COCO CHANEL : DESIGNER WHO CHANGED WOMENS FASHION GOT HER START AS A MISTRESS

CoCo Chanel, the fashion designer, is our mistress for the month of June 2011 and she's been our Mistress of the Month before. Why again? I Just finished reading a wonderful book about her called...

COCO CHANEL
The Legend and The Life
by Justine Picardie
which is published by itbooks An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

BOOK REVIEW:

Justine Picardie has created a solid and invigorating book, packed with images, some in color - portraits, fashion, sketches, posters - which amplify the understanding of the poor born orphaned girl, who lived some unconventional years in the players palace of Royallieu, owned by Etienne Balsan, and then, through hard work and diligence, made it as a world famous fashion designer.

Did Balsan move the seamstress CoCo into his "decadent lifestyle", perhaps father a child or insist she have an abortion?

Certainly he was the person who first funded her ambitions to have a millinery shop, and then design clothes.

There were other women for him - and eventually other lovers also for her - In particular a man called Boy Chapel. Most intelligently CoCo and Etienne continued to be friends until he died in 1953. When she came to Royallieu he already had a mistress there, an actress and beauty known to be well kept by men, Emilienne d'Alecon. So perhaps the romance between them has been exaggerated.

Emilienne was 14 year older than CoCo, and perhaps if not her mentor, an example. She showed CoCo how to get along with and remain friends with ex lovers and providers. (We see this characteristic also in mistress Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman.)

Blurring the possibility that she may have given birth to a son, CoCo apparently embroidered stories and cut out truths, and perhaps this was not lying so much as self preservation and promoting a reality she could deal with. Perhaps she spoke of the conclusions she had come to in making sense of her life.

She blurred her birth date, and how old she was at various experiences in her life, taking the "I am a little girl" perspective, claiming in later years to have been 16 (innocent) rather than in her twenties, when at Royallieu. In this account she was more of an observer than a participant, and so how could she be very heartbroken?

Why is all this important? Because Chanel did much to change women's lifestyles by giving them comfortable clothing that allowed them to move freely and be free.

And while, in past bios, much has been made of how CLASS played a role in preventing an aristocrat from marrying a girl of her working poor background, reading this, I feel Chanel learned some valuable lessons and accepting her station in life, if not a wife, did the extraordinary for a woman of those times coming out of nowhere.

One wonders if perhaps, living in a nunnery- orphanage, turned Coco out to be an unconventional woman, who maybe did not want children or did not want marriage.

Certainly marriage eluded her.

But she was driven and ambitious!

This book also tells about the business deals she made and regretted, and how she fought to get back (her perfumes). She was not waiting on a man to do any of these things for her. She made others wealthier than she was. She was also generous and willing to mentor, champion, or keep, younger men and friends, while cutting some family and aiding others.

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