276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life

£13.5£27.00Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Chanel's circle includes some of those in the Hemingway-Fitzgerald orbit, but, in this book, these American ex-pats hardly figure. There is only one mention of the Fitzgerald's, a passing reference at that.

Now what do i know? all of the above and a little bit more...yes i admit all the info on her love life was very fun to read...the rumored nazi preference, not so much...but still, as in all bios one must read things with a grain of salt...no matter how much we may agree or not with a choice in a person´s life, we werent really there and neither was the author to know exactly what happened that day in that place.This book gives a very honest picture of Chanel as both as artist and a person. I used to study fashion so I did know quite a bit about her prior to reading this book but I definitely learned a lot more. It’s very indepth. As well as talking about Chanel, the author gives fantastic overviews of the time periods and the attitudes especially in relation to fashion which were popular then. I think Chaney really did get into the emotional complexity of Chanel. She showed the vulnerability that was present inside a woman who always had pressure to show a strong front. She certainly had that strong side but she also had the vulnerability side and Chaney showed very well in this book how torturing it was for her to keep that front up at all times due to pressure in the industry to keep her brand’s image but also from herself to do the same for fear it would come over as weakness. I mean thinking of the time period, it would have been hard for her to express that. Even now, a lot of people wish you would keep your vulnerability to yourself but certainly now there is more openness to listening to the pain and insecurities of other people whereas in Chanel’s time I think it would have been seen as weakness so I understood why that worried her so much. Lisa Chaney suggests that Arthur Capel may have committed suicide. I had wondered this, since the accounts of the accident, and the film portrayal of the scene would suggest whiplash and not a burned body. From the newly discovered letters, and his continuing relationship with Chanel after his marriage, he was under enormous strain.

Chanel was born into poverty in the French countryside; her mother died, and her father abandoned her to an orphanage. After a brief stint as a shopgirl, Chanel worked for a few years as a café singer. She later became associated with a few wealthy men and in 1913, with financial assistance from one of them, Arthur (“Boy”) Capel, opened a tiny millinery shop in Deauville, France, where she also sold simple sportswear, such as jersey sweaters. Within five years her original use of jersey fabric to create a “poor girl” look had attracted the attention of influential wealthy women seeking relief from the prevalent corseted styles. Faithful to her maxim that “luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury,” Chanel’s designs stressed simplicity and comfort and revolutionized the fashion industry. By the late 1920s the Chanel industries were reportedly worth millions and employed more than 2,000 people, not only in her couture house but also in a perfume laboratory, a textile mill, and a jewelry workshop.She also saw the need to create a mystique about a product. Choosing the fifth formulation of a perfume created in Grasse in 1921, she spritzed Chanel No5 around the high-tone restaurants of Paris and sent out bottles to celebrities, before launching it with her name on the bottle. She is not famous today for having an affair with Duke of Westminster or a Russian Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. She is famous today for building a Fashion Empire. But after reading this book you might mistakenly think that fashion was secondary, tiny part of her life while her main occupation was looking for the next high profile lover jumping from one scandal to another.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment