“I…am an odious person,” Coco replica chanel watches declared. Not many would have begged to differ. Chanel’s tongue was quite as sharp as her shears and she treated everyone who worked for her harshly, playing one against the other. No one escaped her malice, not even a trusted friend like the poet Jean Cocteau, whom she described to one interviewer as nothing but a “snobbish little pederast who did nothing all his life but steal from people.” She held her own customers in contempt and said, “A woman equals envy plus vanity plus chatter plus a confused mind.” But no one ever built an empire by being nice, and http://www.dmincwv.com/chanel-j12-white-29mm-replica-sale.html, by simplifying, lightening, and eliminating the corset, invented a new way of dressing women.
By so doing, she created both an empire and a legend. In the Thirties, she was the wealthiest woman in France—even more important, she owed that wealth to nothing but her own hard work. This success story drew biographers. The catalog of the New York Public Library records more than eighty-five books about her, compared to twenty-four about Christian Dior. The most recent entry is Mademoiselle: Coco replica chanel j12 black and the Pulse of History by Rhonda K. Garelick. Do we really need another biography of Coco Chanel? Actually, yes, we do.
Chanel had a life that was both complex and complicated: a miserable childhood, a series of men each different from the others. While her earliest lovers would shape her and help her secure entrée into the greater world, the ones who followed were probably more hindrance than help. In any case, none of them made her happy in any lasting way. She also had a profitable partnership with Pierre Wertheimer, the man who made Chanel No. 5 a world-renowned perfume, but the story behind that partnership was one of constant court battles, with a deplorable wartime chapter followed by an unexpected return to success and fortune. A particularly difficult life story to tell because Chanel dodged all direct questioning and constantly reinvented her own past.
What’s more, she intimidated everyone who met her. And so those biographers who knew her were unable or unwilling to view her with the necessary detachment. Though she agreed to open herself to her writer friends such as Jean Cocteau, Louise de Vilmorin, or Michel Déon, she quickly grew to regret it, lost her temper, and ultimately forbade them to publish. Edmonde Charles-Roux persevered nonetheless, but Chanel denied her access to her archives. Paul Morand contrived to have his subject speak in the first person, an approach that failed to produce any great accuracy. The psychoanalyst Claude Delay, who was very close to Chanel in the last period of her life, was willing to echo her statements without raising any questions. As a result there is frequently a hagiographic tone to the earliest French biographies, a quality that is exacerbated by the fact that the French didn’t particularly like to explore subjects such as collaboration with the Germans or how Chanel’s milieu made its own separate peace with the occupiers. On a different plane, the important part that America had in her success is frequently airbrushed out of the story as it is told by her compatriots.
That Rhonda Garelick is an American of another generation, that she has a thorough understanding of the history of the period, and that she was able to take advantage of the opening of German, French, and Russian archives are all factors working to her advantage. In addition, Garelick has an evident zest for ferreting out the telling detail. However, writing an exhaustive biography of Chanel is a challenge comparable to racing a four-horse chariot. Chanel had a long, varied life that cannot be easily sorted into distinct chapters, particularly because her work, her love affairs, her artistic and political passions, and her commercial instincts are invariably intertwined. This makes the assured confidence with which Garelick tells her story all the more remarkable.
People often attribute the harshness of Gabrielle Chanel’s personality to the brutality of her childhood. Actually, she escaped the sordid world of her birth with surprising speed. Born in 1883 in Saumur, orphaned of her mother at the age of eleven, abandoned by her father, she was deposited in a religious orphanage where she wasn’t taught much else than how to sew. At age nineteen, turned out into the small Auvergne town of Moulins to fend for herself, she logically found work as a seamstress and discovered freedom and young men.
Moulins was a garrison town and the junior officers were quick to notice the pretty girls who mended their uniforms in the back rooms of the tailoring shop, Moderne Tailleur. The officers spent their evenings together in one of the town’s numerous café-concerts and Gabrielle decided to perform. She didn’t have much of a voice but she managed to get a laugh out of her audience when she sang “Qui qu’a vu Coco sur le Trocadéro” (Who’s Seen Coco on the Trocadéro?). The song won her her nickname Coco and her first protector, étienne Balsan, the heir to a large textile fortune. When Balsan suggested she come live in his chateau of Royallieu, not as his titular mistress but as just one of his many gigolettes, she cheerfully accepted, eager to escape the poverty in which she’d always lived.
