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Women’s
wardrobes would be oh-so-cumbersome, not to mention
boring, without the contributions of the great Parisian
designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel.
Chanel
gave us the little black dress, gaudy layers of pearls,
and the fitted tweed suit. Most important, she
popularized predecessor Paul Poiret’s early-1900s
frocks that featured straighter silhouettes and shorter
hemlines. These boyish pieces ultimately helped women do
away with the corset.
That’s
common fashionista knowledge.
But
there’s much more that hasn’t been common knowledge
about the bobbed, early-20th-century businesswoman, and
it should make for a book chock-full of scandals and
affairs. Hence, British author Lisa Chaney’s
400-plus-page tome, “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life.”
In the
book, Chaney pieces together lost letters and records,
which the designer spent most of her life trying to
hide, that retell her maudlin story and give substance
to a lot of rumors about Chanel. But, while the story is
juicy chick lit, the book is not. What this fact-heavy
prose lacks is spice.
It takes
a while, but we get Chaney’s point: Chanel was a style
innovator, but it wasn’t a love of clothing that made
this woman tick. It was fear. Fear that she’d lose
control or, worse, the independence she so fiercely
fought for.
Chanel
was born in 1883, the illegitimate child of an
unemployed French playboy and a severely depressed
mother, and lost her parents when she was 12. She grew
up in an orphanage run by nuns. You can imagine how
restricted her fashion choices were.
Chanel’s
life wasn’t easy, and at times, it was downright
degrading. She spent her young adult life as a
courtesan, an upscale prostitute. She entered high
society as one of two mistresses of her first financial
backer, socialite and horseman Etienne Balsan, whom she
eventually left for an even richer Englishman, Arthur
“Boy” Capel, after cheating on Balsan with Capel.
These
stories are more scandalous than those on “Real
Housewives.”
The
forbidden liaisons helped Chanel establish herself early
on as a high-society rule-breaker. Her transition from
milliner — her first business was a hat shop — to
designer helped her express revolutionary thoughts when
it came to women.
Chanel
was among the first upper-class women to ride horses for
recreation and to play sports like polo, so her menswear-inspired
clothing — featuring pockets and baggy fits — was as
much a necessity as a fashion statement.
Chaney
opens the book with Chanel walking through the Tuileries
with Capel. She informs Capel, who is bankrolling her
business, that she doesn’t need his help anymore. His
response: “I thought I was giving you a plaything.
What I gave you was your freedom.”
Soon
after, Capel would leave her.
That was
just one of Chanel’s numerous affairs followed by a
debilitating broken heart. Men would cheat on their
wives with her, then leave both her and the wife to
marry somebody else. Subsequent dalliances included
affairs with composer Igor Stravinsky, artist Pablo
Picasso, and a German soldier during the Nazi occupation
of France. Chaney raises the possibility of lesbian
affairs, too.
Even with
her astuteness, Chanel made some bad business decisions
and was swindled out of the bulk of her profit from her
iconic scent, Chanel No. 5. Despite her grand staircases
and travels around the world with the most revered
artists, she never managed to find happiness.
By the
book’s end, Chanel has become a lonely and bitter
woman who spends much of her time bashing fashion,
especially the miniskirt. She said she found the mini
vulgar and inappropriate, seemingly forgetting how she
herself had popularized a shorter hemline in the early
20th century that freed women from Victorian prudery.
Through
two World Wars, Chanel survived it all. That’s
because, as Chaney puts it so well, Chanel owned the
zeitgeist.
“The
reason she is so often credited with initiating
something, such as chopping off her hair or introducing
short skirts, is because she had become the quintessence
of high fashion,” Chaney writes. “She knew just when
to make the change, and what she did was noticed and
emulated.”
It’s
unfortunate that Chanel’s fashion genius came at such
a daunting price. The designer, who died in 1971, at 88,
remains even now a dominating force in women’s
fashion. But her personal life was far from triumphant.
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