Gabrielle "Coco" Bonheur Chanel (19 August 1883 – 10 January 1971) was an influential French fashion designer, founder of the famous brandChanel, whose modernist thought, practical design, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important and influential figure in 20th-century fashion. She was the only fashion designer to be named on Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century.
Chanel was born to an unwed mother, Jeanne Devolle, a laundrywoman, in a facility for the indigent in Saumur, France. This was Devolle's second daughter. The father, Albert Chanel was an itinerant street peddler who with horse and cart lived a nomadic life, traveling to and from market towns, the family residing in rundown lodgings. He married Jeanne Devolle several years after Chanel was born. At birth Chanel’s name was entered into the official registry as “Chasnel.” It is speculated that this spelling was a clerical error or an ancient spelling of the family name. The couple eventually had five other children: Julia-Berthe, (1882–1913), Antoinette (born 1887) and three brothers, Alphonse (born 1885), Lucien (born 1889) and Augustin (born and died 1891).
In 1895, when she was twelve years old, Chanel’s mother died of tuberculosis. Her father sent her two brothers out as farm laborers and the three daughters to a bleak area of central France, theCorrèze, into the hands of a convent for orphans, Aubazine. It was a stark, frugal life demanding strict discipline but raised with the charity of the Catholic faith. At age eighteen, Chanel, now too old to remain at Aubazine, went to live in a boarding house set aside for Catholic girls in the town of Moulins.
Having learned the sewing arts during her six years at Aubazine, Chanel was able to find employment as a seamstress. When not plying her trade with a needle, she sang in a cabaret frequented by cavalry officers. It was at this time that Gabrielle acquired the name “Coco,” a name possibly derived from a popular song she sang, or an allusion to the French word for kept woman:cocotte. As cafe entertainer, Chanel broadcast a juvenile allure and suggestion of a mysterious androgyny, tantalizing the military habitués of the cabaret.
Later in life, she concocted an elaborate, fabricated history to cover up her humble beginnings with a more compelling light. Of the various stories told about Coco Chanel, a great number were of her own invention. These legends were to be the undoing of the earliest of her biographies. These were ghosted memoirs commissioned by Chanel herself, but never published, always aborted before fruition, as she realized that the facts exposed a personage less laudatory than the mythic Chanel she had self-invented. Chanel would steadfastly claim that when her mother died, her father sailed for America to seek his fortune and she was sent to live with two cold-hearted spinster aunts. She even claimed to have been born in 1893 as opposed to 1883, and that her mother had died when Coco was two instead of twelve.
It was at Moulins that Chanel met a young, French, ex-cavalry officer, and wealthy textile heir Étienne Balsan. At age twenty-three, Chanel became Balsan’s mistress and for the next three years lived with him in his chateau Royallieu near Compiègne, an area known for its wooded equestrian paths and the hunting life It was a life style of self-indulgence, Balsan’s wealth and leisure allowing the cultivation of a social set who reveled in partying and the gratification of human appetites with all the implied accompanying decadence. Balsan lavished Chanel with the beauties of "the rich life"— diamonds, dresses, and pearls. It was while living with Balsan that Chanel began designing hats, initially as a diversion that evolved into a commercial enterprise. Biographer Justine Picardie, in her 2010 study Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life (Harper Collins), suggests that the fashion designer's nephew, André Palasse, supposedly the only child of her sister Julia- Berthe who had committed suicide, actually was Chanel's child by Balsan.
In 1908 Chanel began an affair with one of Balsan's friends, Captain Arthur Edward 'Boy' Capel. In later years Chanel reminisced of this time in her life: “…two gentlemen were outbidding for my hot little body.Capel, a wealthy member of the English upper-class, installed Chanel in an apartment in Paris and financed Chanel's first shops. It is said Capel's own sartorial style influenced the conception of the Chanel look. The bottle design for Chanel No. 5 had two probable origins, both attributable to the sophisticated design sensibilities of Capel. It is believed Chanel adapted the rectangular, beveled lines of the Charvet toilery bottles he carried in his leather traveling case or it was the design of the whiskey decanter Capel used, and Chanel so admired that she wished to reproduce it in “exquisite, expensive, delicate glass.”The couple spent time together at fashionable resorts such as Deauville, but he was never faithful to Chanel. The affair lasted nine years, but even after Capel married an aristocratic English beauty in 1918, he did not completely break off with Chanel. His death in a car accident, in late 1919, was the single most devastating event in Chanel's life.She commissioned the placement of a roadside memorial at the site of the accident, which she visited in later years to lay flowers in remembrance. Twenty-five years after the event, Chanel then residing in Switzerland, confided to her friend Paul Morand: "His death was a terrible blow to me. In losing Capel, I lost everything. What followed was not a life of happiness I have to say."
Chanel became a licensed modiste (hat maker) in 1910 and opened a boutique at 21 rue Cambon, Paris named Chanel Modes. Chanel's modiste career bloomed once theatre actress Gabrielle Dorziat modelled her hats in the F Noziere's play Bel Ami in 1912 (Subsequently, Dorziat modelled her hats again in Les Modes).In 1913, she established a boutique in Deauville, where she introduced luxe casual clothes that were suitable for leisure and sport. Chanel launched her career as fashion designer when she opened her next boutique, titled Chanel-Biarritz, in 1915,catering to the wealthy Spanish clientele who holidayed in Biarritz and were less affected by the war. Fashionable like Deauville, Chanel created loose casual clothes made out of jersey, a material typically used for men's underwear.]By 1919, Chanel was registered as a couturiere and established her maison de couture at 31 rue Cambon.
