Stop Idolizing Coco Chanel : a shocking history of theft

in reality the thing that everyone can agree upon is that she told lies as to what her past was and potentially more Coco Chanel is likely the most famous and controversial fashion designer of the 20th century she has numerous books and movies about her life and even a musical that starred Ka Catherine heurn today she is held up as a pinnacle of class elegance and the modern woman but all the accounts of her life and her accomplishments hold wildly different stories in reality the thing that everyone can agree upon is that she told lies as to what her past was and potentially more the biographies that did come out during her lifetime were incredibly limited She interviewed for quite a few and then refused to let them be published so it's really only recently that a lot of information has come out about her so is the modern version of Coco Chanel anywhere near the real version well to start it off with one of her most famous quotes before you leave the house look in the mirror and take one thing off or some variation thereof likely wasn't even from her and for that matter I honestly can't even find anyone that it did actually come from it seems to have just popped up out of the ether in the late 1990s one of the early versions of it was attributed to Michael Kors so as to her saying that quote I don't think it ever happened and things like that put into question just about everything we know about Chanel what is actually true and real versus just made up she has dozens of fashion items attri uted to her influence creation and inspiration some of them are more than a little bit questionable things like trench coats which were named after the soldiers in World War I that were wearing them in the trenches definitely not an invention by Chanel but there are some of those claims that seem to have really taken hold I see her regularly being given the credit for things like jersey knit and sportswar or simply the little black dress even Carl Lagerfeld who eventually took over being the main designer for the Chanel company is quoted is basically saying no she didn't invent these things she didn't create them she got inspiration from so many places and frankly didn't care where it came from and didn't bother to credit anyone it just made for a really good story but is it really just a good story because the reality is if she didn't come up with these things someone else did and she took the credit from those people and really should we even be giving her the credit in the first place because as I noted she is potentially one of the most controversial fashion designers of the entire Century for a reason so I decided to start looking into a lot of these claims of her inventions of different styles I mostly dealt with American articles just because that's what I have available to me in terms of the resources and the language but I did also go back to a lot of books that have been written about her life more recently which do delve into French records as well in general I do want to know these American articles are going to be much friendlier to Chanel than a lot of the French articles reportedly were in no small part because the American newspapers really love to report on the fashion royalty in different places over in Europe and Chanel was nothing if not a very skilled influencer long before we had the concept of that term she knew how to Market herself Market her lifestyle and Market her brand in an astonishingly controlled way and honestly she ran such a successful PR campaign that she has continued to fool nearly everyone long after her death Gabrielle Chanel was born in Western France in 1883 and she grew up with a rather tumultuous Family Life her mother and siblings were around when she was younger her father was in and out quite a bit she moved into a Convent around age 12 she learned how to sew there and then eventually took up being a seamstress when she grew up and left the convent she also took up singing in nightclubs at the time and it's through this that she likely met some of the really important people in her early life she had a very long string of relationships through her life she was was never married but she was in relationships with a lot of very wealthy and very powerful men and she utilized these connections quite well the first of which was etan balson she started a relationship with him in her mid-20s and he helped financially support her moving into her own business so he initially allowed her to start running a millonary business selling hats out of his Parisian apartment and in addition to financially supporting her connected her with so many wealthy and fashionable women to be customers so she started off very much on the right foot it was around the same time that she met boy Capel who would end up being likely the most impactful relationship that she had in her life he encouraged her to Branch out and in 1913 she opened up a store in doville France which is on the northwest coast it's a lovely Seaside town full of very fashionable people at the time Not only was this a good location for her in a normal day but with World War I looming a lot of the very wealthy people who lived in Paris were looking to to get out of the city as war was getting closer and closer and many of them went to places like doville and she utilized the fact that not only could she Garner the attention and the interest of the people there but Doo was becoming a very popular place to report on and she and her young fashionable friends would go about the town making sure to make a spectacle of themselves and they would consistently end up in magazines and newspapers being reported on with the latest fashions coming out of doville the latest reports of the very wealthy not unlike the paparazzi of today so she knew how to get her image out there very early on she at this time