Coco Chanel’s secret

In general, people always say stick to what you love and it will take you anywhere. For Gabrielle Coco Chanel, her love of powerful men and acute desire to transgress her lower-class roots took her, and effectively, Chanel, to where it stands today. Chanel is an international powerhouse in Couture Fashion, whose influence and appeal as a world- wide brand is boundless. Anyone who truly loves Fashion, will look and find that it can take you on an unimagined journey into the vault of History. Coco’s personal journey, which puts her in the context of two Major World Wars, is a story worth writing about.

As human beings we tend to have an innate curiosity which compels us to delve into ‘Great’ people’s lives; so that we no longer differentiate between the Public and the Private. This perhaps seems more natural today with advances in media. For Coco Chanel her controversial affairs with High Profile men, including a High ranking Nazi official, meant that her personal life was thrust into the spotlight in an extraordinary way. This today isn’t a very well known fact, which makes it all the more intriguing. It is also evidence that Coco Chanel and the company comfortably survived the backlashes and criticism experienced which dictated Coco’s fifteen years of exile. She seemed to be exceptionally skilled in manipulating her personal circumstances, so that her public persona would embody exactly what she needed it to.

Even today, there is a common misconception that Coco Chanel was herself born into aristocracy. This is what she needed people to believe, and yet to take away her humble upbringing would undermine the extent of her achievement as she proved to be an extremely admirable and thrilling example of a very strong woman from her youth to her very final days. It is the very upbringing she took pains to deny, which allows us to understand her taste in men, clothes and even her career path. I think it is interesting that she chose to pursue a life dedicated to fashion. Dressing up is often a tool for escapism; clothes allow you to be anyone you want to be.

Chanel is often hailed as the label which actually established a world of High Fashion.Coco Chanel’s outlook was modern: in her time, she was thinking about the duality of ‘comfortable yet stylish’ clothes for women, which is at the forefront of both High Street and Couture fashion today.

She incorporated the idea of ‘Simplistic but Bold’ fashion into the design and packaging of her infamous No.5 perfume, which is reportedly sold every thirty seconds. Often described as a Feminist, there was method to Coco’s minimalist designs. She believed that females would be liberated by dressing in a ‘mannish’ fashion. She achieved this, for example, by replacing the corset with comfortable and casual clothing.

It is important to emphasise the personality and passion behind the clothing. In fact Coco Chanel is well remembered for her quotes, believing that “fashion is in the air, born upon the wind. One intuits it. It is in the sky and on the road”. Fashion was something that seemed to come naturally to her. She was an embodiment of all that was new and inspiring. For those well-acquainted with Coco Chanel, the image of her they often have in their minds is a lady with that short, straight bobbed haircut, which was so dramatic and striking for her time. This hair-cut actually materialised because she accidentally scorched her hair with a curling iron before going to the opera in Paris. She apparently just went with the change and it took off, forging a major trend.

Coco’s upbringing was one of poverty to the extent that she is believed to have been born one of two illegitimate daughters, to the travelling salesman Albert Chanel and his lover in France. When she was six her mother died. Abandoned by her father, she was forced to spend seven years in an orphanage where she learnt the trade of seamstress. In pursuit of success and acceptance into the kind of High Society which could afford to buy her hat designs and clothes she was careful to disguise this. Interestingly, it has been noted that her birth certificate conveniently involved a misspelling whereby her name was spelt as ‘Chasnel’. Therefore, as few would have been able to pronounce her last name, it would have helped her dramatically to eradicate her ‘less than desirable’ background in the course of her life. By the time of the First World War, Coco had become a well established figure, mixing in circles with an artistic elite, such as Picasso. Stravinsky has been cited as one of her many lovers. Her biographer, Janet Wallach, has labelled her as being an inveterate snob throughout her life.

Coco became the mistress of a wealthy Playboy called Arthur Capel who enabled her in setting up a millinery shop in Paris. It is through these Powerful figures that she gained the appropriate clientele. Chanel’s perfume really took off when she became involved with Nazi officer Pierre Wertheimer, who was rumoured to be the first of her Nazi lovers. He owned 70 percent of the company and his family still control perfume sales today.

The Second World War had a huge impact on fashion internationally and Coco Chanel was not excluded from this; it affected her brand both directly and indirectly. The German occupation of France from 1940-44 put the development of Paris’s own haute couture to a halt. It was the start of British and American fashion as both countries were forced to develop their own manufacturing industry, styles and cultivate their own designers. Coco was forced to close her boutiques in 1939 and served as a nurse during the Second World War. The Hotel Ritz remained her home even during the Nazi occupation of Paris, during which time she was criticised for Anti-Semitism, homophobia and for having a controversial affair with Nazi officer and intelligence agent Hans Guther Von Incklage. Subsequently she was forced to go into exile in Switzerland until she returned in 1954 and was able to continue her career, paving the way for fashion today.

Coco Chanel escaped imprisonment and public humiliation. Her main biographer Wallach has hinted that this perhaps can be attributed to Winston Churchill who had been a close friend to her, early in her career. She was buried in 1970 and her grave is surrounded by five lions. Somehow she seemed to carve out a life for herself, so that she was always surrounded by grandeur and ever triumphant. Coco Chanel was a feisty women who is notorious in her adamant response to accusations about her Nazi affiliations, ‘At my age, when a man wants to sleep with you, you don’t ask to see his passport’. She was a woman who determined her own fate.

By: Kerrie Forde