Chanel, Gabrielle
Gabrielle Chanel, orphaned at an early age, was raised by nuns. Gabrielle wanted to be a singer. She debuted in a concert cafe. Each of the two songs Gabrielle sang contained the word Coco. The name, which was given to her by the audience, stuck for more than eighty years. Her singing career, however, did not. Coco's voice was limited and work did not come easily. After her short attempt at a singing career, Coco Chanel quit performing to begin work as a hat maker.
Coco Chanel went from designing hats to designing daring new fashions for the women of the 1920's. Her rebellious styles liberated women from the past and became the symbol of modernity.
In 1921, Chanel introduced her first ...
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a feeling of hidden luxury rather than ostentation are just two examples of how her taste and sense of style overlap with today's fashion.
Chanel would not have defined herself as a feminist--in fact, she consistently spoke of femininity rather than of feminism--yet her work is unquestionably part of the liberation of women. She threw out a life jacket, as it were, to women not once but twice, during two distinct periods decades apart: the 1920s and the '50s. She not only appropriated styles, fabrics and articles of clothing that were worn by men but also, beginning with how she dressed herself, appropriated sports clothes as part of the language of fashion. One can see how her style evolved out of necessity and defiance. She couldn't afford the fashionable clothes of the period--so she rejected them and made her own, using, say, the sports jackets and ties that were everyday male attire around the racetrack, where she was climbing her first social ladders.
It's not by ...
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the sky and on the road."
It is fitting, somehow, that Chanel was often photographed holding a cigarette or standing in front of her famous Art Deco wall of mirrors. Fashion tends to involve a good dose of smoke and mirrors, so it should come as no surprise that Gabrielle Chanel's version of her life involved a multitude of lies, inventions, cover-ups and revisions. But as Prada said to me: "She was really a genius. It's hard to pin down exactly why, but it has something to do with her wanting to be different and wanting to be independent."
Certainly her life was unpredictable. Even her death--in 1971, at the age of 87 in her private quarters at the Ritz Hotel--was a plush ending that ...
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"Chanel, Gabrielle." Essayworld.com. February 21, 2008. Accessed April 26, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Chanel-Gabrielle/79374.
"Chanel, Gabrielle." Essayworld.com. February 21, 2008. Accessed April 26, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Chanel-Gabrielle/79374.
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