Coco Chanel

French fashion designer

• Born: August 19, 1883
• Birthplace: Saumur, France
• Died: January 10, 1971
• Place of death: Paris, France

Chanel was the first to dress women in a manner that reflected their increasing liberated status, which began in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and she continued to do so for nearly six decades, reigning as queen of fashion in Paris. Her pioneering genius elevated her above the level of merely a great designer, allowing her to support independently her creative brilliance with a fashion empire that encompassed design, textiles, jewelry, and perfume.

Early Life

Little is known for certain, but much, often contradictory, has been written about the early years of Coco Chanel (koh-koh shah-nehl). It is generally agreed that she was born into poverty and that she tried all of her life, with lies and silence, to keep her early life from being known. Chanel herself is probably the least trustworthy source for accurate and truthful information on her early existence. With Chanel, as with many artists who attempt to hide a past of which they are ashamed, the truth comes out most clearly in her creations. The almost peasant simplicity of her designs is complimented by a style that can be seen to be influenced by the convent, the military, and equestrian sportsmanship.

She was born into a poor family whose ancestors had come from the uncompromising granite highlands of France’s Massif Central. Driven from their homeland by agricultural disasters in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Chanel clan became open-air market salesmen and women throughout central France, selling whatever they could, wherever and whenever conditions seemed favorable. Gabrielle was, therefore, the product of the union between an itinerant salesman and a young woman he had seduced and only bothered to marry when Gabrielle and her older sister were joined by a younger sister. Two more children, both boys, were to follow before their devoted and long-suffering mother died of tuberculosis. Gabrielle was probably twelve. At some point she was given over to the care of nuns in a convent, and this is where she received her only formal education. By the time she was about twenty, she went to live with an aunt who had married slightly above her station and had settled in the town of Moulins in the center of France.

Café society was at its peak, and France’s most popular stars were the singers and entertainers of the “café concert.” Gabrielle determined to join their ranks. She was a lamentable singer, but her enthusiasm and style won for her a small following as she traveled the circuit in and around Moulins. One of the songs in her limited repertoire included the rooster’s cry “koko-ri-ko,” and she was called on to sing this number by cries of “Coco! Coco!” which would become her nickname.

Coco’s most ardent admirer was a wealthy young bourgeois named Etienne Balsan, who had great equestrian ambitions and who had purchased an estate in Compiegne to the north of Paris, where he raised race horses. It was there that he brought Chanel and there that she remained for nearly a decade as she added the stigma of being a “kept woman” to that of her humble origins. She slowly abandoned hope of stardom and resigned herself to live on the fringes of a society whose moral hypocrisy deemed her unacceptable.

Arthur “Boy” Capel was a dashing Englishman who had a past as dubious as Chanel but who had the advantage of being a man. He had one foot in Balsan’s equestrian society, where he met Chanel, and another in the Parisian society that cultivated the artistic revolution of men such as Sergei Diaghilev, Jean Cocteau, and Igor Stravinsky. Capel had beauty, wit, and enterprising spirit to match Chanel, and the two fell in love. Capel set about nurturing his new mistress’s latent talents. He introduced her to friends in Paris, where the women of his set admired and borrowed the hats that Chanel had always made for herself. The hats were simple but alluring, made from coarse materials that many milliners would consider rejects, and they possessed the great advantage of being free from the oppressive weight of extravagant adornment. Capel helped Chanel establish a business, and her hats proved so popular that, when fashionable society moved to Deauville for the summer holiday of 1913, she set up shop there. Her white awning set off, in black capital letters, her name, Chanel, advertising for the first time a business that was to become an industry that would outlive its founder.

Life’s Work

The next year, 1914, saw the political chain reaction that plunged Europe into World War I. Deauville became deserted as everyone returned to Paris to prepare for the conflict. His instinct told Capel to encourage Chanel to remain in Deauville. She trusted him, and her tremendous success can be partially seen as the result of his advice. As the German juggernaut advanced with alarming speed on Paris, thousands of people from all walks of life, both military and civilian, fled westward. Deauville was inundated with potential clients who, in the confusion of their world turned upside-down, were more willing to be seduced by the unconventional simplicity of Chanel’s designs. The men were at war, leaving women free to choose hats they might move about in with greater comfort.

With her milliner’s business an unqualified success, Chanel went next, on Capel’s advice, to another great French beach resort, Biarritz, so strangely populated in the off-season. It was there that she established her first full maison de couture, adding women’s clothing to her hat collection. After securing a thriving business there, Chanel advanced closer to the enemy line, taking Paris by storm in the fall of 1915.

