrienne (who was just over a year older than Gabrielle) used these gigs to make extra money and flirt with the military personnel that were stationed in Moulins, France. The story goes that two of the songs Chanel was known to sing were " Ko Ko Ri Ko " and " Qui qu'a vu Coco dans l'Trocadéro ?" ("Who's seen Coco at the Trocadéro?"), and the crowd would call for encores by shouting "Coco! Coco!" Of course, Coco is also a term of endearment for a child (and Chanel preferred telling of how her father would call her that), and it can also be a diminutive of cocotte , a French term for a kept woman—which she would soon become.

3. Chanel was a licensed milliner.

After her brief singing career, Chanel became a licensed milliner and opened a hat shop in 1910 called Chanel Modes, at 21 Rue Cambon in Paris. The venture was funded by Etienne Balsan, a wealthy heir to a textile empire whom she'd met when he was a young officer in Moulins; according to Lisa Chaney's biography Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life , Balsan "invited her to live with him as his mistress," and Coco readily accepted.

At her hat shop, Chanel got a lucky break when Gabrielle Dorziat, a famous French actress of the time, became a fan of Chanel's hats and sparked a trend. Later in Chanel's life, a hat became a signature accessory—photographer Douglas Kirkland, who spent three weeks documenting the designer in 1962, never saw her remove it.

4. She designed that famous Chanel logo herself.

Still emblazoned on handbag, earrings, necklaces, and dozens of other products, the famous interlocking "Cs" of the Chanel logo were created by the designer and first appeared circa 1924 on bottles for her signature fragrance, Chanel No. 5. The logo hasn't changed since. Theories on her inspiration vary, but many point to Catherine de Medici's royal insignia , which Chanel may have seen on a visit to a royal residence. Alternately, the same insignia is featured on the walls of Château de Crémat in Nice where, according to legend, Chanel had attended parties, and the two Cs obviously worked well with her name and branding.

Another possibility was that was an homage to English aristocrat and polo player Arthur "Boy" Capel, Chanel's longtime lover and the man whom she considered the love of her life; he died in an automobile accident just before Christmas 1919, leaving Coco devastated. It's speculated that the Cs could have been for Capel & Chanel—her way of keeping his influence and memory alive.

5. Her fragrance, Chanel No. 5, might have been the result of a lab mistake.

The story behind Chanel's iconic perfume is full of twists and turns. In the early 1920s, Chanel worked with perfumer Ernest Beaux to create the scent. Reportedly, Chanel liked Beaux's fifth sample , leading to the now-famous name. (Also, five was said to be her lucky number.) But the scent, with notes of jasmine, rose, sandalwood, and vanilla, might have been the result of a laboratory mistake. The formula had an unusually high dose of aldehyde in it—a synthetic component that made the scent " sparkle ." The fragrance and its groundbreaking, minimalist bottle design would go on to become one of the best-selling and most recognized perfumes in the world.

6. Chanel sparked a decades-long court case over her perfume.

In a business deal to launch Chanel No. 5 in department stores in 1924, Chanel kept her name on the bottle, but got only 10 percent of the profits. Businessman Pierre Wertheimer agreed to make the perfume in mass quantities, taking a 70 percent cut (Théophile Bader, the founder of famed Paris department store Galeries Lafayette, got the other 20 percent because he brokered the deal). Chanel waged war in the courts for years to try to sweeten her deal—in fact, the Wertheimer business eventually had a lawyer whose only job was to deal with Chanel.

7. Chanel was allegedly a Nazi agent.

After Chanel's death in 1971, classified documents started to emerge that revealed the full extent of her dealings with the Nazis during WWII. Her decade-long affair with Hans Günther Von Dincklage, a German intelligence officer, was well known (she stayed ensconced at the Ritz during much of the Nazi occupation of Paris), but in his 2011 book Sleeping With the Enemy , journalist Hal Vaughan revealed that Chanel was involved enough with the Nazi agenda that she was referred to as Abwehr Agent F-7124—codename " Westminster ." "There were legions of women of courage and derring-do throughout Europe, working hard to outwit the Nazis," The Washington Post 's book review stated. "Chanel was not among them."

When the war was over, Chanel exiled herself to Switzerland before returning to Paris in 1954 to restart her fashion house. For their part, Chanel (the company) contested the claims in Vaughn's book, arguing that she had many close Jewish friends before and after the war and that her role during the Nazi occupation may have been more nuanced.