started picking up wearing a lot more casual clothing she was literally just pulling clothing out of boy capel's closet she was getting inspiration from the sweaters that the fishermen were wearing in town and altering and changing these styles to fit her more casual Seaside sporty attire she was not producing clothing for sale so much yet but that would change pretty rapidly 1914 Jean Rodier who was a seller of fabric had an excess of wool Jersey now Jersey Net had been a very popular item in fashion for a long time silk Jersey was very common when it came to external fashionable garments however wool Jersey was more often used for things like undergarments in June of 1914 reports that pret was going to popularize Jersey meant that there was a sudden Demand with fabric manufacturers and if it didn't pan out that Jersey suddenly became popular that month later that summer meant that there would have been a great excess of Jersey Net this presented a great opportunity for Chanel to buy a large quantity of fabric at a less expensive price and she started making up her own Styles out of this wool Jersey in 1914 women's were magazine reported as interesting sweaters that Embrace new features using wool Jersey they were shaped like a popular midi blouse of the time they were worn belted and they had a 6-in opening with buttons down the front this style was based off of a lot of fashionable designs at the time just simply made out of a fabric that was less typical Vogue also picked up this fashion the same year noting it as a midi sweater of fine Jersey notably both of these mentions are in much larger articles talking about Fashions coming out of doville and out of France at the time so they did not deserve an entire article unto themselves but simply an aside in the changing fashion that was happening in the 19s because it was changing rapidly of course just a few years earlier the Fashions were a lot more constrictive lengthy and much more formal but by the time we reached 1913 and 1914 things were changing dramatically and they were only going to take off even more so with World War I so the world of fashion was becoming much more casual and comfortable and practical pretty much overnight and Chanel was poised to be at the right place at the right time for this despite her claims that she was the one wearing completely unusual clothing for the era when everyone else was still in long skirts that swept the ground and formal corsets and uncomfortable dresses the reality is she was one in many who were making dramatic changes and Jersey became a large part of this as of 1915 other companies picked up on the wool Jersey idea and they started making it more fashionable and formal longv and Jenny two major designers of the day took wool Jersey suits and embroidered them in order to make them more High fashioned and that would be appropriate to sell in Paris Chanel continued to make more sporting and seaside appropriate Styles in part because that's what she was comfortable wearing and she knew perfectly well that she made those things very fashionable it didn't necessarily work on every single person who wore them but she knew how to take everyday items and dress them in a way where she was the center of attention she herself was a very noticeable person and she took advantage of that she didn't need really fancy expensive clothing to be able to show off Paul por another famous fashion designer of the era called her Fashions luxurious poverty meaning that they were made out of incredibly cheap materials but were being sold at not so cheap prices which meant that Chanel was able to make a lot of money very quickly but it only took a couple of years before before Jersey had really already hit its peak and the interest of the novelty had well worn Away by 1917 women's wear had mentioned that Jersey was dropping off even for Chanel and by 1919 Chanel herself said that she has now turned from sports clothes and started looking for other fashionable options which brings us to the story of the little black dress well we tend to think of the 1920s Styles as Flappers the flapper was a very specific type of young woman who lived a very specific type of lifestyle and was not indicative of the larger fashion trends that were happening throughout that decade and there were a lot of different Trends happening for that matter there was not one singular Universal style for the entire 10 years it changed consistently throughout but there were a few major moments that did occur to really Inspire the style in 1922 Victor margarite released a book called Laro and it was a very scandalous book about a young woman at in fact it was so scandalous that he had his Legion of Honor revoked it definitely caught a lot of attention and one of the fashion designing houses of the day pet took notice of this and named one of the dresses that they released L it didn't take off immediately but as the main designer there lady Charlotte started wearing it out and about everyone took notice and by 1923 media was absolutely full of mentions of lagas the fact that this dress was going to be the thing that really influenced the coming years the new Styles and was going to be the thing that everyone was essentially riffing off of for for a long while and it really was Chanel herself however claimed that she was the inspiration for the changes in this era in fact she specifically claimed that she invented the little black dress and popularized the color black saying before me no one would have dared dress in Black the reality was black just like today was a standard of fashionable Styles it was what you purchased and wore when you wanted something that was classic and wouldn't go out of style and it was something that was already immensely popular for day wear and evening wear and just about every situation French women in particular were known to really love wearing black it