Chanel purchased from a textile manufacturer named Rodier a loose, machine-knit jersey wool that was a drab, utilitarian shade of beige. Previously unable to market it as material for men’s undergarments, Rodier reluctantly supplied it to Chanel, who did with it the unimaginable: She made women’s dresses of uncompromising grace and simplicity. The material was too loose to hold restrictive waist and bust lines, and Chanel took advantage of this recalcitrant quality to serve her innovative vision. She abandoned the traditional waistline, dropping it lower to the hips as she radically raised the hem of the skirt to somewhere just above the ankles. Thus she helped to pioneer a silhouette that announced the advent of the jazz age. So great was her success that she was able to pay back everything that Capel had invested to start her business. By 1916 she was independent, and she was only thirty-three years old.

Capel had himself prospered from the same foresight that had led him to encourage Chanel to remain in Deauville. Guided by this instinct, he had cultivated radicals such as Georges Clemenceau, sticking with them as they rose from oblivion to the forefront of French politics and business during the course of the war. These contacts helped Englishman Capel make his fortune by supplying France with coal during the conflict. With his newfound prestige, he began to think of an advantageous marriage, and Chanel’s hopes of marrying him were destroyed as he chose a more “suitable” woman of noble birth. He was killed shortly thereafter in an auto accident, leaving Chanel emotionally shattered. Although there were to be a great many affairs with illustrious men in the future, Chanel was convinced, amid her first successes in business, that she had failed as a woman. On the threshold of international success, the provincial rigidity of her peasant upbringing was to close Chanel’s heart, leaving room for satisfaction only through her work and driving her to tremendous achievement during the years that separated the world wars.

Misia Sert, the thrice-married wife of artist José-Maria Sert, was a close friend of and muse to the group of avant-garde artists of the day that included Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, Colette, and Sergei Diaghilev. During the time of her first triumphs and greatest grief, Chanel was taken under Misia’s wing, introduced to this gilded collection of geniuses, and eventually considered their peer. These associations brought her into contact with a great many influential people, who helped her with her expanding empire. Beyond this, the excitement generated by the activities, both public and private, of these personages lent to Chanel’s business a cachet that was worth more publicity than any fortune could buy.

The essence of Chanel’s appeal was distilled, quite literally, in her first perfume, No. 5, which was introduced in 1922. Prior to No. 5, perfumes had each had an identifiable floral scent and were bottled in elaborate crystal flacons, which were purchased as much for their quality as sculptures as for the perfumes they contained. Chanel did not create, but commissioned and chose, a scent that allowed the perfume industry its first success with abstract, high-quality perfumes that were not restricted to any one flower or floral group. No. 5 is a blend of more than fifty natural and synthetic ingredients whose mystery is sealed by its equally enigmatic name. Not the fifth, but the first Chanel perfume, the logic or illogic behind its name was known only to Chanel. It was packaged, unlike any perfume before it, in a blunt, cubelike bottle with a rectangular stopper. Its white label bore, in simple black lettering, its name, and below it the name of its “creator,” Chanel, in a manner that was reminiscent of the awning outside Chanel’s first boutique in Deauville. Her growing legend fed its mystique, which in turn fed her own. No. 5 became the financial backbone of her entire empire. It revolutionized the perfume industry, making all other perfumes obsolete, and has been popular since the day it was introduced.

When Chanel published a drawing of a seemingly simple black dress in an issue of Vogue in 1926, she also officially morphed this article of clothing into a must-have, versatile staple for all women's closets. Her portrayal of the "little black dress" has sustained into the twenty-first century. Simultaneously neutral and elegant, the dress has undergone various silhouette changes over the years but has, as predicted at the time, remained an essential piece of any woman's wardrobe due to its affordability and chic adaptability for all occassions.

Chanel’s industry grew and prospered uninterrupted until 1936. The spring of that year saw the general strikes that crippled French industries and brought unions to France. Chanel, by that time, was mistress of a fashion empire that employed nearly four thousand workers, mostly women. She thought her own industry, with its decidedly feminine accent, exempt from the strike, but was bitterly undeceived when her workers not only struck but also blocked her from entering her Paris salon. She negotiated with and met the workers’ demands in time for the fall collection but was left embittered by what she considered her employees’ betrayal. She continued for three more years, but in late 1939 she took advantage of the outbreak of World War II to fire all of her workers and shut down her industry. Chanel closed everything but her Paris boutique, severed relations with what was left of the family of which she was still ashamed, claimed poverty (she was in fact tremendously wealthy), and led a shadowy existence during the German Occupation.

