Customer Reviews

The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I read this book the way I read Ms. Karbo's book on Katharine Hepburn: greedily, with an eye to what was in it for me. I plundered every chapter heading: On Style, On Self-Invention, On Fearlessness... does this fit me? Could I/should I adopt this for my own? With some, like On Embracing the Moment, I thought, Oh sure, I've already got that; with others, like On Living Life on Your Own Terms, I was stopped short, and I thought Yeah! I've gotta cultivate that!

The other compelling thing about this book is that once you get past self-interest, you discover that Coco Chanel was an amazing woman. She invented modern fashion, and to do so had to rise above poverty and an actual orphanage. This was great material to draw on and reshape, which she did: Ms. Karbo says Chanel "lied about or embellished everything in her childhood...she had no respect for anything she didn't create, and that included her own history." Her trajectory included being a shopgirl, seamstress, cafe singer, and kept woman before she got to couturiere extraordinaire, and she owed nothing to anyone but herself. She was self-made and a revolutionary.

Karen Karbo tells Coco Chanel's story in a lively way and mines it for usable wisdom. I recommend this book for any fashionista, for sure, and for any francophile, and for any woman who loves the struggle. I especially like it for women who make things or strive to make things, like books or sculpture or businesses or anything else. The Gospel According to Coco Chanel is heartening and a lot of fun.

While this book does have a interesting tidbits on Coco Chanel, it was so annoying to read mostly about Karen Karbo (the author) and her personal struggles with whether she could afford to buy second-hand Chanel clothes on ebay (she assumes that readers can't afford Chanel either), what she (the author) studied in college, the status of her IRA (not good), and how she feels about the expensive things she can't afford (SHE feels qualified to call Warren Buffet a jelly-bean-eating fool?).

I struggled through the section, purportedly related to Chanel's "courage." According to Karbo, "In 1914, she was thirty-one, a few years past the age when women who were were neither married nor mothers were written off as 'redundant.' In this way things haven't changed much... To be thirty-one and unmarried is the same tragedy now as it was a hundred years ago."

Really?? not in New York... (what year was this book written??)

And I finally had enough when I read Karbo's description of the fact that Chanel never married: "While MANAGING TO MARRY is no guarantee that you know a single thing about the intracacies of loving and being loved, failing to make that final commitment suggests that somehow you never made it to the big leagues. If you're a woman, it suggests that something was deeply wrong with you, or, paradoxically, right with you; being too successful, too gorgeous, too smart and too sexy have also been known to send prospective suitors scampering down the mountainside..." (emphasis added)

First of all, this chapter teaches NOTHING about the Gospel According to Coco Chanel (the title of the book). Second, the author apparently sees marriage as something that women must "manage" to do--like "managing" to take a first prize in a contest? Third, remarkably the only acceptable excuse for Chanel not "managing to marry" is that because the woman is SOOOO great, men run away?? I don't know much about Chanel, but I believe it's possible that she may have CHOSEN not to marry--that Chanel "scampered away" from prospective suitors, and not the other way around.

In the absence of any evidence either way, why would the author just assume that no man wanted to marry Ms. Chanel?

According to the author, Chanel once said, "One marries for security and prestige. I'm not interested in all that."

Well, then, why write about her as if any potential suitors ran away??

If you want to know more about Karen Karbo and her financial struggles and opinions about modern marriage, perhaps you can read the rest of the book. If you're looking for a story about Coco Chanel, keep looking...

I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this book... I loved Ms. Karbo's previous book about Katherine Hepburn, but as a longtime -- and unabashed -- fan of Chanel, I was really looking forward to this book when I read about it a few months ago in Bazaar.

Like Chanel herself, Ms. Karbo does not disappoint. Her writing style is tremendous -- witty and fun, moving and historically insightful, she is like a terrific dinner party guest you want to stay for the weekend (and tell nonstop Coco Chanel stories, of course).

I picked this book up as an impulse on one of the front tables of B+N, and read it over the course of two days.

As a modern woman who loves Chanel, I am suggesting it to all my stylish girlfriends, it would make a perfect hostess gift.

And by the way, I HOPE that Karbo gets that real Chanel jacket she is dreaming of.

It was interesting reading about Chanel's life. I didn't realize that she really came from nothing and made herself into the most influential designer of all time.

The book was overall interesting, I did have a problem with the writing style. I am no literary critic, and am not somebody who normally picks up on these types of things, but I thought his book was poorly written. I don't think an editor could have even fixed it. It read like the author's thoughts were in a million different directions. None of the chapters made cohesive sense. The author also tried to create these rules of living like Coco Chanel, yet, none of the rules had any solid facts to back them up, it was almost like it was only the authors opinion of life, rather than facts based on how Coco Chanel really lived.

I recommend reading a book about Coco Chanel since she is an interesting woman, but I do not recommend reading this book.

