Coco Chanel - Feminist or Feminine?
Coco Chanel was shrewd, chic and on the cutting edge. The clothes she created changed the way women looked and how they looked at themselves.
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.
Coco Chanel 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. Chanel not only mixed 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 rebelliousness. 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.
Born on August 18, under the name of Gabrielle, Coco Chanel claimed to have a birth date of 1893 and a birthplace of Auvergne; she was actually born in 1883 in Saumur - her mother worked in the poorhouse where Gabrielle was born, and died when Gabrielle was only six, leaving her father with five children whom he promptly abandoned to the care of relatives.
Gabrielle adopted the name Coco during a brief career as a singer in cafes and concert halls, from 1905 to 1908. Coco became the mistress of a rich military officer, and then a wealthy English Industrialist, and the patronage and connections that these men provided her with enabled her to open her own hat shop in Paris in 1910. She had soon expanded to Deauville and Biarritz.
From her first hat shop, opened in 1912, to the 1920s, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel rose to become one of the premier fashion designers in Paris, France. Replacing the corset with comfort and casual elegance, her fashion themes included simple suits and dresses, women’s trousers, costume jewelry, perfume and textiles.
In 1922 Chanel introduced a perfume, Chanel No. 5, which became and remained popular, and remains a profitable product of Chanel’s company. Coco Chanel introduced her signature cardigan jacket in 1925 and signature “little black dress” in 1926. Most of her fashions had a staying power, and didn’t change much from year to year — or even generation to generation.
It’s not by accident that she became associated with the modern movement that included Diaghilev, Picasso, Stravinsky and Cocteau. Like these artistic protagonists, she was determined to break the old formulas and invent a way of expressing herself. Cocteau once said of her that “she has, by a kind of miracle, worked in fashion according to rules that would seem to have value only for painters, musicians, poets.”
Throughout the ’20s, Chanel’s social, sexual and professional progress continued, and her eminence grew to the status of legend. By the early ’30s she’d been courted by Hollywood, gone and come back. She had almost married one of the richest men in Europe, the Duke of Westminster; when she didn’t, her explanation was, “There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Chanel.”
Coco Chanel was shrewd and cunning. Something that Chanel can never be accused of is not using her brain. Her sharp mind is apparent in everything she did, from her savvy use of logos to her deep understanding of the power of personality and packaging, even the importance of being copied. And she was always quotable: “Fashion is not simply a matter of clothes. Fashion is in the air, born upon the wind. One intuits it. It is in the sky and on the road.”
Coco Chanel wasn’t just ahead of her time. She was ahead of herself. Coco Chanel mixed up the vocabulary of male and female clothes and created fashion that offered the wearer a feeling of hidden luxury rather than pretension are just two examples of how her taste and sense of style overlap with today’s fashion.
Coco Chanel will always be a great role model for those of us that want to break the rules and still be feminine and use the feminine power.
Have a great day!
