Coco Chanel

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was born on August 19, 1883, in Saumur, a market town on the Loire in western France. Her mother, Jeanne Devolle, worked as a laundrywoman; her father, Albert Chanel, was an itinerant street vendor who married Jeanne only after Gabrielle's birth ^[1]. The family moved often and lived close to poverty, and Jeanne died in 1895, when Gabrielle was eleven ^[2].

Albert responded by placing his daughters in the orphanage run by the convent of Aubazine, a medieval Cistercian abbey in the Corrèze. Gabrielle spent roughly six years there, and biographers have long traced her later austerity of line, her preference for black and white, and her sewing skill to the disciplined plainness of convent life ^[1]. She rarely spoke honestly about these years, preferring in later interviews to invent a more comfortable childhood spent with aunts ^[2].

At eighteen she left Aubazine for a Catholic boarding house in Moulins, then found work as a seamstress. In the evenings she sang in cafés frequented by cavalry officers, performing numbers that included the song 'Qui qu'a vu Coco', one origin often given for the nickname that replaced her baptismal name ^[3].

In Moulins she met Étienne Balsan, a wealthy former cavalry officer and horse breeder, and around 1906 she moved to his estate at Royallieu near Compiègne. Life among Balsan's leisured circle gave her time to ride and, crucially, to make hats, which she trimmed with a spareness that stood out against the heavy plumage then in fashion ^[1]. Through Balsan she met Arthur 'Boy' Capel, an English businessman who became the love of her life and the financial backer of her first ventures ^[2].

With Capel's support she opened a millinery shop in Paris in 1910 at 21 rue Cambon, trading as Chanel Modes. Boutiques followed in the resort towns of Deauville in 1913 and Biarritz in 1915, where she began selling clothes as well as hats ^[3]. Her breakthrough material was jersey, a soft knit previously associated with men's underwear. Cut into loose, unstructured dresses and cardigan jackets, it offered women freedom of movement at a moment when wartime work was already loosening the corset's grip ^[1].

By 1918 she had acquired the building at 31 rue Cambon, still the address of the house of Chanel today. Capel's death in a car crash in December 1919 devastated her, but by then the business stood on its own: she was a couturière with an international clientele and a recognizable point of view ^[2].

The list of Coco Chanel achievements reads like an inventory of the modern wardrobe. In 1921 she launched Chanel No. 5, created with the perfumer Ernest Beaux, a fragrance built on aldehydes rather than a single recognizable flower and sold in a plain rectangular bottle. It became one of the best known perfumes in the world, and its commercial exploitation was handled from 1924 by Parfums Chanel, a company formed with the businessmen Pierre and Paul Wertheimer ^[4].

In 1926 American Vogue reproduced a simple black crepe de chine sheath of her design and compared it to the Ford automobile, predicting it would become a uniform for women of taste. The little black dress turned a color once reserved for mourning and domestic service into the foundation of evening dressing ^[3]. Through the 1920s she also popularized costume jewelry worn in unapologetic abundance, the quilted handbag, and the two-tone shoe, and she borrowed freely from menswear: tweeds, sailors' jerseys, and trousers for women at leisure ^[1].

Her second great act came late. After closing her couture house at the outbreak of war in 1939, she returned to fashion in February 1954 at the age of seventy. The Paris press received the comeback collection coolly, but American buyers embraced it, and the collarless, braid-trimmed Chanel suit in nubby tweed, worn with chains of pearls, became a status garment of the postwar decades ^[2]. Jacqueline Kennedy was wearing a pink Chanel-style suit in Dallas on the day of her husband's assassination in 1963, a measure of how deeply the design had entered public life ^[4].

Chanel never married. After Capel's death her companions included the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, a cousin of the last tsar, and from the mid 1920s the Duke of Westminster, one of the richest men in England, with whom she spent long periods sailing and fishing in Scotland ^[2]. Tweed borrowed from the duke's wardrobe fed directly into her collections. She moved in the highest artistic circles of interwar Paris, counting Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Serge Diaghilev, and the composer Igor Stravinsky among her friends; she designed costumes for Cocteau's stage productions and for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes ^[1].

The darkest chapter of any honest Coco Chanel biography concerns the Second World War. She spent the occupation living at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, which housed German officers, and conducted a relationship with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a German diplomat and intelligence officer ^[5]. Documents examined by the journalist Hal Vaughan indicate that she was registered as an agent of the Abwehr, German military intelligence, and participated in a failed 1943 mission, code-named Modellhut, intended to open a channel to Winston Churchill ^[5]. She also attempted during the war to use Aryanization laws to wrest control of Parfums Chanel from the Wertheimers, who were Jewish and had transferred ownership before fleeing France; the attempt failed ^[4].

Questioned by a French purge committee after the Liberation, she was released without charge, and she soon moved to Switzerland, where she lived for most of the following decade. Her protection from prosecution has never been fully explained, though her connections in British circles are often cited ^[5].

The 1954 comeback restored her to the center of fashion, and a 1954 settlement with the Wertheimers, who financed the relaunch, left them in control of the business while guaranteeing her income and expenses for life ^[4]. Through the late 1950s and 1960s she worked continuously, refining rather than reinventing the suit, the chain-strapped 2.55 handbag introduced in February 1955, and the beige and black slingback shoe ^[2].

She kept an apartment above the salon at 31 rue Cambon, famous for its Coromandel screens, but slept across the street at the Ritz. Honors accumulated: in 1957 she received a fashion award in Dallas from Neiman Marcus recognizing her influence on twentieth century dress ^[3]. Her private life narrowed to work; colleagues described a demanding, sharp-tongued perfectionist who pinned and re-pinned garments on models for hours.

Chanel was preparing a spring collection when she died in her room at the Hôtel Ritz Paris on January 10, 1971, at the age of eighty-seven ^[2]. Her funeral was held at the Church of the Madeleine, attended by models wearing her suits, and she was buried in Lausanne, Switzerland, beneath a headstone carved with five lions' heads ^[1].

Few designers have shaped what women actually wear as durably as Chanel. The house she founded continued under a series of designers, most influentially Karl Lagerfeld, who took over in 1983 and spent thirty-six years reworking her codes: the tweed, the camellia, the interlocked double C monogram, the chains and pearls ^[4]. The company remains privately owned by descendants of the Wertheimer family, and Chanel No. 5 is still among the world's best selling fragrances more than a century after its creation ^[4].

In 1999 Time magazine named her among the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century, the only fashion designer on the list ^[6]. Museums have repeatedly examined her work: the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute mounted a Chanel retrospective in 2005, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London staged the exhibition 'Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto' in 2023 ^[7].

Among the most cited Coco Chanel facts is the simplest: she entered fashion when women were laced into corsets and left it having dressed them in jersey, trousers, black, and tweed. Historians continue to weigh that liberating influence against the documented record of her wartime collaboration, and recent biographies present both without flinching ^[5]. The tension between the two is now part of the story, and the clothes, still copied and still worn, are the other part.