Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was an unlikely person to change the world of fashion and become so well-known that even today, 132 years after her birth, her name is synonymous with understated elegance and an unmistakable style. She was born into poverty in 1883, daughter of a laundrywoman who died when she was young and a father who abandoned the family. She and her sisters were sent to a convent orphanage, where the nuns nurtured her talent as a seamstress. Yet from these most uninspired beginnings rose a fierce and vivid woman, determined to live the way she wanted to live, with a vision for fashion that would forever change the way women dressed.
Mademoiselle Chanel is a work of fiction that imagines the life of Coco Chanel as accurately as possible, following the facts of her life but filling in the colours to create an homage to her larger-than-life character. She was controversial in life and she is also so on these pages; unapologetic and driven, not particularly happy or kind, but loyal and loving to her friends and family. It follows her meteoric rise from obscurity, making hats for the female guests of her British lover, on to having her own boutiques and eventually being known across Europe and America. It didn’t come easily–she worked tirelessly, without stopping, through sleepless night after sleepless night. This was in part the way she dealt with various sorrows in her life, the most devastating of which was the death of her beloved Boy (the nickname of Arthur Capel).
We see her sisters and her relationship with them and also with the aunt who is very close to her own age, and see the compromises they are willing to make that Coco isn’t. And as a result, they rise with her, a part of her success. Coco lives life on her own terms, with no desire for motherhood and very little for a conventional marriage, but instead with a fierce thirst for independence. She mixes with the great names of the era, everyone from Churchill to Cocteau to Stravinsky.
As I am sure she was in life, the Coco Chanel on these pages doesn’t really care if you like or admire her. As such, I didn’t always like her as a person. Her story is inspiring in one sense, but not in others. During WW2, for example, we see her using anti-Jewish laws in France to attempt to free herself from a contract legally binding her to the Jewish Wertheimer brothers who made and sold her perfumes–and who made themselves very rich in the process. (An afterword states that she made her peace with them, finally, after the war) During the occupation of Paris, she took a German lover and also attempted to do some spying, all in an effort to free her nephew from his imprisonment in Berlin.
It’s evident that author C.W. Gortner is an admirer, although he has presented a balanced, nuanced view of her life. Coco Chanel remains fascinating, a larger-than-life woman who bears at least some responsibility for the fact that I am wearing comfortable clothes to type this instead of corsets and constricting skirts. Mademoiselle Chanel offers a glimpse at the woman behind the legend, and it’s definitely worth a read.