In 1920, she was introduced by ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev to Igor Stravinsky. Now a notable patron of the arts, Chanel guaranteed the production of the balletLe Sacre du Printemps (“The Rite of Spring”) against financial loss, and provided her new home Bel Respiro, located in a Paris suburb, as a residence for composer Stravinsky and his family. In addition to turning out her couture collections, Chanel threw her prodigious energies into designing dance costumes for the cutting-edge Ballet Russe. Between the years 1923-1937, she collaborated on productions choreographed by Diaghilev and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, notably Le Train bleu, a dance-opera, Orphée and Oedipe Roi.
In 1924, Chanel made an agreement with the Wertheimer brothers, Pierre and Paul, directors of the eminent perfume house Bourgeois since 1917, creating a corporate entity, "Parfums Chanel." The Wertheimers agreed to provide full financing for production, marketing and distribution of Chanel No. 5. For ten percent of the stock, Chanel licensed her name to "Parfums Chanel" and removed herself from involvement in all business operations.Displeased with the arrangement, Chanel worked for more than twenty years to gain full control of "Parfums Chanel." She proclaimed that Pierre Wertheimer was “the bandit who screwed me.
One of Chanel’s longest and enduring associations was with Misia Sert, a notorious member of the Parisian, bohemian elite and wife of Spanish painterJosé-Maria Sert. It is said that theirs was an immediate bond of like souls, and Misia was attracted to Chanel by “her genius, lethal wit, sarcasm and maniacal destructiveness, which intrigued and appalled everyone. Both women, convent bred, maintained a friendship of shared interests, confidences and drug use. By 1935, Chanel had become a habitual drug user, injecting herself with morphine on a daily basis until the end of her life. According to Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent, Luca Turin related an apocryphal story in circulation that Chanel was "called Coco because she threw the most fabulous cocaine parties in Paris"
In 1923, Vera Bate Lombardi, born Sarah Gertrude Arkwright reputedly the illegitimate daughter of the Marquess of Cambridge, afforded Chanel entry into the highest levels of British aristocracy. It was an elite group of associations revolving around such personages as Winston Churchill, aristocrats such as the Duke of Westminster and royals such as Edward, Prince of Wales. It was in Monte Carlo in 1923, at age forty-two that Chanel was introduced by Lombardi to the vastly wealthy Duke of Westminster, Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, known to his intimates as “Bendor”. The Duke of Westminster lavished Chanel with extravagant jewels, costly art, and a home in Mayfair. In 1929, he gifted her with a parcel of land he had purchased near Monte Carlo where Chanel built an opulent villa, La Pausa. His affair with Chanel lasted ten years. The Duke, an outspoken anti-Semite, intensified Chanel’s inherent antipathy toward Jews and shared with him an expressed homophobia. In 1946, Chanel is quoted by her friend and confidante, Paul Morand: “Homosexuals? …I have seen young women ruined by these awful queers: drugs, divorce, scandal. They will use any means to destroy a competitor and to wreak vengeance on a woman. The queers want to be women—but they are lousy women. They are charming!” Coinciding with her introduction to the Duke, was her introduction, again through Lombardi, to Lombardi's cousin, the Prince of Wales, Edward VIII. The Prince became smitten with Chanel and pursued her in spite of her involvement with the Duke of Westminster. It is said that he visited Chanel in her apartment and requested that she call him “David,” a privilege reserved only for his closest friends and family. Years later, Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, would insist: “the passionate, focused and fiercely independent Chanel, a virtual tour de force,” and the Prince, “had a great romantic moment together.”
It was in 1931 while in Monte Carlo that Chanel made the acquaintance of Samuel Goldwyn. The introduction was made through a mutual friend, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, cousin to the last czar of Russia, Nicolas II. Goldwyn offered Chanel a tantalizing proposition. For the sum of a million dollars (approximately seventy-five million today), he would bring her to Hollywood twice a year to design costumes for MGM stars. Chanel accepted the offer. En route to California from New York traveling in a white train car, which had been luxuriously outfitted specifically for her use, she was interviewed by Colliers magazine in 1932. Chanel said she had agreed to the arrangement to "see what the pictures have to offer me and what I have to offer the pictures." This enterprise with the film industry left Chanel with a dislike for the business of movie making and distaste for the Hollywood culture itself, which she denounced as “infantile.” Chanel's verdict was that: "Hollywood is the capital of bad taste...and it is vulgar." Ultimately, her design aesthetic did not translate well to film, failing to satisfy the standard of Hollywood glamour of the era. On screen her creations did not transmit enough dazzle and sexy allure. Her designs for film stars were not acclaimed and generated little comment. Despite her failure in Hollywood, Chanel went on to design the costumes for several French films, including Jean Renoir's 1939 film La Règle du jeu where she was credited as La Maison Chanel.
In early 1971 Chanel, then 87-years old, was tired and ailing but continued to adhere to her usual schedule, overseeing the preparation of the spring collection. She died on Sunday, January, 10th at the Hotel Ritz where she had resided for more than thirty years. She had gone for a long drive that afternoon and, not feeling well, had retired early to bed.
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