8. Chanel even enlisted Nazi help in the Chanel No. 5 fight.

During World War II, Chanel leveraged her Nazi connections and tried to use Aryan laws to push Pierre Wertheimer and his brother—who were Jewish—out of her business. Thanks to some last-minute business dealings that involved selling their majority stake to an Aryan businessman during the war, the Wertheimers were able to hold on to their investment and regain full ownership after the war. Incredibly, the Wertheimers eventually financed Chanel's return the fashion industry in the 1950s. The notoriously tight-lipped Wertheimer family refuses to give interviews or speak on their dealings or relationship with Coco Chanel, but they still own the Chanel brand to this day; it's worth $8 billion by recent estimates.

9. Winston Churchill was a friend of Chanel's.

Chanel had well-placed friends everywhere, including politicians. She met Winston Churchill in the mid-1920s through her then-lover, the Duke of Westminster. The duke—one of wealthiest men in the world and one with considerable influence—was close friends with Churchill (who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer), and the future prime minister was a regular at his home. Once, in a letter home , Churchill wrote that "the famous [Coco Chanel] turned up and I took great fancy to her—a most capable and agreeable woman … She hunted vigorously all day, motored to Paris after dinner, and today is engaged in passing and improving dresses on endless streams of mannequins. … She does it all with her own fingers, pinning, cutting, looping. Some have to be altered ten times." More than a decade later, during World War II, this old friendship was used by the Nazis to try to form an alliance with England.

10. Although Chanel had many affairs, she never married.

The only thing Chanel was more famous for than her fashions might be her storied affairs. Her many dalliances included a short-lived one with Pablo Picasso (Lisa Chaney's biography Coco Chanel, An Intimate Life describes its end as "Picasso [was] always quick to demand sexual and emotional subservience from his women, and Gabrielle being in many ways just as intense and formidable a character as he was, this affair could only have been a brief one"), the Duke of Westminster, the grandson of a Russian Tsar, and the composer Igor Stravinsky. When Stravinsky took to reworking his famed The Rite of Spring for a new staging with a Paris ballet company in 1920, Chanel was one of the primary patrons .

11. The Chanel bag made it acceptable for women to wear shoulder bags.

In the 1950s, it was de rigueur for women of status to carry their purse in their hands. But in 1955, Chanel changed all that when she introduced the 2.55 Chanel Shoulder Bag (named for when it launched, in February 1955). The sleek bag featured quilted leather and a signature gold chain for the strap, making it glamorous for women to wear a bag on their shoulder.

12. Chanel made jersey fabric cool.

When Chanel first starting designing in the early 20th century, women's fashion relied on the corset, which made for tight, fitted, and uncomfortable styles. Chanel liberated the silhouette by using jersey —a fabric then primarily used for men's underwear. Jersey was inexpensive and it draped well, making it perfect for Chanel's early designs of simple dresses.

13. Chanel's also credited with popularizing the little black dress.

Perhaps fashion's most enduring wardrobe staple—the one that can be reinvented and reworn a thousand different ways—was another one-time revolutionary idea that Chanel brought to the masses: the little black dress. Vogue coined the term in 1926, printing a Chanel design and comparing it to the Ford Model T in terms of universality (they called the dress "the frock that all the world will wear"). Although the LBD is considered a basic must-have now, at the time it was revolutionary because black was considered a color for those mourning.

14. Chanel even made getting a tan fashionable.

The LBD, striped shirts, perfume, menswear as womenswear: Everything Chanel did started a trend. And that includes suntans. In the early 1920s, when visibly spending too much time in the sun was still considered lowbrow, Chanel got a little too bronzed while out on a Mediterranean cruise with the Duke of Westminster. The resulting photos of her arrival in Cannes are often credited as setting off a desire for that sun-touched glow (which she soon capitalized on by creating the first line of tanning lotions for women).

15. Katharine Hepburn played Chanel in a Broadway musical.

, a 1969 musical based on Chanel's life, had a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner (best known for the blockbuster My Fair Lady ). Though Katharine Hepburn was a veteran stage actress, the four-time Oscar winner was not particularly known for her singing voice—and this was to be her one and only musical. The show only had 329 performances on Broadway, but thanks to YouTube, the company's performance at the 1970 Tony Awards is still available—it was nominated for seven Tonys that night and won two. Even if the musical didn't have staying power, at least the thought of one pioneer of the modern, trouser-wearing woman playing another feels very—how would you say?— je ne sais quoi .

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Coco Chanel: her story, biography and influence on fashion

The name  Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel  represents much more than a fashion house, it is the meaning of rebirth for a society that sought to understand public life in the aftermath of war. The French designer presented in her time an unexplored concept of femininity and confidence, where fashion was her ally in freeing women from the conventions of dress, dominated by the rigidity and constriction of the body.

