Lisa's Chaney's `intimate life' of Coco Chanel is terrific, a tour de force that places Chanel in the multiple contexts that informed her life choices, her career and her loves. Sympathetic, even-handed and frank, the book traces the life of a much discussed, and much mythologized, 20th century figure, bringing her into focus as a woman, and treating her faults and her achievements as part of a desire for security and satisfaction, if not for self-knowledge. Chanel is not self knowing, nor is she always just, charitable or fair. Her strong desires -- to make a mark, to be someone, to fend off competitors, to come out on top, to win and to succeed -- inform Chanel's trajectory through life, but her desires are much more complex than this list suggests, rooted (in part) in her transient early life, the wayward father who abandoned her, and her subsequent education as a seamstress (and presumably as a highly disciplined worker) by the nuns who ran the orphanage in which she and her sister were brought up. Chaney reports Chanel as saying that she needn't necessarily have been a clothes designer. It seems clear that designing and making clothes was merely one of the routes that a pretty, clever and creative French woman from her class, educated in the way that she was, and in need of work that could give her identity and security, could take. What is also clear is her extraordinary talent was not merely for the look and cut of hats (first) and dresses (second). Her real talent was to articulate deeper desires in material form -- the desires of the age in which she lived, and in particular, the desire of women to emerge from the closet of the corset, and into modernity, through the looks she created for them. Chaney credits Chanel with disseminating many of the stylistic innovations of the 20th century that women now take for granted -- short hair, trousers, handbags with shoulder straps. Whether she invented these things is less important than the idea that she systematised them as a look, and created, again and again, clear, clean, elegant, sophisticated lines for women's clothes that flattered women's bodies, and flattered women's sense of who they wanted to be. That Chanel's life had its ups and its downs is an understatement, and Chaney treats with great care Chanel's war-time behaviour, putting into a wider political context, but never understating or excusing it. Chanel was one of many who collaborated with the enemy, and the many stories and analyses of that period remain ongoing subjects of discussion and reflection. Chaney is wary of oversimplification, what she is able to do is to set Chanel's behaviour within the frame of her lifetime approach -- always passionate, always hard working, always, endlessly, creative, and at the same time, harsh, self serving and at times foolish and cruel. This is Chaney's third biography. It seems to me, having read each of her books, that she is alert to and interested in the lives of people like Elizabeth David, J. M. Barrie and Coco Chanel (so far) who invent and reinvent themselves. Each of them has an intuitive grasp of what the public needs and wants, of what comes next, and of what kinds of desires are at work in their own age -- and they each express these in ways that are not within the mainstream professions of the age in which they live, but in new ways. As well as enjoying this book very much -- a page turner indeed -- I look forward to what this imaginative and intelligent author will write next.
