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“but who was the woman behind the legend, and how did she rise out of poverty to take the world by storm?”
it's a rags to richestory marked by destitution and betrayal, determination, luxury and fabulous triumph so just relax, and let your mind drift as we explore the sleepy history of Cocoa Chanel Born by some accounts in a poor house, and raised in an orphanage, Coco Chanel survived a childhood of warmth, and adolescents spent in austerity and two world wars that ravaged her native friends and tested her loyalty and character
“through it all, she channeled her innate charisma and artistic talent to not only survive, but thrive beyond the wildest expectations”
she built a life of fame and opulence for herself and bequeathed to the world a fashion legacy that continues to transcend time and place her story is one of growth, change and her surveillance, and it all began in a small town in France in the late 1800s
Coco Chanel was born Gabrielle Chanel in 1883, she was the second child of a poor, unmarried couple who already had one baby daughter less than a year old
her father was a petler or street vendor who traveled around the French countryside he was not present for Gabrielle's or her sister's births, her mother apparently worked as a laundry woman the couple married when Gabrielle was a toddler and they went on to have four more children of this its children four would survive two brothers and two sisters the family moved around from small town to small town until Gabrielle was eleven years old
when her mother died possibly from bronchitis one freezing cold morning in 1895
Years later after poor Gabrielle became the glamorous and famous Coco she wou...
in line with that fiction she would later tell reporters that she had been six years old not eleven when her mother died
“this is one of many discrepancies and contradictions in the stories Coco Chanel told the world about herself and her difficult childhood”
that fact along with the passage of time and lack of historical records sometimes makes it hard to untangle the specifics of her life story indeed details are murky as to what happened next to the newly motherless Chanel children but it appears that Gabrielle's father may have sent the children to stay with relatives for a short time
whatever happened it's known that the next year the Chanel girls were left in the care of nuns at the orphanage
Gabrielle would spend her team years at the convent of the abbey of Oversene
“in the care of nuns belonging to the order of the sisters of the sacred heart”
years later Coco Chanel would come back to visit one of the nuns according to local oral histories so she apparently formed some attachments there but the environment was certainly a steer
its stern and colorless aspect is believed to have influenced Chanel's eventual fashion aesthetic
with its minimalism, simple lines and emphasis on black and white comforts must have been few but no one living today knows exactly what young Gabrielle experienced in her childhood perhaps regular meals and reliable roof over her head meant more than we can say later on she would say that she'd had a revelation at twelve years old that money meant independence without money you are nothing she declared but with money you can do anything
“I would say to myself over and over money is the key to freedom”
this aligns with statements one of her biographers has made about Chanel's lifelong pursuit of power as the means to being an independent woman when Gabrielle was 18 years old she left the convent and attended a boarding school called Notre Dame as she had no money or family to speak of she got what was called a charity spot at the school in today's terms she received a scholarship
to that mean that the school or the nuns from the convent saw potential in the young Gabrielle perhaps at any rate little is known of her time at the school but when she left the school's mother superior found her, found her younger sister and one at jobs and down they worked as seamstresses at a local draper shop it was the beginning however humble of Gabrielle's life in the broad world of fashion
go go and her sister or potentially a young aunt again the details of murky also began to sing in cafe shows that were popular with officers from the local army barracks one of the songs Gabrielle would sing was about a young Croatian girl who loses her dog the name of the song was Kikawukoko it may have been from there some historians believe that Gabrielle took the name that the world would know her by
The history that comes down at that time evokes a young woman barely more tha...
with great personal magnetism photos from later years show a slender and graceful young woman
“with a wide mouth and high cheekbones but she seems to have been noted most for her persona”
and the story is that she was a charismatic performer more than a remarkable singer she certainly must have had a forceful character and strong drive as she was taking charge of her destiny by the time she entered her 20s around that time Gabrielle or Koko started becoming friendly with the army officers stationed in the town she was transforming from an orphan at the conference into a young woman of the world then at the dawn of the 20th century as she was just entering her 20s
Koko's new life really took off
“she went to spend the summer with her grandfather in Vichy a famous spot out”
there she met a cavalry officer and heir to a textile fortune who had a man or home ground enough that it had Chateau in its name they became lovers and he set her up as his mistress at his Chateau
it was the first in a string of romances with wealthy and powerful men
that would offer Koko luxury, protection, financial support and entree into society the most influential of these would be a wealthy, polo-playing Englishman named Arthur Cabell commonly known by the nickname Boy Koko had known poverty and want from her earliest days her mother and some siblings had not survived their years of destitution
Koko herself survived on charity and she entered adulthood with nothing yet she built a life and legacy that would be the envy of the world
at first romance was her ticket out of obscurity until her artistic talents
an entrepreneurial instincts could take over and catapult her to celebrity and wealth from early on Koko exhibited a flare for fashion that drew the attention of those around her
“she began designing stylish hats very important fashion items for women at the time”
with the financial support of her lovers she eventually opened a small hat boutique in Paris around this time however tragedy struck again in her personal life when her older sister Julia died Julia left behind a son, Andre, who Chanel would care for rumors swirled around the relationship with many speculating that Andre was actually Koko's biological son from one of her affairs not long after opening the hats studio Chanel opened a clothing shop
in the fashionable seaside resort town of Doville it was followed by another boutique in another seaside town B.A. Reets in 1915
for her first boutiques Koko created women's sportswear at a jersey
a simple fabric that was mostly used at the time to make men's undergarments although recall that undergarments in that era were much more extensive than nowadays think of something more like what we would call long underwear, also known as thermals or base layers
Those worn for snow outings
Koko's jersey designs were simple and comfortable yet chic