With a childhood marked by a nomadic life and unstable jobs, the young  Chanel found her vocation by learning sewing in the orphanage where she was raised . Her flair for public relations and a hidden talent for her singing, crossed into her life the men who supported her with her beginnings in fashion, and became the reason for the creation of the most significant pieces of it. With the sewing skills learned in her youth, French fashion designer  Gabrielle Chanel  entered the world of hat design, a job that began what became a vast fashion empire.

Coco  learned the perspective of having nothing, and having everything, a vision that allowed her to take inspiration from the elite and their customs to deconstruct the concept of good taste, and impose her own way of understanding it. The designer established a business that delighted both the aristocracy and the masses, democratizing style with garments that gave any woman the opportunity to look elegant in clothes that no longer contained her, but adapted to her daily life.

Chanel  created pieces loaded with fascinating stories that concentrate the meaning of Parisian style, which today converge the spirit of the designer and her original concept of the brand, with a new understanding of contemporary women and fashion. The house founded by  Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel , which began as a hat business at 160 Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris, represents one of the most relevant figures in fashion with more than 300 locations around the world, maintaining its vision of style. as a romantic means to navigate life.

Also read: Fast fashion: what it is and how it came about

Who was Coco Chanel?

Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel  was a French fashion designer and businesswoman, founder of the eponymous fashion house, Chanel. She is considered the dressmaker who gave freedom of dress to women in the post-World War era, strongly dominated by corsetry constructions.  Chanel introduced more sporty and casual silhouettes in the 1920s , redefining the meaning of elegance and femininity at the time. She was the promoter of the  cruise  seasons, an important influence on French haute couture and  the creator of the Chanel n.5 perfume . Her brand grew from creating hats to a fashion empire characterized by the new image of women, bringing her aesthetic to her famous jewelry and the creation of her iconic leather bags.

Where was Coco Chanel born?

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel  was born on  August 19, 18883 in Saumur, France . Gabrielle’s mother was Eugénie Jeanne Devolle, a laundress at a local charity hospital, and her father was Albert Chanel, a traveling salesman. Coco was the second of eight children of the couple, after the death of her mother when Chanel was eleven years old, her brothers were sent to work in the fields and she and her other two sisters were sent to a convent in Aubazine. which served as an orphanage.

How did Coco Chanel become a designer?

Gabrielle  learned to sew during her time in Aubazine and went on to work as a seamstress, a job she complemented by singing in a Moulins cabaret frequented by French cavalry officers. While singing at Moulins, Chanel met Etienne Balsan, a former cavalry officer and heir to a textile company. The singer became Balsan’s lover, with whom she lived and introduced her to a life of luxury. While with the heir, Chanel began designing hats, a hobby that later became her profession. Etienne helped Chanel establish a hat business in Paris, and in 1910 she opened the  Chanel Modes  store at 21 rue Cambon in Paris to sell her designs.

Around 1908  Gabrielle  had begun an affair with Edward Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, an English polo player and merchant. Both men were influential in Chanel’s personal life and as a designer; while Etienne introduced her to the world of hat design, Boy Capel and her sartorial style served as inspiration to create the ‘Chanel look’. With financing from Arthur Capel, the designer opened a new store in Deauville, a luxury location in the city center where her hats, jackets, sweaters and sailor blouses were sold. With the success of the store, the designer opened a boutique in Biarritz, a destination for war exiles and wealthy people of the time. Barely a year after opening, the business was so successful that Chanel managed to return to Capel the amount of the initial investment she put into the stores.

Coco Chanel  with Arthur ‘boy’ Capel on the beach of Saint Jean de Luz in 1917. Getty Images

Also read: Who was Karl Lagerfeld and his most iconic designs

What was the legacy that Coco Chanel left in fashion?

Coco Chanel  freed post-war women from silhouettes dominated by corsets and bulky skirts with the introduction of an aesthetic that revolved around more sporty, youthful and casual styles. The designer built a fashion house whose designs revised the customs of the elite, giving women the opportunity to belong to this style. Gabrielle took note of horse riding, hunting and yachting culture to create her most famous designs, the Frenchwoman converted situations into garments that allowed her to redefine the style and femininity of her time.

The Chanel fine jewelry store at 18 Place Vendôme in Paris Chesnot

What were Coco Chanel’s most iconic designs?

El little black dress

At a time when black was only worn by women when they were in mourning,  Coco Chanel  gave women with the little black dress a new opportunity to dress elegantly even during times of the great depression in Europe. Made of wool or chenille to wear during the day, and satin, crepe or velvet for the night, Chanel allowed low-income women  to walk like millionaires.  In 1926 Vogue defined the little black dress as a ‘uniform for the woman of good taste,’ comparing it to a Ford car for its attributes of accessibility, design, simplicity and price.