wasn't just something for saleswomen and stenographers it was something that was considered very fashionable even if it was a fairly plain dress as for the term little black dress that I can find back at least as far as 1913 which makes perfect sense little and black are just adjectives to dress so it's not necessarily a phrase so much as just a description at that point but by the time we reach 1924 that changes very quickly in that year alone I found so many references to a little black dress Kalo had a little black dress that took off Mary pford did an interview where she wore a little black dress from lval worth also was mentioned as having a little black dress just designer after designer in the early 1920s was noted as having a little black dress for the season in fact the term little dress had become so popular that there was an entire article devoted to the fact that that it was basically just an afternoon dress but a little bit more simple and that was the easiest way to define it there were lots of designers mentioned in that same article that were rather famous for Designing little dresses Chanel was not one of the ones mentioned and by this point black had honestly become the most common color in things like fashion displays in the windows of stores was considered a sign of class no different than it is today black is considered the classic color as for Chanel's claim to have invented the little black dress the one that came up in all of my searches came came out in 1926 so well after the other designers had already been making their own little black dresses and this dress is pictured in Vogue magazine on page 11 of an article about French Fashions at literally the last page before it turns to just simply text and below it is a small description as model 817 made out of black crepine they termed it the Chanel Ford now nowhere else in this article do they talk about this dress or even talk about Chanel though dozens of other designers are mentioned and there's Styles gone over in much greater description the fact that they called it the Chanel Ford of course is in reference to Ford Motor Vehicle company who was well known for making very inexpensive very consistent and very popular cars the Model T that they were selling at that point in time had been sold from 1908 and would continue to be sold until 1927 the next year which point they would retool completely and start up making their Model A line they sold over 15 million model T's in its lifetime but with the change that was happening just after there is some added irony of the fact that just like the Model T was reaching the end of its lifespan I failed to find really almost anything else about the Chanel Ford dress I found one other article from the next year that mentioned it and specifically stated that in places like beitz and along the beach the old Chanel Ford dress was now being produced by other manufacturers in a heavy linen doesn't really sound like the high fashion impactful dress that it has gone down in history as she did however the next year manage a different dress that became a little bit more impactful and a little bit more popular but it was not a little black dress instead it was a little beige dress model 142 debuted to a much larger Fanfare and in fact there was an entire article written about it and the impact that it had not only in the day that it debuted and how quickly it made its way to being reproduced in places like department stores in America so it had a a lot more impact than the supposed little black dress from the year prior from what I can find interestingly enough this is also a great example of Chanel's business Concepts because she was perfectly fine with her Styles being copied over and over and over again she understood perfectly that in many ways this was great advertisement and that was one of the mindsets of the way that she ran her business that made it so successful chel was always looking for new ideas to adopt as her own and to expand her business and in 1921 she was in relationship with Grand Duke Dimitri pavlovich who was a displaced Russian aristocracy and he introduced her to Ernest Bo who was the Exar perfumer and she took this as a great opportunity to start her own perfume they spent a good long while trying to figure out exactly what it should be like she wanted it to be very unique and different so she went with more natural scents as well as quite a few that were very expensive and difficult to find rather than these synthetics that had become very popular in many perfumes of the day so she ended up with a rather iconic scent which is still how it's made today Chanel Number Five has not changed over the years as to why she named it Chanel Number Five it's likely that it was just because that was her favorite number as for the perfume itself it became immensely popular very quickly because she didn't advertise it in the typical way instead of plastering it all over magazines and trying to get people interested in the advertisements she instead very subtly slipped it into different places these shops of course smelled of the perfume she made sure that quite a few very fashionable and exciting women women wore it around so more and more people caught literal wind of it and wanted to know what it was and garnered interest and Intrigue over time and it took off very quickly it wasn't long then before she was approached by people wanting to purchase the business from her and in 1924 the ver timr brothers made her a wonderful offer she not only made a lot of money but she continued to keep 10% in the business and despite only taking in 10% the business grew so rapidly that Chanel was making an inordinate amount of money off of this perfume and that is one of the things that likely took her to the top of the list of the highest earning fashion houses at the time her height was really in the 1920s and by the