코코샤넬 자료 Coco Chanel: The Designer and The Revolutionary

For many years, the name Coco Chanel has been synonymous with fashion, style and haute couture. Her influence in the fashion industry iss fused with the modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired designs and the pursuit of simplicity that comes with a costly price tag. In fact, she is so influential on the fashion world that she was the only person in the industry to be named to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century.

Numerous biographies, both written and on film, have emerged over the last two years, unfolding the layers of a woman who was not only a fashion designer, but a cultural revolutionary. She stretched the boundaries of what women wore and what was expected of them.

Coco Chanel in one of her signature jackets. Photo CocoChanel-Blog.com

"Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future." - Coco Chanel

Born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in 1883 in the small town of Saumur, Maine-et-Loire to Jeanne Devolle and Albert Chanel, a traveling salesman, the circumstances of her birth were a world away from the pristine and indulgent life that she is associated with today. She was born in a poorhouse where the employees were illiterate. So when her birth was recorded, no one knew how to spell Chanel and it was recorded with an "s," making it Chasnel. This error proved difficult for biographers when Chanel later rose to prominence. Especially since she would later concoct her own version of her earlier years to avoid the stigma that came with poverty, orphanhood and illegitimacy.

After her mother died of tuberculosis when Chanel was 12 years old, the young girl spent seven years in the orphanage of the Roman Catholic monastery of Aubazine with her siblings, while their father continued to travel around the country for his work. It was here that she learned the trade of a seamstress. She refined these skills during school vacations that were spent with relatives in the provincial capital.

At 18, Chanel left the orphanage and took up work with a local tailor. She soon met and began an affair with the French playboy and millionaire Étienne Balsan, who introduced her to the rich life of diamonds, dresses and pearls. Around this time she started designing hats and opened her first shop in 1913 in Paris. Unfortunately, the shop went out of business and she was forced to surrender her properties. More determined then ever, Chanel used the connections of her new lover, Arthur Capel, to acquire property and financial backing for her second millinery shop in Brittany. Her hats were worn by celebrated French actresses, which helped to establish her reputation.

"Fashion fades, only style remains the same." - Coco Chanel

By the World War I era Chanel had three shops. She was now opening the eyes of French women to the notion of dressing for themselves rather than for the men in their lives. Unlike most designers of this era, Chanel focused on the women inside the clothes as the centre of her creations. "I gave women a sense of freedom," she said. "I gave them back their bodies: bodies that were drenched in sweat, due to fashion's finery, lace, corsets, underclothes and padding."

Associated with the image of the 1920's flapper, Chanel's designs garnered a new breed of self-confident women who challenged the established concept of socially acceptable behaviour. Compared to previous generations of women, the flapper demonstrated independence through new looks and attitude - all devised by the incomparable Chanel. In 1921, Chanel came out with her first signature fragrance, Chanel No. 5. The perfume was the very first to have a designer's name attached to it, setting the standard for many years to come.

"In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different." - Coco Chanel

In 1939, at the onset of World War II, Chanel closed all her shops, claiming that it was not a time for fashion. She took up residence in the Hotel Ritz Paris, where she lived for more than 30 years. (She would die of a heart attack in her private suite here in 1971.) During this time she was widely criticized for having an affair with a German officer and Nazi spy who arranged for his lover to remain at the hotel during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

In 1943, after four years of professional separation, Chanel contacted Vera Bate Lombardi, who had been her muse and public relations liaison to a number of European royal families since 1925. Lombardi had offered Chanel the highest connections possible to build the House of Chanel. These connections allowed for the fashion house, and the designer herself, to rise to creative, romantic, social and political power. The guise for Chanel's 1943 contact with Lombardi was for her original muse to return to work at Chanel, but there was much suspicion surrounding the real reasons.

When Lombardi refused to comply with the request to come to Paris, she was arrested as an English spy and thrown into a Roman prison by the Gestapo. Chanel herself would later be arrested for war crimes, but avoided trial due to the intervention of the British Royal family. She moved to Switzerland in 1945, but returned to Paris in 1954, the year she also returned to the fashion world. Due to her much publicized relationship with the German officer, her new collection was not popular with Parisians. However, it was much applauded by the Americans, who would become her most loyal customers.

Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster and Coco Chanel

"Great loves too must be endured." - Coco Chanel

Chanel's many lovers and achievements have been highlighted in several biopics. An American television movie, "Coco Chanel," debuted in September 2008, starring Shirley MacLaine as the 70-year-old Chanel. The young Chanel was depicted by Audrey Tautou in a film called "Coco Avant Chanel," which was released in April 2009, and hints at the designer's rumoured lesbian affairs.
But perhaps her most famed affair was with the composer Igor Stravinsky, which became the subject of many novels and films. The most recent of these was Jan Kounen's "Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky," which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. The highly praised film takes the measure of this affair and develops the impression of two 20th century cultural revolutionaries, rather than a dual biopic.

The film moves between the French villa where the designer stowed her lover and his family following the Russian Revolution, her famous Paris fashion house, the Theatre des Champs-Elysees where Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" had its disastrous premiere, and the lab in Grasse where Chanel No. 5 was created.

"A women who doesn't wear perfume has no future." - Coco Chanel.

Known as the perfume capital of the world since the end of the 18th century, Grasse - located 20 kilometres from the Côte d'Azur - produces over two-thirds of France's natural aromas and turns over more than 600 million euros every year. Today, Grasse is to fragrance what Wall Street is to finance. It has hosted everyone who is anyone in the industry, including the legendary Chanel.

She was an influential powerhouse, unparalleled even by her male contemporaries. She lived a life that was full of passion, fashion and drama. Today, though recent films have uncovered a woman who had many secrets, she is celebrated as a pioneer in the fashion industry and a role model for young women everywhere.

 

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