Coco Chanel couldn't be making a star turn in media at a better time.

Start with Anne Fontaine's film "Coco Before Chanel", coming to American theaters this fall after dazzling audiences in Europe. It's the right film about Chanel: the early years. And though the facts are as murky about pre-Chanel Chanel as about the fashion icon, the theme --- a woman born without advantages, making her way in the world --- is more universal.

But the better reason for women --- and the men who love them --- to pay attention to Chanel is because she was a cheerleader for self-sufficiency, in good times and bad. So skip over the fashion. Consider only the politics. I mean: ours.

Is this a great time to be a woman in America? I'm not so sure. More American women may now be going to college than men, but when they graduate, they're still looking at salaries as much as 30% lower than men get for the same work. The anti-choice movement, always noisy, has upped the volume --- and the violence. And it seems that a sizable number of American men won't be happy until all women are homebound mothers, wearing the equivalent of the burqa.

No writer has a better understanding of what it means to be Chanel and what it means to be a woman who admires Chanel than Karen Karbo, author of the short (240 pages) and addictive The Gospel According to Coco Chanel. Karbo is the granddaughter of Emilia Karbowski, known as "Luma of California" for the clothes she designed for the wives of movie moguls in the 1950s. Which is to say: Karen Karbo is real and unashamed of it: "I am the average consumer." She looks for Chanel jackets on eBay. And she writes as if she's having a conversation with a close friend over double-shot lattes.

Who is Chanel to Karbo?

Chain-smoker. Workaholic, though she could stay in bed all morning with a newspaper. Leo, with a Pisces moon. Born nobody. Fell in love once, but not again. Her bigger love: money. "Money was more than her security blanket. It was her ongoing victory lap." And restrained: "Even though Chanel insisted on having the best of everything, she didn't insist on having everything."

Are you hearing "Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves" in the background? You should be.

Karbo delivers a mini-biography, with perceptive and amusing commentary:

"She looked like the girl at school who conned you into breaking the rules with her, then let you take all the blame."

"Her childhood was the Belle Époque version of a country-and-western song. The only thing she lacked was a dead dog and a wasting disease."

"She compulsively lied about her past, and then lied about having lied, and then disavowed the lie about the lie."

Along the way, great trivia abounds. Yes, French women wore hats adorned with feathers --- but did you know that, in 1911, in France, 300 million birds were killed to provide those feathers?

And, because Karbo really is your new best friend, she even labels the punch line: "Cut to the chase, don't waste time doing stuff that seems essential to your life and business, just because other people do it."

Just so. The fashion is merely fascinating, a means to an end. The life lessons? For a woman trying to find a safe haven in America, this book delivers more wisdom --- and wit --- per page than Dr. Phil will dispense in a lifetime.

I wish this book had given more real insight or information about the genius of Coco Chanel. Instead of being treated to deeper understanding about Coco's life or genius, the reader is constantly interrupted and distracted by the author's babblings about herself and her income, or lack thereof, her own lame attempts at humor, shopping and sewing. If I had wanted to read a book about her, I would have bought one entitled, The Gospel According to Karen. A waste of time and money.

Possibly the worst book I have ever read. How could something of this short order get published?? Complete waste of time. The author made way too many inferences and allegations into the life of Chanel and somehow made every example and so-called maxim an auto-biographical path towards her own stunted femininity, which could use a few spritzes of Chanel No. 5. It is clear Karbo holds some deep-seated and bizzare grievences with Chanel, her clothing, women of a particular work ethic and French culture in general. I expected a light-hearted read, the cover has a stick-figure cartoon sketch, and it is only couture after all, but was irritated by the author's constant put-downs and kitchsy personal anecdotes.

This book is not what it promised. The life lessons are sparse and not well organized. Half of the book is the author pinning to own Channel or ranting about the woes of suburban mom. The parts of the book that focused on Coco were good but not enough to be worth the price. I wouldn't recommend this book. If you want life lessons from Coco read a true biography.

Underwhelmed. I purchased this book to learn more about Coco Chanel but ended up getting too much information on the author, who I was not interested in hearing about.

This book at times turned into diatribes that weren't about Chanel as much as they were Karbo's opinions on various aspects of Chanel's life. So in that manner, it included much too much Karbo gospel and not Chanel's. And what nerve she had to complain about Chanel or anyone else not "doing anything" as the world was preparing for another world war. Doesn't she or anyone else know that's what's happening now and few, including her, are doing anything about it? She even stated not to ever trust the press, so why isn't she or anyone else looking to other (international) news sources that warn us of this fact? Talk about hypocrisy. Anyway, bottom line, the only reason I gave this two stars is because it led me to get a glimpse of the Mademoiselle enough to want to read a biography on her. So if you too want to learn more about the amazing woman who was Coco Chanel, skip this and choose instead to read a biography by someone who appreciated Chanel and did enough research to make the read about her and not about the author.