Gabrielle Chanel  en uno de sus  little black dresses .Rex Features

The tweed suit

The Chanel  suit was distinguished by the practicality and comfort it gave women to carry out their daily tasks without having to compromise their style, or expose what they did not want to show. The Chanel tweed jacket and skirt set did not have shoulder pads or darts on the bust lines as was customary in the design of the time, it was an intelligently designed piece made to measure for the clients, whose measurements were taken with the models standing or climbing steps to ensure good performance of the suit.

The Chanel tweed suit.

The Chanel tweed set was not like other women’s tailoring pieces, inspired by the construction of men’s pieces, but was designed for a special man, the Duke of Westminster, one of Chanel’s  lovers . The designer used to use her clothes and she thought that with a change in the fabric she could create a design adaptable to the woman’s figure. Chanel commissioned a Scottish textile factory to manufacture the tweed yarn, the main focus of the piece.

The bag 2.55

Inspired by soldiers’ bags during the war,  Chanel  created the 2.55, whose name comes from the date it was created: February 1955. It was a piece with thin straps that allowed women to have their hands free when carrying their bag. . Its design brought together the designer’s memories, the strap simulated the Castilian-style belts used by the caregivers of the orphanage where Chanel grew up, while the burgundy color of its interior came from the color of the uniform worn by the nuns of the convent. The padding and texture of her exterior, however, came from Gabrielle’s relationship with sports, being a direct reference to the vests worn by jockeys in horse racing.

The Chanel 2.55 bagVanni Bassetti

Two-tone shoes

Before the introduction of these shoes in 1957, women typically only wore footwear that matched their outfit.  Gabrielle  created a two-tone piece, its black toe shortening the appearance of the foot, while the nude color gave the illusion of longer legs. Chanel’s creation became revolutionary and was made in two versions, high heels and sneakers. After celebrities such as Catherine Deneuve and Brigette Bardot were seen wearing this design, its use became popular and became a success.

The two-tone shoes in Chanel’s Cruise 2014 collection by Karl Lagerfeld. Yoshi Okamoto

The Breton top

Chanel’s travels were the reason for the creation of many of her pieces, and the Breton top was no exception. Her trips to the French coast and the sailors’ nautical uniform caused Chanel to incorporate into her 1917 collection a piece with horizontal lines, the Breton top, one of the most famous pieces created by Chanel. The designer’s relationship with sailing culture also gave life to pieces such as flared boot pants and espadrilles, both worn by sailors and fishermen.

Coco Chanel  at her Villa La Pausa in Roquebrune, wearing a Breton top. Rex Features

How is Coco Chanel’s aesthetic defined?

Fashion experts refer to  Coco Chanel ‘s design, more than as a fashion trend, as a social phenomenon that changed the perception of women’s dress and femininity after the end of the First World War. Chanel’s style took women from silhouettes dominated by corsetry and rigidity, to a style where comfort and the reconquest of sensuality confronted the definitions of what was modest and proper. Unaware of the impact her designs would create,  Gabrielle  focused her fashion house on concentrating on Parisian style, and everything that the term means.

Chanel  sold the hedonism of Parisian life to the masses as part of their experience, through a design still influenced by the style of the elites and the aristocracy; adapted to a changing society in search of a sense of freedom as if it were a new rebirth. For Chanel, ‘fashion is not simply a matter of clothes. Fashion is in the air, it is born from the wind. One senses it. It is in heaven and on the way,’ the designer with her savoir-faire took the DNA of French culture and her own experiences to create a brand that encompasses elegance through simplicity, with pieces that transcend and use meaning of the dress to represent the person.

Coco Chanel en 1950Rex Features

What contributions did Coco Chanel make to fashion?

Coco Chanel ‘s contribution to fashion transcends the meaning of clothing, the designer gave women a new sense of confidence that had not yet been explored at the time. In a Europe that was coming off 4 years of war followed by a significant depression, where dress codes for women were dominated by the corset and structured silhouettes, Chanel gave women a way to free themselves from tradition and reveal themselves in against conventions.

The vision of the young woman raised in an orphanage penetrated the European elites, creating with her brand a form of democratization of style.  Chanel  dismissed the aesthetics associated with good taste to impose her own way of understanding it, enchanting both the aristocracy and the masses with her new concept. The symbols associated with wealth were part of Chanel’s tactic to build her empire, the designer contributed to the normalization of imitations of gold and pearls as a way for women to look elegant with more affordable jewelry, without compromising their style.

