Fashion Designer Coco Chanel

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was born August 19, 1883 and died on January 10, 1971.

Coco Chanel was born the second illegitimate daughter of traveling salesman Albert Chanel and Jeanne Devolle in the small city of Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, France. Coco was born in a poorhouse. She had five siblings: two sisters and three brothers. In 1895, when she was 12 years old, Chanel's mother died; her father left the family a short time later. The young Chanel spent seven years in the orphanage of the Catholic monastery of Aubazine, where she learned the trade of a seamstress. School vacations were spent with relatives in the provincial capital of Moulins, where female relatives taught Coco to sew with flourish. When Coco turned eighteen, she left the orphanage, and took up work for a local tailor.

It was at the tailor shop where she met and soon began an affair with the English playboy ienne Balsan. While living with Balsan, Coco began designing hats as a hobby. The hats immediately caught the attention of the female Parisian ite, and provided designer Chanel with a path toward earning financial independence for herself. With the aid of Balsan and another rich lover Arthur "Boy" Capel, Coco Chanel was able to acquire the property and financial backing to open her own millinery (hat) shop.

The Chanel Empire

The extremely influential Chanel suit, launched in 1923, it was an elegant women's suit consisting of a knee-length skirt with trim, along with a boxy jacket. This designer Chanel suit was traditionally made of woven wool with black trim and gold buttons and worn with large costume-pearl necklaces. Coco Chanel also popularized the little black dress, whose blank-slate versatility allowed this designer Chanel dress to be worn for day and evening, depending, of course, on how it was accessorized. Although unassuming black dresses existed before Chanel, the ones she designed were considered the haute couture standard.

In 1923, Chanel told Harper's Bazaar that "simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance." Chanel always kept the clothing she designed simple and comfortable. Chanel's boutiques sold practical, loose sportswear made of jersey (a fabric then only used for men's underwear), and ignored the corsetted style of the time. Coco not only popularised the bob haircut and the tan, but introduced us to costume jewelery, which she cleverly mixed with real jewels, man-style dressing, and the first perfume to be marketed as a brand extension.

Hollywood stars including Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly fell in love with her effortlessly chic boxy cardigan suits. Her death in 1971 at age 87 came suddenly, with Coco spending her last moments in the style she had become accustomed to at her opulent private apartment in The Ritz. A true icon of fine women's fashions, Coco Chanel.

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