“they offered a breath of fresh air and freedom in the era of corsets and elaborate restrictive gowns”
it could be said that Chanel's early designs freed and empowered the women who wore them much as Chanel freed and empowered herself when she took her destiny in her own hands
wealthy women soon yielded to the allure of Chanel's elegant yet freeing designs and within five years
she was taking the fashion world by storm in the interim World War One broke out in Europe
“and as it happened the resulting shortages and austerity efforts contributed to the abandonment of the ornate basions from the previous era”
this further pushed western women's clothing styles toward the simplicity and more comfortable chic of Chanel's aesthetic after the war simpler lines and fluid fabrics informed the fashion of the roaring 20s in the midst of it all in 1926 Koko Chanel introduced what may be her most enduring legacy at least in the realm of women's clothing the little black dress the custom at the time had been to wear black dresses only for morning when someone had died
“but the young women of post-war society in Europe were all about breaking boundaries and pushing limits”
and so black began to show up in the most cutting edge designs and Chanel was perhaps among the sharpest of those fashionable cutting edges the simple elegance and versatility of the little black dress made it both edgy after all it was black and a wide appeal
vote called it the Ford a fashion referencing the Ford Model T cars that were the first automobiles to break through from a rare luxury possession and reach the wider popular market
the place of Chanel's little black dress in fashion war would be cemented years later what the iconic garment worn by Audrey Hepburn and the movie breakfast activities and it remains a fashion staple to this day meanwhile at the start of the 1920s the artist and entrepreneur had introduced another of her lasting legacies her signature perfume Chanel number five its complex Jasmine based scent and simple chic bottle cropped held it to a phenomenal popularity that endures more than a century later
and that popularity formed the foundation of Chanel's financial success she received only ten percent of the profits from the perfume sales due to a contract she signed early on with an established department store and a cosmetics company to help produce and market the scent over the decades she would try many times to revisit that arrangement and claim more rights over the Chanel empire but without success
nevertheless the perfume sold so well that her share was still highly profitable cocosuring a scent continued with movie stars like Marlena Dietrich and Greta Garbo wearing her designs during her heyday the designer was in the middle of a wild social world of the rich the famous the brilliant and the extravagant
She spent time or shared beds with the likes of Picasso the composer Stravins...
and the grandson of Zarr Alexander II of Russia
“in the interwar period friends like much of Western Europe played host to social upheaval”
that saw artists and socialites embracing a decadent and convention breaking lifestyle gender roles and Victorian expectations were flung aside as champagne and elicit substances float freely and Chanel was in the midst of it all
but at the end of the 1930s the dark specter of war once again descended on Europe
and on the life Coco Chanel had so carefully constructed for herself
“Chanel shuddered her fashion house in 1939 she was living in the stylish Ritz Hotel in Paris at the time”
in 1940 the unthinkable happened and France fell to the invading German army the Ritz became not the headquarters after the Germans took control of the country
Coco began a romantic affair with Baron Hans-Gunther von Dinkliga
a half German half English diplomat and as a transpired German spy had Coco Chanel then 58 clutched again at the romantic charm that had allowed her to escape destiny in her young adulthood
“we can't know her motives but she would go on to live with Vandinkliga for a number of years during and immediately after the war”
communicating in their common language of English Coco mixed with the German army and was accused of collaborating with the occupation the story of those years is cloudy and many participants took their stories to the grave in 2023 a museum exhibition reportedly showed a mixed picture of Chanel's activities and royalties during the occupation of France the exhibit included evidence of her collusion with the Nazi authorities occupying Paris and provocatively it also presented new evidence claiming that Chanel was also connected to the French resistance
whatever the true set must have been lost to time however it seems certain that her relationship with Vandinkliga and association with the German army must have provided great personal benefits during the war that were not enjoyed by other French citizens those benefits may also have extended to her nephew Andre her late sister Julia Sun the one who had sometimes been rumored to be actually Chanel's biological child
Andre was a French soldier being held as a prisoner of war in a German detention camp the historical record indicates that in 1941 Coco traveled to Madrid with the German intelligence officer soon afterward Andre was released after France was liberated in 1944 the new French authorities briefly arrested Chanel but no charges were brought against her the erstwhile artist moved to Switzerland and for some years seemed to be in retirement but the designer couldn't remain in obscurity for long
meanwhile in the period right after World War II ended Christianity or had upended the fashion world with his new look it featured an exaggeratedly feminine outline tightly sensed wastes and flared skirts Chanel did not approve of the structured restrictive designs which must have recalled the Victorian clothing she was instrumental in rejecting in her youth
George doesn't dress women he opposed to them she criticized
perhaps this helped nudge Coco to begin designing again
“in 1954 the year she would turn 71 years old she presented her first fashion collection in a decade and a half”
that's when she gave the world another of her iconic legacies an elegant cardigan style suit of the kind that Jackie Kennedy would later favor it was a huge hit including with Grace Kelly the movie star style icon and eras who would soon become Princess Grace of Monaco through marriage then in 1961 breakfast at Tiffany's came out and Audrey Hepburn's chic character Holly Go Lightly returned the little black dress to the spotlight
“over the final years of her life Chanel remained a high priestess of Oat Goudur until her death in 1971”
since then her brand and legacy have endured some 12 years after her passing the designer Carl Logofeld took the helm of the house of Chanel in 1983 he went on to lead the brand through many more decades of prominence Logofeld spearheaded decadent fashion shows and daring designs that pushed new boundaries
“once that would have been inconceivable in the days when young Coco first gave women comfortable chic in the form of jersey sportswear”
what remains ahead for the iconic brand that's the creative request of that determined complicated charismatic artist who burst forth from the convent and poor house more than a century ago that remains to be seen but one thing seems sure Coco Chanel's sense of chic and her artistic legacy looked destined to maintain their place in fashion history for a long time to come
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