Coco Chanel  at her 1969 spring/summer show. Rex Features

Chanel  printed a part of its own history in its designs. Her loves were translated into bags, perfumes and suits; while her vacation on the French Riviera became the reason for her pieces with naval silhouettes and her motivation for the creation of the cruise collections. The designer took notes from the environments she frequented to create some of her most representative pieces. The world of horse riding, water sports, and the hunting season with British royalty were great inspirations for Chanel.

Her fame as a couturier and good social relations gave  Chanel  the opportunity to put her designs into new fields. Gabrielle frequented figures such as the Russian Sergei Diaghilev, patron and founder of the Ballet Russes, through whom she formed a close relationship with Igor Stravinsky. From this friendship arose Chanel’s collaboration with the composer to produce the famous production Le Sacre du Printemps, in addition to creating costumes for performances by the Ballet Russes.

Coco Chanel  en 1930.Rex Features

The relationship with the arts forms an important part of  Gabrielle Chanel ‘s legacy. In addition to her contribution to the foundations of Parisian haute couture, she was an ally of the MGM studios during the 1930s for the creation of their stars’ costumes for films, achieving dressing important Hollywood figures such as Gloria Swanson in her famous role in  Tonight or Never  (1931), Ina Claire and Greta Garbo. Chanel was not only  part of American cinema , the designer also designed costumes for films by renowned French directors such as Jean Renoir.

Coco Chanel  in her suite at the Ritz hotel in Paris, where she lived for more than 30 years. Rex Features

The fascinating story of Chanel ‘s life, her loves and her career in fashion, has been an attraction for the creation of films, books and investigations. Films like  Coco Before Chanel  (2008) take a look at the designer’s life before she built her fashion empire, while Coco  Chanel & Igor Stravinsky  (2009) tell the story of the relationship between Chanel and the Russian composer. Karl Lagerfeld himself directed a short film presented during the French brand’s 2013/2014 Métiers d’Art collection, titled  The Return  (2013), which reviews the reopening of Chanel in 1954 after  Gabrielle ‘s hiatus in Switzerland.  Once Upon A Time  (2013) is another short film directed by Lagerfeld that tells about the opening of the Chanel store in Deauville.

What is the story behind the iconic Chanel perfume?

When  Chanel  decided to commission her first perfume, she did so with the intention of redefining the concept of women in the 1920s. At the time, fragrances for women were a source of categorization, scents with flowery scents were used by society women, while strong fragrances with musk notes were associated with courtesans.  Gabrielle Chanel  commissioned French-Russian perfumer Ernest Beaux to create a perfume that smelled like a woman, not roses; so her first fragrance concentrated both scents to represent all of them, and not just one of the female spirits.

Beaux presented Chanel with 10 different samples, numbered from 1 to  5  and from 20 to 24, Coco chose the number 5. Since her youth  the number had had great symbolism for the designer , so she told Ernest that she would keep the number. fifth show because she presented her collections on the fifth day of May, which is the fifth month of the year, so she would let the show keep the number 5 because it would bring her good luck.

Actress  Marylin Monroe  was one of the personalities who helped popularize the perfume. Courtesy

The result was  Chanel no. 5 , the first fragrance made by a French couturier to bear her own name and with herself being the image of her advertising. To date, other designers like Poiret had also ventured into the world of perfumery, but the Frenchman decided instead to give the perfume the name of his daughter. Chanel’s perfume for the flapper of the 20s had notes of jasmine, roses, sandalwood and vanilla, harmonized with the newly created aldehydes that imitate the smell of freshness that Chanel was looking for, which had a close link with its past in laundries, and they allowed the woman to enjoy the fragrance for longer.

The story behind the bottle that contains the Chanel fragrance is a new story related to the designer’s experiences.  Gabrielle  wanted a bottle that would change the concept of elaborate figures, for that she was inspired by the rectangular lines of the bottles made by  Charvet , a French tailor, that her lover, Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, carried in his travel case. leather. The Chanel No. 5 bottle was compared to the design of whiskey decanters, in effect another element associated with the British that inspired the designer, who sought to reproduce the ‘exquisite, expensive and delicate’ look of her glass.

How did Coco Chanel choose the logo for her fashion brand?

It is presumed that Chanel’s famous  double C logo  was conceived by the designer around 1925 after a visit to the  Château de Crémat , in Nice, France, where she frequently vacationed. The castle is recognized for its vaulted arches decorated with stained glass, where in the middle of a series of geometric patterns in different colors, there are two C-shaped metal slats that intertwine with each other, an image that has been cited by the house of Chanel as one of the most likely sources of inspiration for its logo.

