1883-1971 Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

The Times seems to be on a Coco binge today...:wink:

Audrey Tautou and Anna Mouglalis star as Coco Chanel

Fashion icon and designer is to be played by both Anna Mouglalis and Audrey Tautou while Shirley MacLaine took US TV role

She glides on the arm of a tail-coated swain into an elegant belle époque salon. Music swirls, eyes swivel — and no wonder. Her thin black dress hugs a gamine frame, a look of masculine confidence rests on her face. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, better known as Coco, is making an entrance.
It’s not her only one today — through a crowded maze of extras, crew, stylists and film-set gofers — or, indeed, on other days. Coco Chanel is making a lot of entrances on film at the moment. Last year, I visited the set of Chanel & Stravinsky, five minutes’ walk from the Gare du Nord, to see the rising French star Anna Mouglalis as Coco opposite the Danish Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen. However, this is just one of three on-screen incarnations of the distinguished designer. There is also Coco Avant Chanel on the way this summer, a lavish confection starring Audrey Tautou, and last year both French films were preceded by the American television mini-series Coco Chanel, for which Shirley MacLaine barked and purred and received a Golden Globe nomination.
It doesn’t even stop there. Until recently, there were at least two other Chanel film projects on the go. One was to be written and directed by the French veteran Danièle Thompson, while an American version was rumoured to be starring that noted demimondaine Demi Moore. (There will also be a book on Chanel from Justine Picardie in the autumn.) Not all of these could possibly have reached fruition; there will be no Chanel film No 5, or, indeed, four. But three finished dramas on one woman, however celebrated, seems excuse enough to ask the question: what on earth is going on? One possible answer is that these are just London buses. Films sometimes come along in twos and threes because film-makers often think along uncannily similar lines. Look at Truman Capote, the recent subject of a pair of more or less identical screenplays. And history does have a habit of coughing up figures who repeatedly stir the creative juices. This is usually because there’s an insoluble riddle at the heart of their story. Take the civilised Nazi Albert Speer, or the tragic Indian mathematician Ramanujan, or the vanishing yachtsman Donald Crowhurst — dramatists keep coming back to the well because, in each case, there’s no getting to the bottom.
It could be that Chanel belongs in this gallery thanks to the distinctly colourful company she kept. Her brief dalliance with an aesthetic co-revolutionary in Paris, in 1920, is dramatised in Chanel & Stravinsky. She was also pals with Cocteau, Picasso and Chaplin, and spent the war in occupied Paris under the protection of a Nazi officer. It was only thanks to her connections in the highest reaches of the British establishment that got her off the hook, and only in the 1950s that she dared return from Swiss exile. Good material for a drama, surely? Well, yes, except that none of these films goes anywhere near her war record. It’s not an easy slip to explain in a heroine. The French remain squeamish about stories that shine a light on wartime collaboration, but even the MacLaine mini-series on the Lifetime Network, with no French involvement, contrived not to mention the war.
The fascination of her early years helps to explain Chanel’s appearance on screen. It boils down to two words: Edith Piaf. Marion Cotillard’s Oscar-winning turn in 2007’s La Vie en Rose “opened the idea of a biopic in France”, explains Anne Fontaine, director and co-writer of Coco Avant Chanel. “The biopic is not a very French tradition, but Chanel is one of the best-known French figures in the world, and I was astonished someone hadn’t done a film on her before.”
As dramatised in Coco Avant Chanel, the designer, like Piaf, had a troubled youth, out of which she battled by sheer force of personality. Her mother died when she was 12, her father disappeared to America in search of work, and she spent the next seven years in an orphanage run by nuns. As with La Vie en Rose, the film will shine a bright light onto a past the facts of which are not widely known. Edmonde Charles-Roux’s biography, the bible of Chanel studies, explained how the facts of her youth were blurred by a clerical error at her birth in 1883, when a clerk was left to guess that her surname was spelt “Chasnel”. But Chanel also abetted in the creation of her own myth by changing her birth date to 1893.