time she reached the 1930s she was starting to struggle in quite a few ways in no small part this is due to the 1936 strikes that took place these were very large labor strikes that took place all over Paris so it wasn't just Chanel but her entire Parisian Workshop staff walked out and locked the doors behind them by the way what they were demanding were shorter hours Collective contract abolition of peacework and higher wages and more consistent weekly salaries this did not go over well with her and she promtly fired all 300 of the women she did plenty of interviews complaining about what these women did they were just being absolutely absurd and silly staging siins she literally said what idiots these girls were with all the interviews that she was doing disparaging these women and the fact that the general Tides were turning in support of these Strikers she decided she needed to do something about this so she essentially took it back resigned with big air quotes there and decided to magnanimously offer to sell her business to her employees which she knew that they could not afford it's not like they made that much money they of course had to refuse so she took everything back even after laak de metanol granted a 40-hour work week paid vacations collective bargaining rights and compulsory schooling to age 14 on a broad sweep she refused to give in it would be another two months before she finally did acques to some of their requests and the reality was she was starting to struggle though the perfume business was doing incredibly well and she was bringing in a lot of money she was honestly having trouble as a fashion designer styles were changing rapidly away from the things that made Chanel so famous in the 1920s and the new 1930s Styles especially as we reached the mid and late 1930s were becoming much more feminine and soft and that was not what she was known for and there were so many other designers that were up and coming at the time whereas a lot of the designers that she had first been up against in the late teens and early 20s were no longer around they were much older by that point and had not continued their businesses she was now up against brand new names like scaparelli and scaparelli was well known for her knitwear to begin with in the late 1920s and the novelty of this stylish sporty knitwear eventually picking up on new Styles and being heralded as this very youthful but still very classy and interesting designer all the things that Chanel had heard about herself in the 1920s and we do know that she was personally not particularly fond of scaparelli so designers like that were nipping at her heels and she was beginning to find herself less and less assured of her position between all of the changes in her business and fashion and culture and her own life and the oncoming World War she decided it was just all a bit too much and 3 weeks after war was declared between France and Germany she closed her business overnight and despite the fact that her workers begged her to open and to continue even the Labor Bureau got involved and asked her to try and stay open for the sake of these women who needed jobs now that so many men were going off to war and somebody needed to be earning the money and doing the work she refused she put all of her money into a Swiss bank and basically just disappeared of course the perfume continued to be sold so she was still going to be making money but the fashion side of the business was shut down as for her wartime experience things continued to get more and more Rocky as Paris was taken she got out of out of town and didn't come back until 1940 at which point she managed to finagle her way back into living at the Ritz hotel which was now absolutely filled with German officers it was at this point that she started up a relationship with one of the SS Intelligence Officers who lived there she of course took advantage of this relationship like many of her earlier ones and first off petitioned for her nephew Andre to be released he was a German prisoner of war at the time and was not doing well and after that she decided to turn her attention back to her perfume company it was still continuing to operate during this time bringing her a lot of money but she was still only getting 10% and she felt like that was not a fair deal to her so she took advantage of the aryanization laws that were being put into place in Paris host the German invasion and the fact that the perfume company was sold to two Jewish Brothers unbeknownst to her however the verer brothers had been a little bit smarter than that they had actually worked out a business deal with a friend where he purchased the entire perfume company he was not Jewish and they took that money went to Spain Brazil eventually made their way up to New York where they opened up a subsidiary of Chanel perfume this of course was not something that Chanel knew at the time but when she found out she was absolutely enraged because as far as she was concerned that was not something she had agreed to she didn't know if she was going to be making money off of that in the same way of course and she was concerned that they were going to be making a version of Chanel number five that was not up to standards of course the brothers knew perfectly well what they were doing and they mened to get a hold of the recipe as well as all of the ingredients despite them being incredibly difficult to do so they managed to continue to produce the perfume the same way that it was before Chanel lost out on this court case this likely would have fit quite well into a lot of her frustrations of the era Chanel over the years was in a lot of relationships with very very conservative and sometimes openly fascist men she picked up on a lot of the opinions and mindsets and was a very strong nationalist when it came to France there's a whole big history there if you want to