She continued to live in the Ritz in Paris, despite the fact that the Nazis had requisitioned it. She took a lover who was in German intelligence, and through him either instigated or became involved in a plot to meet with Winston Churchill and sue for peace at a price considerably less than the unconditional surrender the great English leader had just declared would be the only way to end the war. Nothing came of the plot, but rumors of Chanel’s Nazi collaboration led to her immediate arrest on the liberation of Paris. She was released after twenty-four hours, it is thought on Churchill’s personal orders, and was thus spared the great humiliation of having her head shaved and being paraded naked down the streets of Paris, as were many unfortunate women who had had German connections. Several years later, the former head of Nazi intelligence was paid a large sum of money to keep Chanel out of his memoirs. Worse than these ill-advised personal and political decisions was Chanel’s cold-blooded attempt to wrest complete control of Chanel Perfumes from its co-owner and cofounder Pierre Wertheimer, who was Jewish and had fled to the United States. Their relationship had long been difficult and litigious because Chanel was unhappy that she was not in complete control of her enterprises. She tried to take advantage of her partner’s reduced status, but his interests were fiercely protected in his absence, and she did not succeed. After the war, not wishing to sully the name on the bottles of perfume that he was selling, Wertheimer forgave her and they buried their differences, becoming friends in time for him to help her with her big comeback.

After the war and the liberation, a new breed of fashion designer (mostly men), led by Christian Dior, began to leave its mark on women’s fashions. A new look, which found its inspiration in the pre-Chanel era, owed its popularity to a nostalgic desire to return to earlier days, before modernity had brought about horrific world conflict and the atomic age. Skirts were becoming longer, the material was heavier, and the styles were once again trying to squeeze and mold women’s figures into exaggerated forms of themselves.

Chanel bided her time, correctly assessing the current trends as more fad than fashion. On February 5, 1954, after an absence of fifteen years, at the age of seventy, and with the press poised to attack, she launched “le comeback.” It was a short-term failure and a long-term success, ensuring her legend and creating a “look” that is immediately identifiable as hers, even to those who have no especial interest in the history of fashion. What the press was so quick to savage, but which possessed qualities of grace and comfort sensed more than seen by a steadily growing, more youthful market, was the Chanel suit. A simple, collarless cardigan jacket worn over a blouse with a matching skirt that is neither tight nor loose, this highly copied design has never gone out of fashion. Buyers in the United States, trusting the label, had purchased it sight unseen, and, just when its failure seemed assured, a generation of American women that wartime had employed began to buy the suit for its businesslike qualities, its comfort, and its feminine chic. In 1955 she also released the popular and still coveted quilted handbag with the braided chain strap, known as 2.55 after its release date and designed as a more practical yet sophisticated bag for women. Slower to catch on in Europe, Chanel’s new designs, along with the memory of her interwar triumphs, not only reinstated “La Grande Mademoiselle” as leader of feminine fashion but also earned for her a place far above and beyond any yet achieved by her predecessors or colleagues. Both iconic celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, as well as more modern famous women, such as Kate Moss and Keira Knightley, have endorsed and donned Chanel products.

This vaunted position often left the peasant girl from Moulins who had never married alone and lonely. As monstrous as she could be charming, Chanel had never been easy to approach, and, until the day before she died at eighty-seven, she buried her solitude in her work. She died while taking a nap in her apartment in the Ritz on Sunday, January 10, 1971.

Significance

Chanel never sketched her designs. She created by pinning, sewing, and cutting her garments on live models. Her scissors were the most important tools of her trade, because what she did best was minimize. For her, luxury and elegance were best expressed with understatement and simplicity. That was half of her genius. The other half was the business acumen she used to sell her revolution. A descendant of salespersons, she knew how to charm and seduce, and she knew when to bully and scold. Most of all she knew herself. She knew what she could do best and how to capitalize on it. Hand-in-hand with selling her products, Chanel sold herself, lending her own unique charm to everything that came out of her workrooms and salons. She was suspected of designing everything with only herself in mind, no matter how illustrious or beautiful her client may have been. If that is so, she made it not only flattering but also, in her heyday, imperative to dress in Chanel. She replaced the individual monogram with the designer label, creating a style that could be worn by all women. She took what was simple and common, distilled the beauty she found there, and, with the guarantee of her own good name, sold it to a century of women whose changing needs it so well served. The fashion house of Chanel, helmed by chief designer Karl Lagerfeld since 1983, has maintained the powerful influence of the brand developed by Chanel.

Bibliography

Baxter-Wright, Emma. The Little Book of Coco Chanel. London: Carlton, 2012. Print.

Berman, Phyllis, and Zina Sawaya. “The Billionaires Behind Chanel.” Forbes 143 (1989): 104. Print.

Charles-Roux, Edmonde. Chanel: Her Life, Her World, and the Woman Behind the Legend She Herself Created. Rev. ed. New York: Vendome, 2005. Print.

Fucini, Joseph J., and Suzy Fucini. “Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel.” In Entrepreneurs: The Men and Women Behind Famous Brand Names and How They Made It. Boston: Hall, 1985. Print.

Galante, Pierre. Mademoiselle Chanel. Chicago: Regnery, 1973. Print.

Garelick, Rhonda K. Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History. New York: Random, 2014. Print.

Koda, Harold, et al. Chanel. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005. Print.