When did Coco Chanel die?

Coco Chanel  died at the  age of 87 on Sunday, January 10, 1971 , at the Ritz hotel in Paris, where the designer had resided for more than 30 years. His funeral was held at the Eglise de la Madeleine, it was a  commemorative event  inside the Catholic building attended by other designers such as  Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Balmain and Cristóbal Balenciaga , while the models who wore his designs for years occupied the front row. of the ceremony. Gabrielle’s coffin was covered with camellias, gardenias, orchids, white azaleas, and some red roses. Her grave is in the Bois-de-Vaux cemetery in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Coco Chanel ‘s funeral in Paris, 1971.  Rex Features

Who did Coco Chanel leave her fortune to?

After her death,  Coco Chanel  left most of her estate to her nephew, André Palasse, and her two daughters.

Gabrielle Chanel  was the designer who changed the concept of dress for the woman of her time, introducing her to a new vision with more freedom. With her iconic designs, she created one of the most important fashion houses today, leaving a legacy of sophisticated style and the meaning of good taste.

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Published: 2022-12-12 ǀ Updated: 2024-07-08

Coco Chanel Biography

Gabrielle Chanel (* August 19, 1883, in Saumur, Pays de la Loire as Gabrielle Chasnel; † January 10, 1971, in Paris) is considered a pioneer of a revolutionary women's fashion, who was to shape the fashion history of modern women like no other. Arguably creating the world's most famous fashion brand. Chanel's fashion trademarks include the "little black dress," collarless tweed jackets and suits, gold buttons, handbags with straps made of metallic chain links, long pearl necklaces, and gold jewelry. Chanel manifested Paris as the international center of fashion at an early age, and was considered an outstanding style icon of her time even at a young age.

Chanel is born in a poorhouse in Saumur on the Loire (Anjou) as the daughter of the peddler Henri-Albert Chasnel and the laundress Eugénie Jeanne Devolle.

After the death of her mother, Gabrielle — as she was officially called — moves to an orphanage at the age of 12, where she trains as a seamstress. Here she lives until she comes of age. In the following years, the young Chanel struggles to make ends meet as a clerk in a trousseau and baby goods store and as a seamstress.

Chanel meets Etienne Balsan, a member of the French upper class. She follows him to the Royallieu estate as his mistress and, in this sophisticated environment, creates clothes to match this lifestyle. It is here that she met the Brit Arthur Capel.

Chanel opens a hat studio in Paris. The simple, modern creations quickly made their way into the fashion magazines of the time via Parisian personalities.

She opens a hat atelier at 21, rue Cambon in Paris. Within five years, her innovative use of jersey to create a "poor girl" look attracts the attention of influential wealthy women seeking relief from the prevalent corseted styles.

Chanel opens a fashion boutique in the seaside resort of Deauville. The store bears the name Chanel's Fashion, the year 1913 is still considered the founding year of the Chanel company.

The fashion designer runs fashion salons in Paris, Deauville and Biarritz, which quickly achieve notoriety for a new functional fashion without ornamentation.

Chanel already employs 300 seamstresses, and American Vogue dubs her designs the "epitome of elegance."

The opening of a haute couture salon at 31, Rue Cambon. The location remains the center of her creative work until the end of her life.

The legendary perfume Chanel N°5 (House of Chanel) launches.

Chanel founds the initially independent perfume division Parfums Chanel in Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Chanel's world-famous customer base includes Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.

During the German occupation, Chanel had an affair with Nazi functionary Günther von Dincklage and worked as an agent for the German Reich. ( Handelsblatt )

After the war she is arrested as a collaborator, but due to her contacts, she is released and lives with von Dincklage in Lausanne ( FAZ )

She returns to the fashion industry with the tweed costume, which becomes a sales hit with international stars such as Grace Kelly and Romy Schneider. In addition to his ownership of the perfume division, her business partner Pierre Wertheimer is also given 100% of the shares in the fashion company to prevent Chanel from going it alone.

Coco creates the "Little Black Dress" that celebrates its greatest success with Audrey Hepburn in the rom-com "Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)". The design of the globally popular black sheath dress dates back to 1926.

Chanel established the Fondation CoGa, based in Liechtenstein, which would later become the sole heir to the designer's fortune.

After Chanel's death, the fashion house loses its luster until 1983, when Karl Lagerfeld joins as designer.

Alain and Gerard Wertheimer become the sole owners of Chanel.

Claudia Schiffer becomes a model for Lagerfeld's Chanel collections.

