Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life
Justine Picardie has spent the last decade puzzling over the truth about Coco Chanel, attempting to peel away the accretions of romance and lies. In this critically acclaimed, bestselling biography she shares the history of the incredible woman who created the way we look now.Coco Chanel was an extraordinary inventor - she conjured up the little black dress, bobbed hair, trousers for women, contemporary chic, best-selling perfumes, and the most successful fashion brand of all time - but she also invented herself, fashioning the myth of her own life with the same dexterity as her couture.While Chanel was supreme innovator and vendor of all things elegant and beautiful, what lies beneath her own glossy myth is far darker. Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation.Justine Picardie brings the mysterious Gabrielle Chanel out of hiding, to celebrate her great achievements. She examines Chanel's enduring afterlife, as well as her remarkable life, uncovering the consequences of what she covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and legend, yet keeping intact the real fabric of her past.
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Sleek. Chic. Notoriously guarded. Welcome to the secret world of Gabrielle Chanel.
The story of Chanel begins with an abandoned child, as lost as a girl in a dark fairytale. Unveiling remarkable new details about Gabrielle Chanel’s early years in a convent orphanage, and her flight into unconventional adulthood, Justine Picardie explores what lies beneath the glossy surface of a mythic fashion icon.
Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation. An authoritative account, based on personal observations and interviews with Chanel’s last surviving friends, employees and relatives, it also unravels her coded language and symbols, and traces the influence of her formative years on her legendary style.
Feared and revered by the rest of the fashion industry, Coco Chanel died in 1971, at the age of 87, but her legacy lives on. Drawing upon her unprecedented research, Justine Picardie brings Gabrielle Chanel out of hiding and uncovers the consequences of what she covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and myth, in a story that reveals the true heart of fashion.
‘Justine Picardie’s thoughtful and beautifully illustrated biography illuminates the iconoclast who might justifiably be said to have invented the twentieth-century woman’
Times Literary Supplement
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 This revised edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
© Justine Picardie 2010, 2017
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 Cover photograph © Apis/Sygma/Corbis
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Justine Picardie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN 9780007318995
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780007346295 Version 2017-04-24
‘I imposed black;it’s still goingstrong today,for black wipes outeverything else around.’
Coco Chanel
Contents
I am writing this at the desk of Gabrielle Chanel, in her private apartment above the couture salon of the business she founded in 1910, in Rue Cambon. This is a place I first came to many years ago, not long after the death of my sister Ruth in 1997. The story that follows is not about my sister, but she is part of it, as is my mother, who married my father wearing a little black dress, cut from a Chanel pattern, eight months before I was born. That dress took on a talismanic quality when I was old enough to wear it as a young woman; it seemed to speak of elegance, but also of rebellion (for to marry in black is to break a powerful taboo). And Chanel appeared to be significant in other ways, too – for like legions before me, I came to associate her name with the scent of womanhood; in my case, via the flask of Chanel N°5 in my mother’s bedroom, and the vial of Chanel N°19 that her mother, my grandmother, gave me as a birthday present when I turned 18. Thus Chanel was written into our lives, but with a light touch (a spray of perfume; the feel of black satin against naked skin).
And then my beloved sister died of breast cancer at the age of 33, when her longed-for twins had just reached their second birthdays. In the aftermath, I felt as if my heart was cracked and might never mend again; for Ruth was my best friend, my comrade since childhood, the girl I had always sought to protect, a lifelong companion whose journey I had shared for so long.
