Historical Figure
Coco Chanel
d. 1971
French fashion designer (1883–1971)
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Biography
Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel was a French fashion designer and businesswoman. The founder and namesake of the Chanel brand, she was credited in the post–World War I era with popularising a sporty, casual chic as the feminine standard of style. She is the only fashion designer listed on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. A prolific fashion creator, Chanel extended her influence beyond couture clothing into jewellery, handbags, and fragrance. Her signature scent, Chanel No. 5, has become an iconic product, and Chanel herself designed her famed interlocked-CC monogram, which has been in use since the 1920s.
In Their Own Words (5)
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.
As quoted in Chanel : A Woman of Her Own (1991) by Axel Madsen, p. 124 , 1991
Fashion fades, only style remains the same.
As quoted in Architectural Digest (September 1994), p. 30 , 1994
I was a rebellious child, a rebellious lover, a rebellious couturière — a real devil.
As quoted in Paris, Paris : Journey Into the City of Light (2005) by David Downie, p. 93 , 2005
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone.
As quoted in Contemporary Quotations (1954) by James Beasley Simpson , 1954
He will soon be claiming that the Resistance has liberated the world.
On Charles De Gaulle from the 1944 interview with, the then MI6 agent, Malcolm Muggeridge. Read the full interview here. , 1944
Timeline
The story of Coco Chanel, told in moments.
Born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in a poorhouse hospital in Saumur, France. Her birth certificate misspells her name as "Chasnel." Her father peddles clothes from a cart. Her mother does laundry. Six children in a one-room lodging.
Her mother dies of tuberculosis at 32. Gabrielle is 11. Her father drops the three girls at an orphanage run by nuns in Aubazine and disappears. She never sees him again. The nuns teach her to sew.
Opens her first shop in Paris, selling hats. Funded by Etienne Balsan, a wealthy cavalry officer and lover. She uses his apartment. His horses. His connections. Within three years she opens boutiques in Deauville and Biarritz, selling sportswear to aristocratic women.
Launches Chanel No. 5. She asks perfumer Ernest Beaux for a scent that smells like a woman, not a flower. The name is the sample number she picks. Marilyn Monroe later says it's all she wears to bed. It becomes the best-selling perfume in history.
Vogue publishes her little black dress and calls it "Chanel's Ford." Like the car: simple, accessible, universal. She's taken women out of corsets, shortened hemlines, borrowed from menswear, and made jersey fabric fashionable. She's redefined how women dress.
The war ends. Chanel has spent the occupation in the Ritz with a German intelligence officer, Baron von Dincklage. Declassified documents confirm she collaborated with the Sicherheitsdienst. She's interrogated but not charged. Churchill intervenes on her behalf. She flees to Switzerland for nine years.
Dies in her suite at the Ritz, Paris. She is 87. Still working. Her last collection showed the week before. The interlocked-CC monogram she designed in the 1920s is on handbags in every city on earth.
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