Linda Simon - Coco Chanel

Chanel appears as the living incarnation of her creations.
French Vogue, 1926

In 1919, Coco Chanel said, I woke up famous. In fact, fame grew in the next few years as she created her first perfume, No. 5, in 1921 and her iconic little black dress in 1926. But in 1919 she was famous enough, cited in fashion magazines and newspapers, a rising star in a fashion world of many competitors. Jeanne Lanvin was famous too, as was Madeleine Vionnet; so were Jenny, Jean Patou, Madeleine Cheruit, Premet, Molyneux, Martial et Armand, Redfern, Rene, and of course the venerable Englishman Charles Frederick Worth. Around 40 couturiers were famous in 1919 and yet, nearly 100 years later, Chanel is the name that has survived, synonymous with high fashion: the haute of haute couture. Chanel has survived as a legend.

This is the triumph attributed to Chanel: she liberated women from corsets, bustles, floor-length dresses and beribboned, feathered hats; she urged women to move, in and out of cars for one thing, onto horses if they chose and into the workplace, just as she had done. She bobbed her hair and women followed; she introduced them to androgyny and they revelled in a new image; and she told them to wear soft, comfortable clothing such as mens sweaters (jauntily belted), mens shirts (open at the neck to reveal strands of fake pearls) and fabrics usually associated with menswear (like tweed and jersey). Chanel, so the legend goes, changed not only the shape of clothing but also the narrative of womens lives. She invented not only the simple black chemise, but also the modern woman.

To say that she was a fashion designer hardly captures her social and cultural significance. From 1913 onwards, when she first opened a hat shop in Deauville, until her death in 1971, Chanel sold more than clothing, accessories and a phenomenally successful perfume: she sold a myth that became as attractive for many women as her body-skimming dresses and boucl suits. Her most flamboyant creation was her public persona: glamorous, slender, sexually independent, a playgirl who cavorted with the rich and famous. Alluring and charismatic, with a breathtaking genius for publicity and self-promotion, Chanel was the first celebrity couturire. Like any celebrity, her fame was based partly in reality the reality of her artistry and vision and partly in desire: her own relentless desire for adulation, as well as her publics, for a bold image of feminine power and sexuality. For generations of women, Chanel embodied possibility, achievement and most of all defiance.

This book teases apart the myth that Chanel and her public collaborated to create, explores its contradictions, and examines the world that she both reflected and shaped. Chanel flourished in and contributed to a culture of notoriety that enabled her to achieve startling success, and she helped to change the dissemination of fashion that made the Chanel name and brand known far beyond the rarefied world of haute couture.

Certainly, she was an iconoclastic entrepreneur who rebelled against and manipulated the gender expectations of her time, but she also championed deeply held cultural assumptions about womens roles and their relationships to men. Certainly, her designs were beautiful and coveted, and often they astutely and elegantly responded to popular fashion trends. Certainly, Chanel had taste and flair. She boasted a refined sense of smell and many who witnessed her success argue that she had as refined But luck does not explain the enduring myth of Coco Chanel.

In 1913, when Chanel was a milliner selling boater hats that she bought at the Galeries Lafayette and decorated with streamers and ribbons, fashion magazines already showed a new silhouette: slim, with fluid lines, in soft fabrics. These magazines addressed active women who took up tennis, golf, yachting, horseback riding, camping and skiing. They danced energetically, and each issue of the upscale womens magazine Femina featured instructions for new dances the turkey trot, le pas du double boston, the one-step and the tango. Our epoch will be the epoch of energy, of health, and of balance, an editorial exclaimed.

In 1919, the year Chanel awoke to fame, drawings of designs by her competitors which were appearing in French fashion magazines all featured the same look as her own: trim and narrow. Fashion plates by illustrators such as Georges Lepape and Georges Barbier depicted slender young women with impossibly long legs and cropped hair, wearing low-waisted dresses in muted tones like grey and beige, and in fluid fabrics like silk or wool jersey. The sensational novelty of the season almost everywhere, reported