Chanel, gabrielle
Chanel, gabrielleGabrielle Chanel, orphaned at an early age, was raised by nuns. Gabrielle wanted to be a singer. She debuted in a concert cafe. Each of the two songs Gabrielle sang contained the word Coco. The name, which was given to her by the audience, stuck for more than eighty years. Her singing career, however, did not. Coco's voice was limited and work did not come easily. After her short attempt at a singing career, Coco Chanel quit performing to begin work as a hat maker.
Coco Chanel went from designing hats to designing daring new fashions for the women of the 1920's. Her rebellious styles liberated women from the past and became the symbol of modernity.
In 1921, Chanel introduced her first fragrance, Chanel No. 5. She continued to lead the fashion world until her death in 1971.
Coco Chanel wasn't just ahead of her time. She was ahead of herself. If one looks at the work of contemporary fashion designers as different from one another as Tom Ford, Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada, Jil Sander and Donatella Versace, one sees that many of their strategies echo what Chanel once did. The way, 75 years ago, she mixed up the vocabulary of male and female clothes and created fashion that offered the wearer a feeling of hidden luxury rather than ostentation are just two examples of how her taste and sense of style overlap with today's fashion.
Chanel would not have defined herself as a feminist--in fact, she consistently spoke of femininity rather than of feminism--yet her work is unquestionably part of the liberation of women. She threw out a life jacket, as it were, to women not once but twice, during two distinct periods decades apart: the 1920s and the '50s. She not only appropriated styles, fabrics and articles of clothing that were worn by men but also, beginning with how she dressed herself, appropriated sports clothes as part of the language of fashion. One can see how her style evolved out of necessity and defiance. She couldn't afford the fashionable clothes of the period--so she rejected them and made her own, using, say, the sports jackets and ties that were everyday male attire around the racetrack, where she was climbing her first social ladders.
It's not by accident that she became associated with the modern movement that included Diaghilev, Picasso, Stravinsky and Cocteau. Like these artistic protagonists, she was determined to break the old formulas and invent a way of expressing herself. Cocteau once said of her that "she has, by a kind of miracle, worked in fashion according to rules that would seem to have value only for painters, musicians, poets."
By the late '60s, Chanel had become part of what she once rebelled against and hated--the Establishment. But if one looks at documentary footage of her from that period, one can still feel the spit and vinegar of the fiery peasant woman who began her fashion revolution against society by...
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