The nickname Coco probably comes from a time when Gabrielle performed as a singer at the Grand Café in the garrison town of Moulins, where she preferred to perform the songs Qui qu'a vu Coco? and Ko-Ko-Ri-Ko. Military personnel present called her Coco after a while. ( Telegraph )

From 1937, Chanel stayed in a 2-room suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where she also died in 1971. Her apartment above the studio at 31, rue Cambon had no bedroom.

• Wikipedia Little black dress
• Wikipedia Coco Chanel
• Vogue (German)
• Chanel.com (German)
• Coco Chanel
• Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883–1971) and the House of Chanel (Costumes in The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Illustrated Books

• Coco Chanel: The Illustrated World of a Fashion Icon (2015) [Megan Hess]
• Vogue on Coco Chanel (2017) [Bronwyn Cosgrave]
• Coco Chanel Special Edition: The Illustrated World of a Fashion Icon (2021) [Megan Hess]
• Chanel: Collections and Creations (2007) [Danièle Bott]
• Coco Chanel: Style Icon: A Celebration of the Timeless Style of Coco Chanel (2022) [Maggie Davis]

Biographies

• Coco Chanel, New Edition: The Legend and the Life (2023) [Justine Picardie]
• Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (2015) [Rhonda K. Garelick]
• Chanel and Her World (2005) [Edmonde Charles-Roux]
• Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War (2012) [Hal Vaughan]
• Coco Chanel: A Biography (Bloomsbury Lives of Women) (Paperback) [Axel Madsen]
• Coco Chanel: Pearls, Perfume, and the Little Black Dress (2018) [Susan Goldman Rubin]
• I Am Coco: The Life of Coco Chanel (2022) [Isabel Pin]
• Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life (2012) [Lisa Chaney]
• Library of Luminaries: Coco Chanel: An Illustrated Biography (2016) [Zena Alkayat]
• The New Look (2024) [Biography, Drama, History] {Todd A. Kessler}
• the controversial history of chanel 👜🖤💸 (2023) {ModernGurlz}
• Discovering The Life Behind The Brand of Coco ChanelAbsolute Documentaries (2023) {Absolute Documentaries}
• Coco Chanel - Fashion Icon & Collaborator Documentary (2023) {The People Profiles}
• Coco before Chanel (2009) [Biography, Drama] {Anne Fontaine}

Coco Chanel’s Secret Life as a Nazi Agent

The fashion designer aided in undercover missions for Abwehr during World War II.

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In recent years, however, the availability of declassified French government documents has revealed her covert work for Nazi military intelligence during World War II.

Chanel grew up in poverty but rose through the ranks of society by the start of WWII

Born into poverty in 1883 and sent off to a convent-orphanage at age 12, Chanel overcame her rough beginnings to debut her visionary women's wear by World War I.

Her meteoric rise thrust her into the stratosphere of Europe's most powerful and influential figures. Along with hobnobbing with artistic luminaries like Pablo Picasso and Serge Diaghilev, she became friends with Winston Churchill and mistress of Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster.

Chanel's prominent standing and connections helped her regain control over her life at a crucial time, as Adolf Hitler ’s forces began closing in on Germany’s neighbors in the late 1930s.

Chanel dated a German military officer

After the Nazis took over Paris in 1940, Chanel cozied up to Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, an officer in Abwehr, the German military intelligence. Their romance enabled Chanel to move into comfortable living quarters at Paris' Hôtel Ritz, then doubling as a German headquarters, and kept her firmly entrenched in high society, which also had been infiltrated by German officers.

Chanel’s relations with Dincklage also allowed her to deal with important personal matters. Most pressing was her need to see to the release of her nephew André Palasse, who was imprisoned in a German stalag in 1940.

Then there were her business interests: Since 1924, when the Jewish Wertheimer family had backed the launch of her perfume line in exchange for most of the profits, the fashion maven had sought to renegotiate things on more favorable terms. Now, with “Aryanization” laws forcing Jews to give up their businesses, Chanel saw the opportunity to reclaim a lucrative branch of her empire.

Chanel became Abwehr Agent F-7124 in 1941

Dincklage introduced his lover to another prominent Abwehr agent, Baron Louis de Vaufreland, who allegedly promised to help Chanel free her nephew in exchange for her service to Berlin. Sometime in 1941, Chanel was registered as Agent F-7124, with the code name of “Westminster,” after her former flame.

Tasked with obtaining “political information” from colleagues in Madrid, Chanel traveled to the Spanish city for a few months in mid-1941 with Vaufreland, under the guise of business dealings. According to Hal Vaughn’s book Sleeping with the Enemy , there is a record of her dinner with British diplomat Brian Wallace, during which she casually discussed life in occupied Paris and the animosity the French and Germans held toward each other.