Coco was bright and observant, and she became even more so as she came in contact with the grandes horizontales—émilienne d’Alen?on and Liane de Pougy, for instance—who frequented the chateau. Skinny, flat-chested, and without an expensive wardrobe or fine jewelry, she had no way to compete with the glamorous courtesans and so she began to develop a personal style of her own. She borrowed Balsan’s shirts, tweed suits, and riding breeches and cut them down to her size. She’d also begun wearing very simple straw boaters, which had the advantage of not flying off in a gust of wind because she wore them tugged low over her forehead. Soon, all étienne’s girlfriends wanted hats like hers for themselves.
It was at this point that her life took another sharp turn. She fell in love with one of Balsan’s friends, Arthur “Boy” Capel, an English businessman whose mother was French. Unlike Balsan, Capel was not a playboy. He understood work, finances, and had grasped the scope of Coco’s talent and ambition. Very quickly
she turned from courtesan into something almost unheard-of for the era: a self-supporting businesswoman. At the same time, he was collaborating with her on an even more surprising venture: the birth of the couturière-celebrity, a fashion designer whose life as well as work would be accepted into society.He made it possible for her to set up her atelier and boutique in Paris at 21 rue Cambon. They openly lived together, even as Capel carried on his social life as a bachelor, unconcerned with maintaining any pretense of fidelity. As an adviser, he remained unbeatable. And so, at his recommendation, she opened a boutique at Deauville, the most fashionable beach resort in Normandy, on the eve of World War I. That is where she stayed throughout most of the war.
The war changed women’s attitudes toward clothing. Proust has one of his characters say that it’s no longer a matter of parading around in a dress made by a great couturier, but rather of obtaining “charming results in the realm of fashion, without ill-considered and unseemly luxury, with the simplest materials, [and creating] prettiness out of mere nothings.” That is exactly what Chanel was offering and, by so doing, she attracted the notice of the American press. An article in Women’s Wear Daily in July 1914 praised her sweaters and her jersey suits. Two years later, the same publication hailed the opening of her boutique in Biarritz. But just as she was becoming increasingly successful she was struck by twofold misfortune. In August 1918, Boy Capel, the only man she seems ever to have loved, married a young Englishwoman from one of the best families in society and then, even worse, he was killed in a car crash a year later. “1919, the year I woke up famous and the year I lost everything.”
That was when she became a cynic, according to Garelick, and when she developed her passion for her work:
When I realized that my business had a life, my life, and a face, my face, a voice, my own, and when I realized my work loved me, obeyed me, and responded to me, I gave myself over to it completely and I have had since then no greater love.Colette described her as a small black bull, a bull that lowered its head, charged into adversity, and just kept coming. Even as she mourned the loss of the man of her life, she started collecting lovers, by preference handsome, wealthy, or famous; among them were the most renowned playwright of the time, Henry Bernstein; a Russian grand duke; Igor Stravinsky; and finally the Duke of Westminster, with whom she had a lengthy affair. Even more important, in 1920 she launched the most significant of her innovations: her perfume, the famous Chanel No. 5.
To create it, she hired Ernest Beaux, the onetime perfumer to the Tsar: she told him exactly what she wanted, or to be more accurate, what she didn’t want: “I don’t want hints of roses, of lilies of the valley.” She wanted her perfume to smell like “a bouquet of abstract flowers.” Beaux did what she asked by combining “impossibly expensive” jasmine essence with a synthetic compound that “added a note of clean northern air.” A final stroke of genius: instead of giving her perfume a romantic or Oriental name, she named it after herself and her lucky number. The spectacular success of the scent cemented her fortune. But part of the credit for that success was due to her partnership with Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, two Jewish brothers from an Alsatian family, owners of the Parfumeries Bourjois, the biggest cosmetics company in France.
Chanel lacked the resources to produce and market her perfume on a large scale. Théophile Bader, the owner of Galeries Lafayette, one of the largest department stores in Paris, put her in touch with the Wertheimer brothers. They got on so well that both parties to the contract decided to use the same lawyer. According to the terms, 70 percent of the Parfums Chanel company went to the Wertheimers, who took responsibility for making and distributing the perfume; for his role as middleman Bader was given 20 percent; Chanel kept 10 percent. That 10 percent would make her one of the wealthiest women in the world. Of course, the Wertheimers, in spite of risks and investments, made more money than she did, which set off her fury against them.
Still, the first few years of their collaboration went smoothly. Chanel savored her success. Beginning in 1923, she became the mistress of the Duke of Westminster and discovered the pleasures of high life; her friendship with Misia Sert threw open the doors to the world of the avant-garde. She was dazzled by the Ballets Russes and became one of Diaghilev’s greatest supporters. When Chanel asked him about his financial situation, he explained that each season he was forced to go begging for funds. The Princesse de Polignac, née Winnaretta Singer, a wealthy heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune, had just given him 75,000 francs. Chanel replied on the spot. “She is a grand American lady, I am only a seamstress. Here’s 200,000.”
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