look into that but she was incredibly outspoken even more so than most about her opinions on what was happening during World War II at one dinner party she said some things that were so shocking that even her friends literally stopped talking to her after that and wrote down everything that she said because it was just that scandalous considering that it was World War II in German occupied Paris that these things were being said she has a whole long quote in reference to Jewish people which uses the phrase exterminated altogether and say things like France had only gotten what it deserved in reference to the German invasion and saying the fact that France had gone essentially too liberal at that point time and it was essentially punishment for that as I said these things did not go over well even considering her audience was literal SS officers and strong opinions like that had a tendency to not stay behind closed doors when the war ended she was interviewed and interrogated as to her connections to the Nazi party and Germany and the judge at the time ended up dismissing most of the case because they didn't have access to a lot of the paperwork and evidence that they really needed on top of that it's likely that she utilized her connection with the British royal family having earlier had a long relationship with the Duke of Westminster at which point she met and befriended Winston Churchill so he had a fair bit of influence over the fact that her trial was wrapped up pretty quickly turns out that she did operate as a German spy during the war she even had a formal code name worked in an operation called operation model hat so it's a very complicated deal but needless to say she was heavily involved in the Nazi party in Germany and all those things during the war and even though none of that was proven at the time and she was let go the general attitude in Paris around her was not terribly positive and especially since any German collaborators at the time were being humiliated at best she decided that it was a very good idea to leave town and so she went to self-imposed Exile in Switzerland for quite a few years years however she didn't like to sit still for very long and by 1953 she was starting to feel like she wanted to get back into things in no small part due to the fact that the Dior New Look had really taken off and these super curvy very feminine styles that were popular of the day were not the sorts of things that she was interested in and she wanted to offer up an alternative now she was very smart about the way that she advertised for this she didn't do new interviews or take new pictures she let the journalists rely on the old things written in back in the 1920s and 1930s now granted not all of that old material was quite the exciting review that she might have been looking for a lot of the descriptions that I found of Chanel around 1920 when she was really taking off are not necessarily meant to be unflattering but they definitely don't match up with the image that we have of a very novel and inventive designer that she later claims vogan 1920 said conservatism and impeccable taste marked the collection shown by Chanel that there were no striking Novelties sponsored ERS no daring or extreme models in 1921 women's wear said as everyone knows Chanel makes little or no attempt to attract interest by novelty which under the right context isn't sound terribly flattering she herself said that I don't intend revolutionizing Fashions on the contrary I shall attempt to standardize Simplicity she was not looking to create new things she was looking to make the simple style that she preferred the standard style and even in the 1930s Simplicity was still being touted as the main symbol of Chanel but despite the fact that she wasn't offering strange and unusual novel and interesting ideas she knew how to Market herself going all the way back to 1921 she invented her famous double CA logo around the same time as her perfume and this I originally thought was meant to be representative of Coco Chanel but at that point she was still going by Gabrielle Chanel aside from with her friends and it was actually meant to represent Chanel and Capel as in boy Capel who was one of her very early important relationships it's notable that logos like this were not typical for the era while there were certainly brand names plastered inside of garments worth and other things like that can be found on tags and waistbands in all sorts of Fashions of the day it was not typical to have a logo that was distilled down like this let alone one that eventually would make its way onto the exterior of garments but Chanel understood the importance of branding and what we today would term a cult of personality that it wasn't just a matter of selling the clothes it was a matter of selling the lifestyle that went along with it and things like logos were a big part of that so all this became very useful to her when she prompted that 1953 return she forced the journalists to go back to the old claims and sort of ramp them up a little bit they might have said that she was famous for her Jersey Net now she invented Jersey it she might have been influential during the time of the boyish craze well now she invented the boyish fashion craze so she knew perfectly well what she was doing to get these specifically American newspapers ERS to start publishing all of these really grandiose claims and interesting things about the Chanel who frankly had not designed anything in 15 years and people were already forgetting so they could claim just about anything about her because frankly all of the other designers from her day were long gone most of them dead they were not going to stand up and say no actually I invented that I came up with that this was a way of making the event much more exciting than it actually was because when she released her 1953 collection it was a flop