10 interesting facts about Coco Chanel
On August 19, 1883, she was born that revolutionized the fashion world, created a cult fragrance and answered the eternal female question “What to wear” by designing a little black dress. We present 10 interesting facts about the great Mademoiselle!
Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was a real rebel. She did not like her own childhood, she rewrote her biography again, from scratch, inventing for herself as many as three loving aunts, a caring dad (in fact, after the death of her mother, the girl grew up in an orphanage at the monastery, she saw her father the last time she was 12. - Approx. Woman.ru). Then came the turn of a new name (in her youth, Gabrielle performed in a cabaret, her repertoire included two favorite songs - Ko Ko Ri Ko and Qui Qua Vu Coco: this is how the nickname appeared. - Approx. Woman.ru), and it seems that Chanel succeeded to do what women over twenty-five dream of: they say she “cut off” her real age by 10 years.
“Coco Chanel told me: “The legendary man is doomed to dissolve himself in the myth – and thereby strengthen the myth.” She herself did just that. I invented everything for myself - a family, a biography, a date of birth and even a name, ”said Salvador Dali once.
The nuns taught her to sew and embroider - you must admit, this is clearly not enough to reshape ideas about women's fashion and women's rights - but Coco did it anyway.
She had the audacity to use jersey, a material that was considered exclusively masculine, to create her legendary costumes. With the advent of elegant outfits from Chanel, women felt free for the first time in several centuries - she dressed women in trousers that gave them freedom and speed of movement.
“Women wear perfume given to them by others. But they must wear those that they themselves like! - Coco claimed and created Chanel No.5. By the way, even the bottle design of the cult fragrance has become another attack on masculinity. Deprived of any pretentiousness - smooth and flat, as if masculine - today it takes its place among the exhibits of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The perfume itself is another, as today's psychologists would say, a stylish way out of the psychological comfort zone. At that time (it was 1921) it was considered defiant to “wear” a fragrance that had more than one note. As a rule, the perfumes of decent women smelled of some one flower - rose, lily of the valley, etc.
Mademoiselle had her own ideas about what a woman's scent should be. According to legend, perfumer Ernest Bo (an immigrant from Russia, by the way) made a mistake with the concentration of aldehydes - as a result, a complex fragrance consisting of more than 80 ingredients was obtained. Thus ended the era of mono perfumes. The iconic fragrance Chanel No.5 is still one of the top ten best-selling perfumes in the world today.
Chanel was the first and only couturier who managed to find the right answer to the eternal question “What to wear?”: A little black dress is a universal outfit for almost all occasions.
In 1926, American Vogue did not fail to report that the popularity of LBD (the abbreviation LBD is the first letters of the English little black dress. - Approx. Woman.ru) is equal to the popularity of the Ford car: and this was a real recognition!
The era of self-made woman began with her: Coco proved to the whole world that a woman is not a helpless creature, unable to even dress herself, not a fashionable male accessory, but a person who can earn money with her own mind and talent. Mademoiselle, who had been playing all her life on a "foreign" - primordially male field - nevertheless did it in a very feminine way, categorically and elegantly at the same time, made the fair sex representatives, if not believe in themselves, then at least doubt that a woman should spend your whole life in the kitchen - pregnant and barefoot.
Did you know that ... Koko liked to repeat that she rummaged through the wardrobes of her lovers in search of new ideas. Her creations are a kind of creative report on changes in her personal life. So, during the period of close contact with the Diaghilev ballet and passion for Prince Dmitry Romanov, cousin of Nicholas II, Russian motives were traced. During an affair with the Duke of Westminster, the richest man in Great Britain, they are English. Chanel never drew sketches, she worked "live" - on fashion models, because she believed that the dress should move, and instead of a pencil she used only tailor's scissors and pins. For her, “a pair of scissors and a few precise hand movements were enough for luxury itself to emerge from a pile of shapeless matter.” She dressed the rich and famous - the wives of financial bigwigs and popular actresses, and was friends with creative people - Serta, Diaghilev (note Woman.ru: Diaghilev ... was afraid of Mademoiselle: he first met a woman who helped him and did not demand anything in return. She somehow lent a large amount of money to Sergei for the production and asked very much not to tell anyone about it), Stravinsky, Picasso, Dali, Cocteau, Max Jacob, Christian Berard, Jean Renoir and many others. Mademoiselle was the first to mix jewelry and jewelry. The fact is that she did not like “stones for the sake of stones - large, like a cork from a decanter, diamonds that serve as a sign of the wealth of the husband or lover of the women who wear them. I do not like jewels for the sake of jewels, diamond earrings or strings of pearls that are taken out of the safe to show in them in the evening and then put back in the safe and which most often belong to some joint-stock company. All of these are jewels-that-can-sell-in-a-crisis.” And at the same time, she did not consider wearing jewelry to be something reprehensible: “There should be a lot of jewelry. If they are real, it smacks of boastfulness and bad taste. I make fake and very beautiful ones. They are even prettier than the real ones. “I never aspired to have money,” Coco argued, “but I aspired to independence.” And this was true - although Mademoiselle's start-up capital belonged to her patron, however, soon, thanks to a combination of talent, perseverance and luck, she really became independent, and then a very wealthy person. Mademoiselle Chanel was a somnambulist. During one of her bouts of moonwalking at the Ritz, she not only cut a suit out of a bathrobe, but also attached a flower cut from a white towel to the lapel. Coco has never been married (they say that she refused the Duke of Westminster under the pretext that there can be as many duchesses as you like, and there is only one Mademoiselle Chanel. - Approx. Woman.ru) and fundamentally did not finish the demonstration of the collection with a wedding dress. “I can’t make women pay before whom I kneel to straighten their skirts,” Coco grumbled and did not take money from famous actresses: for example, Ingrid Bergman or Romy Schneider, who dressed with her. Chanel also dressed Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy-Onassis. Every morning, Coco Chanel, who basically spent the night at the Ritz, returned to her apartment after making a preliminary call: she asked her assistants to make the salon smell of Chanel No.5 perfume by the time she arrived. “Customers will come to the smell,” she was sure. Mademoiselle began her working day in the trail of her favorite fragrance. The iconic fragrance Chanel No.5 is still one of the top ten best-selling perfumes in the world today. In 1954, Koko said that she was tired of carrying reticules in her hands, which, in addition to everything else, had the tendency to constantly get lost. The following year, she presented the fashion world with an original solution to the problem - a quilted Chanel 2.55 bag (again, quite prosaic things are hidden behind the digital code, or more precisely, the date the model was created: 2 is February, and 55 is the year. - Approx. Woman.ru) on a long chain, which is convenient to wear on the shoulder. What exactly inspired Mademoiselle - jockey jackets, stained glass windows of the abbey in which she grew up, or sofa cushions in her apartment? We can only guess.
