Coco Chanel concentrated on simplicity and practicality in the clothes she fashioned. She fashioned her own life, however, to be complicated, and she further complicated things by changing her stories (or perhaps her memories) of her past. Fashion columnist and novelist Justine Picardie has attempted to sort out Chanel's life in a satisfying biography, _Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life_ (It Books). Chanel displayed an unusual resilience, overcoming poverty and lack of parental guidance to revolutionize women's fashions, and perfume, and then retiring and starting up again as successfully as before. Picardie says that "... so much of Chanel remains enigmatic - the more you run after her, the more elusive her ghost becomes," and it is easy to see that with Chanel busy making her mark in fashion and making herself into a legend, keeping track of what's real and what's not is often impossible. Nonetheless, even if there are gaps we cannot completely close, Picardie's portrait with all of Chanel's contradictions nicely brings to life this unique artist, bon vivant, and brilliant businesswoman.
Chanel was born in 1883, though of course she did not give this date in her own accounting of her origins. She was placed into a convent, and the austerity of convent life found its way into her clothing designs. She worked afterwards as a seamstress but also as a cabaret singer. Somehow she encountered a roué who set her up as a mistress, along with other lovers, and during these years she learned skills in observation and in such essentials as horse riding. Her lovers set her up in her own Paris hat shop in 1909, and there were soon more than hats. Chanel fancied loose trousers and collarless jackets; the clothes proclaimed that women ought to be comfortable and confident in walking, riding horses, or driving. When Chanel said, "Extravagant things didn't suit me," she meant that she thought such things didn't suit any woman. Her perfume, brought out in 1921, made her an international name brand, but she regretted the agreement she had made with the manufacturer, and tried to use the anti-Jewish laws of the German occupation to claim the company for herself; she not only failed but she tarnished her reputation. She also took a Nazi lover, but got no punishment after the war. She had closed down her business when war was declared, saying, "This is not the time for fashion." She stayed out of clothing fashions, though she had a secure income from her international perfume sales. She was aghast when designers such as Christian Dior came out with extravagant fashions after the war, and disgusted with the reintroduction of corsets. She was seventy years old when she launched a comeback in 1954. The French press, perhaps because of her war record, sneered at her new line, which was a variation on the practical, attractive, and simple designs that she had done before. In the United States, however, the clothes were celebrated in an issue of _Life_ magazine: "Her styles hark back to her best of the Thirties." She became copied even in France, and said of Yves Saint-Laurent that he "... has excellent taste. The more he copies me, the better taste he displays." The Chanel look has never really gone out of fashion.
There was a Broadway musical about Chanel, and plenty of biographies and memoirs about her, and a couple of recent films, so interest in her extraordinary life has never subsided. Picardie's book packs many anecdotes, and lots of Chanel's own words (often funny or acid, and of course, often misleading) into a full biography. There are on these glossy pages plenty of pictures of Chanel at work, or at play on yachts or on the estates of those even richer than she, and pictures of the fashions that made her famous. Chanel succeeded with her outfits by maintaining creativity while keeping to essentials; Picardie has done just the same in a beautifully produced book.