she came out with styles that really weren't terribly different than what she used to design and in France the buyers had absolutely no interest in it not only did they remember a lot of the Scandal around the War years to do with Chanel but they also just generally didn't like the Styles they didn't feel fresh and new they felt old and dated the added irony of which there's a lovely quote from Chanel saying that my models will always be up up to date never retrospective and the term retrospective was used over and over and over again in the articles about these collections however despite the fact that it didn't take off in France America had ramped Chanel up in media and decided that this was actually a very new and exciting style despite the fact that it was sort of just a copy of the older ones but it fit in with the more casual American styles of the time eventually styles did start to shift back towards the boxier look that Chanel was famous for and she began to design much more popularly in France as well but America was always the better market for her around the time of her return Pierre verer one of The Early Brothers actually got in touch with her and offered to buy out the entirety of Chanel and in doing so he would offer her not only a large amount of money for the purchase but also royalties as well as basically covering all of her bills so she would be living absolutely for free with no Financial concerns continuing to do design work for the company and she wouldn't have to pay any of the bills or worry about any of the finances not surprisingly as she was getting on in years she took him up on that and she continued to design for Chanel until her death in 1971 the reality is that the true Chanel was one that did a very good job of distilling down the Fashions of others from the day and remodeling them into something much more simple let so say in the 1920s when frankly everything was pretty simple but she just was a great example of her time she generally tried to keep up with the trends despite her protestations that she did not and refused to really design anything that she personally wouldn't wear she herself had a very distinct look and style she was slim and considered relatively ageless and Youthful she had a very boyish figure and that was what she designed for the Chanel look that became so famous was the look that flattered her the most and she understood how important it was to sell her life her look she was essentially a very glamorous woman from the outside she lived her life with a lot of money booming business a very distinct style she had numerous relationships with very exciting and important and wealthy men over the years and in many ways that was sort of the fairy tale version of the Modern Woman of the early 20th century however she was never particularly interested in things like feminism despite being around for some of the most momentous occasions in feminist history she was not really supportive of it she had her own path that she was taking she was less concerned with what it meant for other people she instead was interested in the fact that it resulted in her being able to sell her lifestyle to people in one interview she said my charm was perhaps that I resembled no one else this charm or privilege compared a great many women to want to look like me and marked them all with the same appearance while this repetition of my own fantasy left me alone with my exceptionalism she created the Chanel uniform and uniform is a term that is used over and over and over again during many decades when it comes to the Chanel fashion styles a monotony that is just an attempt to look like Coco Chanel herself she wasn't interested in creating the Modern Woman of today the woman who is independent and unique and has her own fashion style and her own interests she was interested in taking her life that others found so appealing and selling it to them part of the glamour of her life was creating a version of herself that was so incredibly influential and so incredibly successful that she invented the modern woman and honest the vast majority of fashion so it's no wonder that she claimed these things it made her all the more attractive and all the more desirable when it comes to women wanting to be her so that was the version that she presented regardless of what actually happened and the reality as we've seen from just a little bit of research is the fact that there were so many amazing designers during those eras that had very big influences on the Fashions going forward and things like the little black dress should really be more attributed to the house of puet more so than Chanel and things like the early casual styles of sports where of fashion didn't come just out of Chanel but out of so so many different designers like Lon and Jenny and scaparelli and so many other names that have been blotted out by the giant name of Chanel the irony being that though she supposedly created the Modern Woman she was never particularly fond of them she said that a woman equals Envy plus vanity plus chatter plus a confused mind she was not a feminist in the modern sense and in my opinion she definitely did not create the Modern Woman of today so we should take a moment to look at her actual history it's not to say that she didn't have any impact she certainly had plenty there's just a big difference between someone who was part of amazing movements an amazing time in history and someone who should single-handedly be credited with nearly all of the major fashion movements of the 20th century

Channel: Nicole Rudolph

Views: 320,359

Keywords: nicole rudolph, fashion history, history myths, weird history, explainer videos, fashion analysis, fashion evolution, busting myths, historical fashion, historical costuming

Id: km4dJCGZXFY

Length: 33min 0sec (1980 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 13 2024