COCO CHANNEL

COCO CHANEL

Chanel S.A is the French house of high fashion that specializes in haute couture and ready-to-wear clothes,luxury goods, and fashion accessories. In her youth, the couturière Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel gained the soubriquet “Coco” while achanteuse de café in provincial France. As a fashion designer, Coco Chanel catered to women’s taste for elegance in dress, with blouses and suits, trousers and dresses, and jewellry (gemstone and bijouterie) of simple design, that replaced the opulent, over-designed, and constrictive clothes and accessories of 19th-century fashion. Historically, the House of Chanel is most famous for the stylistically versatile “little black dress”, the perfume No. 5 de Chanel and the Chanel Suit.

As a business enterprise, Chanel S.A. is a privately held company owned by Alain Wertheimer and Gerard Wertheimer, grandsons ofPierre Wertheimer, an early business partner of Coco Chanel. Commercially, the brands of the House of Chanel have been personified by fashion models and actresses, by women such as Inès de la Fressange, Catherine Deneuve, Carole Bouquet, Vanessa Paradis,Nicole Kidman, Anna Mouglalis, Lucía Hiriart, Audrey Tautou, Keira Knightley and Marilyn Monroe, who epitomise the independent, self-confident Chanel Girl.

HISTORY

The House of Chanel (Chanel S.A.) originated in 1909, when Gabrielle Chanel opened a millinery shop at 160 Boulevard Malesherbes. She started on the ground floor below the flat of socialite and textile businessman Étienne Balsan, as his mistress. Because the Balsan flat was a salon for the French hunting and sporting élite, Chanel had opportunity to meet their fashion-conscious demi-mondaine mistresses, upon whom the rich men displayed their wealth. Chanel sold them the hats she designed and made and earned an independent living. Chanel befriended English socialite and polo player Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel; per the upper classsocial custom, Chanel became his mistress. Capel noticed her business acumen and in 1910 financed her first independent shop, Chanel Modes, at 21 rue Cambon, Paris. Because that address already housed a dress shop, her lease limited her to millinery rather than couture. Two years later, in 1913, she opened shops inDeauville and Biarritz, offering ready to wear sports clothes for women.

The economic imperatives of World War I (1914–18) affected European fashionthrough material scarcity and the socio-economic mobilisation of women. Besides active military service, the need for increased production of coal made men scarce in factories and fields, where they were replaced by women. Clothes makers had to produce practical and protective garments that would allow women the physical freedom required to do this work. By that time, Chanel had opened a large dress shop at 31 rue Cambon, near the Hôtel Ritz; among her offerings were flannelblazers, straight-line skirts of linen, sailor blouses, long sweaters made of jersey fabric and skirt-and-jacket suits. Jersey's practicality, low cost and other qualities such as its "drape" — how it falls on and away from the body — made it a popular choice. Some of Chanel’s designs derived from military uniforms. By 1915, her designs were known throughout France.

In 1915 and in 1917, Harper’s Bazaar magazine reported that the garments of the House of Chanel were “on the list of every buyer” for the clothing merchants of Europe. The Chanel dress shop presented day-wear dress-and-coat ensembles, black evening dresses trimmed with lace and tulle-fabric dresses decorated with jet, a minor gemstone. The high-quality confection (design, construction and finish) of these clothes established the professional reputation of Coco Chanel as a meticulous couturière. After the war, the House of Chanel produced beaded dresses for the Flapper woman. By 1920 Chanel had designed and presented a woman’s suit of clothes — composed of two or three pieces — which allowed the wearer to have a modern feminine appearance, while being comfortable and practical. Advocated as the “new uniform for afternoon and evening”, the ensemble became known as the Chanel Suit. In 1923, to explain the success of her clothes, Coco Chanel told Harper’s Bazaarmagazine that design “simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.”

In 1921, to complement her suits, Coco Chanel commissioned perfumer Ernest Beaux to create a perfume for the House of Chanel, and he produced several échantillons, including the perfume No.5, named after the number of the sample Chanel liked best. Originally, a flaçon of No. 5 de Chanel was given as a gift to her regular clients. The perfume's popularity prompted her to begin selling it in 1922. No. 5 quickly became Chanel's signature fragrance.