It’s unclear whether Chanel’s interactions in Madrid moved the needle in any way, but they were apparently enough to impress Abwehr supervisors and earn the release of Palasse.

However, her desire to reclaim her perfume profits reached a dead end, as she learned that the Wertheimers had transferred control of the company to a non-Jewish Frenchman named Félix Amiot before fleeing to the United States.

She was outed as a German spy in 1944

Sometime between late 1943 and early 1944, with the tide turning against Germany, Chanel was tapped for another mission by General Walter Schellenberg of the SS. Named Operation Modellhut, German for “model hat,” she was to use her personal connection to Churchill, now England’s prime minister, to relay word that many SS senior officers were seeking an end to the bloodshed.

Chanel arranged for the release of Vera Lombardi, a mutual friend of hers and Churchill's, from an Italian prison. They traveled to Madrid with Dincklage, where Lombardi was instructed to hand over Chanel's letter to Churchill at the British Embassy.

However, this plan was blown up when Lombardi denounced Chanel and her associates as German spies. Lombardi was taken back into custody, though Chanel managed to safely return to Paris.

Chanel escaped punishment and erased evidence of her actions that tied her to Abwehr

In August 1944, a few months after the Madrid fiasco, French forces reclaimed Paris from the Germans. With her reputation as a “horizontal collaborator,” Chanel was taken in for questioning before the Free French Purge Committee, though she was released in short order and promptly fled to Switzerland.

After the war’s conclusion, Chanel appeared in a French court to account for sworn testimony from arrested German officers that tied her to Abwehr. She managed to wriggle her way out of trouble, confirming that Vaufreland had promised to get her nephew out of prison but otherwise denying the extent of their interactions.

According to Sleeping with the Enemy , Chanel also took care to erase evidence of her actions, where possible. Upon learning that an ailing Schellenberg was planning to publish his memoir, Chanel paid his medical bills and ensured his family was on sound financial footing; the subsequent memoir had no mention of her involvement as an agent.

Ultimately, Chanel never endured any ramifications for her wartime dealings with the Nazis. She made a celebrated return to the fashion world in 1954, aided by the very same Wertheimer family she had fought for so many years, and lived out her years as a celebrity, before her death at the Hôtel Ritz in 1971.

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Which Coco Chanel Biography Is Best?

June 2, 2023

thedutchladydesigns

Are you a fashion enthusiast who wants to learn more about Coco Chanel, one of the most iconic designers in history? If so, you might be wondering which Coco Chanel biography is the best to read.

With so many options available, it can be overwhelming to decide which one to choose. In this article, we’ll explore some of the best biographies about Coco Chanel and help you find the perfect book for your needs.

The Queen of Fashion

One of the most popular biographies on Coco Chanel is “The Queen of Fashion” by Caroline Weber. This book offers a comprehensive look at Chanel’s life and career, from her humble beginnings in a French orphanage to her rise as one of the most influential designers in history. Weber’s writing is engaging and informative, making this book an excellent choice for both casual readers and serious fashion scholars.

Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life

Another well-regarded biography is “Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life” by Justine Picardie. This book takes a more personal approach than “The Queen of Fashion,” delving into Chanel’s relationships with various men throughout her life. Picardie also includes rare photographs and illustrations that help bring Chanel’s story to life.

Chanel: An Intimate Life

For readers interested in a more scandalous take on Coco Chanel’s life, “Chanel: An Intimate Life” by Lisa Chaney might be the perfect choice. This biography delves into some of the darker aspects of Chanel’s past, including her rumored affairs with Nazi officers during World War II. While some readers might find this approach distasteful, others will appreciate Chaney’s willingness to tackle difficult subjects.

Coco Chanel: The Illustrated World of a Fashion Icon

If you’re looking for a visually stunning biography that showcases Chanel’s designs, “Coco Chanel: The Illustrated World of a Fashion Icon” by Megan Hess is an excellent choice. This book features gorgeous illustrations of Chanel’s iconic designs, as well as information about the designer’s life and career. While it might not offer as much depth as some of the other biographies on this list, it’s a perfect coffee table book for fashion lovers.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, which Coco Chanel biography you choose will depend on your personal preferences. If you want a comprehensive look at her life and career, “The Queen of Fashion” is an excellent choice.

For a more intimate portrait, try “Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life.” “Chanel: An Intimate Life” is best for readers interested in scandalous details about Chanel’s past. And if you’re looking for something with stunning visuals, “Coco Chanel: The Illustrated World of a Fashion Icon” won’t disappoint.

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