Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel is a maker of the modern world, she was a fashion designer who greatly improved the fashion in the 1900’s. She was among the top hundred famous people in the century, her designs were branded her name “chanel” which were very expensively simplified and was inspired by menswear.

She was born in Sumur, France in 19th August 1883.Chanel was left an orphan after the death of her mother and the departure of her father. She was then taken to the Roman Catholic monastery of Aubazine. She was learnt how to sew and the vocation of seamstress, after eighteen years she left the orphanage to be cabaret singer in the town of Mourlins and Vichy. She was later nicknamed “Coco” as she performed in the towns, though she wasn’t successful. She met Etienne Balsan, a young legatee of a French textile, who employed her in a tailoring shop. During her free time she designed hats, and after a while it was her passion. She left Balsan went to Paris were she was funded by Arthur Edward, who enabled her to open a shop and to design her own made designs.

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Chanel became a licensed hat maker in 1910, where she took the opportunity to open a boutique. Her career flourished when Gabrielle Dorziat, a theatre actress modelled her hats in the play Bel Ami in 1912. After a year introduced casual clothes for sports and leisure in her new boutique. In 1915 she launched her next boutique in Biarritz were she mainly served wealthy Spanish clients who spent their holidays in Biarritz. In 1919 she had established her fashion house as she had already been registered as a couturiere. Chanel was not proud that she started from humble beginning, which made her to make up stories of how her father went to America to search for green pastures and was sent to stay which her two heartless aunts. She also claimed that she was born in 1893.

Coco Chanel was known to date famous men including the Duke of Westminster. Chanel was inspired in 1925 by Vera Bate Lombardi, née Sarah Gertrude Arkwright who was reportedly the illegitimate daughter of Marques of Cambridge who linked her to several royal families in Europe. Chanel brought up the English look, which borrowed heavily on Lombardi’s personal style. The extremely high social connections that Lombardi had such as her uncle the Duke of Westminster and her cousin the Duke of Windsor among others had an immense effect on Chanel’s celebrity status.

1918, Chanel purchased the building at 31 rue Cambon, in one of the most stylish districts of Paris. In 1921, she opened an early incarnation of a fashion boutique, featuring clothing, hats, and accessories, later she expanded to offer services on jewellery and perfumes. In the spring of 1920, Chanel was introduced to the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky by Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Russian Ballets. During the summer, Chanel discovered that the Stravinsky family sought a place to live, having left the Soviet Union after the war. She invited them to her new home, Bel Respiro, in the Paris suburb of Garches, until they could find a suitable residence. 

They arrived at Bel Respiro during the second week of September and remained until May 1921. Chanel also guaranteed the new (1920) Russian Ballets production of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring against financial loss with an anonymous gift to Diaghilev, said to be three hundred thousand francs. In addition to turning out her couture collections, Chanel threw herself into designing dance costumes for the Russian Ballets. In the years 1923 to 1937, she collaborated on productions choreographed by Diaghilev and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, particularly the blue train, an opera dance.

In 1922, at the Long champs races, Théophile Bader, founder of the Paris Galeries Lafayette, was introduced Chanel to businessman Pierre Wertheimer. Bader was interested in selling Chanel No. 5 in his department store. In 1924, Chanel made an agreement with the Wertheimer brothers, Pierre and Paul, directors since 1917 of the eminent perfume and cosmetics house Bourjois. They created a corporate entity, Parfums Chanel, and the Wertheimers agreed to provide full financing for the production, marketing, and distribution of Chanel No. 5. The Wertheimers would receive seventy percent of the profits, and Théophile Bader twenty percent. For ten percent of the stock, Chanel licensed her name to Parfums Chanel and withdrew from involvement in business operations.[18]:95 Later, unhappy with the arrangement, Chanel worked for more than twenty years to gain full control of Parfums Chanel.[26][18] She said that Pierre Wertheimer was "the bandit who screwed me".

One of Chanel's longest enduring associations was with Misia Sert, a member of the bohemian elite in Paris and wife of Spanish painter José-Maria Sert. It is said that theirs was an immediate bond of kindred souls, and Misia was attracted to Chanel by "her genius, lethal wit, sarcasm and maniacal destructiveness, which intrigued and appalled everyone".[6]:13 Both women were convent schooled, and maintained a friendship of shared interests and confidences. They also shared drug use. By 1935, Chanel had become a habitual drug user, injecting herself with morphine on a daily basis, a habit she maintained to the end of her life.[6]:80–81 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".[27]

The writer Colette, who moved in the same social circles as Chanel, provided a whimsical description of Chanel at work in her atelier, which appeared in Prisons et Paradis (1932). "If every human face bears a resemblance to some animal, then Mademoiselle Chanel is a small black bull. That tuft of curly black hair, the attribute of bull-calves, falls over her brow all the way to the eyelids and dances with every maneuver of her head.



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