Coco Chanel: The Importance of Being Coco

From humble birth to the heights of Parisian society, Coco Chanel's life was a wild ride. But it was much more than one big party. The timeless style she created continues to influence fashion and the way women dress even today.

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To anyone who knows even the barest outline of couture legend Coco Chanel's biography, it feels like poetic justice that Nicole Kidman and Baz Luhrmann should be doing the new Chanel No. 5 ad campaign. Kidman and her Moulin Rouge director so clearly reveled in the flavorful, over-the-top decadence of the Moulin Rouge era--the period Coco Chanel was born into (albeit on the lowest rung of the social ladder) and would later transform. These two should certainly be able to appreciate the near operatic intensity of Chanel's life story. The movie Moulin Rouge is tame by comparison.

Young fashion aficionados know Chanel primarily as a luxury brand they associate with elegant tweed suits, quilted bags, classic fragrances and spare, no-tricks dresses that, year after year, make actresses on the red carpet seem to glow in their own limelight. For those who know something of the real woman behind the name, there is still mystique enveloping the vague image of a slim, dark-eyed woman with ropes of pearls, delicate chains and maybe a small hat. The full Coco Chanel story beats all fashion designers' stories--it is Cinderella cum Sleeping Beauty cum Horatio Hornblower. It is a movie that cannot be made because it would be 10 hours long (not that Hollywood hasn't tried: the 1981 travesty Chanel Solitaire was a cliché-ridden, conventional swatch of a highly unconventional life).

Chanel revolutionized women's fashion beginning early in the 20th century. She introduced women's sportswear made of jersey with shorter straight skirts, cardigans and open-neck blouses. She gave couture dresses a spare, modern elegance and distilled chic that keeps them timeless even today. She pioneered costume jewelry of great beauty. She created the eternally popular little black dress. She introduced Chanel No. 22 and the classic No. 5 fragrances in 1923, and they have never gone off the market. She invented suits with short jackets, distinctive trim and buttons that have never aged.

More than anyone else, she is the creator of both the casual and glamorous women's fashion we know today. Designer Cristóbal Balenciaga was not engaging in hyperbole when he famously said, "Chanel is an everlasting bomb that not one of us can defuse."

And here is the adage Chanel herself was famous for: "There is a time for work and a time for love. That leaves no other time." For her it was almost true. Her loves and her work were inextricably intertwined and her conquests were so fortuitous that many of the design coups that made her successful derived directly from her romantic affairs. She had a particular talent for making art out of life and lived with an awareness of that fact. "If I [had an active social life], it was not because I needed to set the fashion; I set fashions precisely because I went out, because I was the first woman to live fully the life of her times," she said somewhat defensively later in life.

Gabrielle Chanel was born poor in Saumur, France, on August 19, 1883, of a long-suffering mother (tuberculosis, six children, a philandering husband) and a traveling peddler father who disappeared permanently after the death of his wife when Coco was 12.

For her first 25 years, Chanel's life was a study in self-education of a peculiar, shaping kind. She was taught little. She learned a lot. At the Catholic orphanage where she was placed upon her mother's death and stayed until 18, Chanel was taught the basics of sewing. She was then a charity case in Notre Dame pensionnat, a finishing school in Moulins, a garrison town. Out in the world, she found a job in a boutique where the well-to-do, often aristocratic clientele--wives, fiancées and mothers of officers stationed in Moulins--appreciated not just her sewing skills but her taste.

What she learned was that the things she made (including her own wardrobe) appealed to wealthy and sophisticated women, and the women who noticed her wanted to emulate her fresh look. She liked to stand out in a crowd by wearing clothes that were different--simpler, more streamlined. She didn't realize yet that she was her own laboratory, but she intuited that in matters of style, she was a step ahead of others. She had been taught by her situation and surroundings that she was poor and that it was better to be rich. What she learned was that it was up to her to climb out of poverty.

As a young woman, Chanel was attractive but not beautiful. She was also opinionated and sharp-tongued but very entertaining, and with these assets she became the mistress of a wealthy bon vivant named Etienne Balsan, who brought her to his luxurious residence where he also kept the notorious courtesan Emilienne d'Alencon. Chanel meticulously studied the other woman, "the odalisque," and proceeded to outlast her, staying with Balsan for five years. At his great stables, she learned to ride astride, borrowing her lover's riding clothes. She went to the races with him and his aristocratic friends and absorbed all the details of social life around her. She learned that leisure eventually becomes boring. When she got an itch to make hats, she found that other women in her circle--which did not include wives, but did include young actresses like Marthe Davelli and Gabrielle Dorziat (who would later become her clients)--all admired them. They were fashioned with one feather instead of the huge concoctions of bows, flowers, veils and birds' nests, and they were chic in a new, young, modern way. Balsan was amused at his mistress' minor creative accomplishment, but shrugged his shoulders: "How can you compete with established names in fashion?"

At 25, Chanel met an acquaintance of Balsan's who became the love of her life and the beginning of her future. Arthur "Boy" Capel was a handsome Englishman from a coal mine-owning family, an accomplished polo player and a man of culture, vision and acute business sense. He both loved and understood Chanel, and he encouraged her. She left Balsan amicably and went with Capel to Paris, where, using Balsan's apartment (this is how amicable the parting was) and Capel's financing, she opened a millinery shop, built her clientele and began getting her designs featured in magazines. The best "product placement" happened when her friend Gabrielle Dorziat wore two of her hats on stage and was photographed wearing one for the cover of Journal des Modes. Schooled in basic business by her commercially savvy lover, Chanel moved to a new store on Rue Cambon and prospered. Success being a great aphrodisiac, Chanel and Capel lived in giddy bliss, dining at Maxim's and the Bois de Boulogne, attending Isadora Duncan performances and the theater and entertaining at home, where Chanel's taste extended naturally to interior design.

Under Capel's influence, Chanel matured greatly. She absorbed his interests and knowledge, from Eastern religions to the subtleties of the Parisian social life, from literature to politics. His sophistication lent her polish and poise.

While on vacation in Deauville in 1913, Chanel decided to open a store on a fashionable thoroughfare in the tony Parisians' retreat. For this expansion of Chanel Modes, she introduced something quite new--resort sportswear for women. For the cool Deauville nights, she had taken one of Capel's sweaters, cut it in front from the V-neck down, finished the edges with a ribbon--and created the first women's knit cardigan. Every woman in Deauville wanted one. "[To think that] my fortune is built on that old jersey I'd put on because it was cold in Deauville," she reminisced later. At the same time she took the jersey fabrics that had previously been seen fit only for men's underwear and created the soft, sporty silhouettes that became her trademark. She turned into an instant sensation and she and Capel were seen as a celebrated couple.

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