Famous women entrepreneurs | Coco Chanel

"You can be gorgeous at twenty, charming at forty, and irresistible for the rest of your life,"
- Coco Chanel

Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel (19 August 1883 - 10 January 1971) was a pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired fashions, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion. She was the founder of the famous fashion brand, Chanel. Her extraordinary influence on haute couture was such that she was the only person in the field to be named on TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

An enormously influential designer from the mid-1920s on, she was noted for her simple, elegant modern styles: jersey dresses, especially the "little black dress," and suits; perfumes, notably Chanel No. 5, created in 1922; black or gray pullovers with white piqué collars and cuffs; boxy, braid-trimmed suits; trousers for women; and clothing generally designed for comfort. Among the most imitated of all designers she had a major resurgence of popularity beginning in 1954, when she reopened the business she had closed (1930) at the beginning of World War II. Her fashion empire ranged from Chanel suits and quilted handbags with chains to costume jewelry and a textile house.
Her business would soon grow into something never known in the history. Traditionally, dressmakers had never been part of "society". But Coco Chanel changed that. Coco Chanel became a magnetic person, an international figure invited everywhere. It did not seem to surprise her at all. She commented: "I did not go into society because I had to design clothes. I designed clothes precisely because I did go out, because I was the first to live the life of this century"

Coco Chanel wasn't just ahead of her time. She was ahead of herself.

She was surrounded by the crème de la crème of the society, the most famous women and men of her time.

At the age of fifty-five, Coco Chanel was in the prime of her beauty. Her face, like her figure, had reached their ultimate refinement. She had never dressed with more invention or with a greater perfection. At that time she was the most admired and most invited.

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A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.
Coco Chanel

A woman has the age she deserves.
Coco Chanel

A women who doesn't wear perfume has no future.
Coco Chanel

As long as you know men are like children, you know everything!
Coco Chanel

Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.
Coco Chanel

Elegance does not consist in putting on a new dress.
Coco Chanel

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.
Coco Chanel

Elegance is refusal.
Coco Chanel

Fashion fades, only style remains the same.
Coco Chanel

Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.
Coco Chanel

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.
Coco Chanel

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.
Coco Chanel

Great loves too must be endured.
Coco Chanel

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.
Coco Chanel

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
Coco Chanel

I don't know why women want any of the things men have when one the things that women have is men.
Coco Chanel

I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like.
Coco Chanel

I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.
Coco Chanel

In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.
Coco Chanel

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.
Coco Chanel