Although the nuns taught her to sew, it was the stage that originally attracted her. Like Piaf, she picked up a nickname there, from singing Ko Ko Ri Ko. Coco Avant Chanel concentrates on the two affairs that changed her destiny. The first was with Etienne Balsan, a rich aristocrat in whose chateau, explains Fontaine, “she discovers how privileged women of the era dress, and where she invents the very practical clothes that come from riding on horses and running in the fields”. She then fell in love with the young English blade “Boy” Capel, who supported her early in her career but whom she refused to marry until she could pay off her debts to him. As the film hints, her dedication to her career would leave no room for marriage or children.
Capel, who married an English aristocrat and broke her heart, before dying in 1919, also appears at the start of Chanel & Stravinsky, when the heroine attends her first classical concert. It just happens to be the riotous premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913. The idea that Chanel could claim equal billing with classical music’s first great iconoclastic modernist was first posited by Chris Greenhalgh in his novel Coco and Igor, on which the film is based. Both book and screenplay pinpoint 1920 as the year of Chanel’s efflorescence and attribute it in part to the influence of Stravinsky’s guiding revolutionary spirit. “Designers were second-class citizens for a long time,” Greenhalgh explains. “In the novel and the screenplay, when Stravinsky and Chanel have a fight, she says, ‘I’m just as smart as you. And as much of an artist.’ He says, ‘You’re not an artist, Coco. You’re a shopkeeper.’ It’s perhaps a reflection of the increasing power and significance of women that we’re finally appreciating what she did for them.”
Greenhalgh’s 2002 novel was not the first effort to put the story of Chanel’s liberation of women from the corset at the heart of a fiction. Before her death in 1971, Chanel was able to witness her transmogrification into a musical. Alan Jay Lerner and André Previn collaborated on Coco in 1969. Chanel was delighted to discover she would be played by a Hepburn; less so when she found out she would be embodied not, as she assumed, by the clotheshorse Audrey but by the battle-axe Katharine. The show ran on Broadway for more than 300 performances. If Chanel goes on to prosper in the cinema, don’t back against the musical making a return (like Pam Gems’s Piaf, recently revived).
There was a ring of truth to the casting of the less sylphlike Hepburn. The consensus is that Chanel had the hide of a rhinoceros. “She was tough and quite cold,” says Jan Kounen, the director of Chanel & Stravinsky. “She was a bit of a tyrant,” says Mouglalis. “She built an empire at a time when women were not working at all. She was a fighter all her life. She was angry about centuries of lack of education for girls and wanted to change that. I think she hated women, because she wanted things to change quickly — and women were going for the dresses, not the way of life.”
Rake-thin and with the baritone voice of a seasoned smoker, Mouglalis is ideal casting. They obviously thought so at the Lifetime Network, because she was offered the part of the young Coco for the mini-series before it went to the Slovak actress Barbora Bobulova. For her part, Fontaine was not prepared to proceed with Coco Avant Chanel until she found the right actress. “If I hadn’t had Audrey Tautou, I don’t think I would have developed the project because I needed an ideal interpreter to play Chanel. You can’t imitate her. You have to have the bodily proportions. If she’s too big, it won’t work. If she’s too round, it won’t work, either.”
In the spirit of pre-match sparring, Coco Avant Chanel’s publicity campaign is putting it about that its film is the one officially recognised by the House of Chanel. In reality, Karl Lagerfeld, chief designer of Chanel since 1983, has looked supportively on both productions, supplying access to designs and drawings (though not much exists from 1920). His recent collection opened with a short black-and-white silent film called Paris-Moscou: the house’s connection with Russian culture is clearly not one he repudiates. Just don’t expect him to produce a film entitled Paris-Berlin. However many times they dramatise the life of Coco Chanel, some things remain unsayable.
 
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Ina Claire and Coco Chanel
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Coco Chanel and Jacques Chazot
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Pamela Smith and Coco Chanel

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Winston Churchill Hunting with his Son Randolph and Coco Chanel
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Lady Dunn and Coco Chanel
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Boomer, thanks for the articles, very interesting.

I asked recommendations for biography books here on the thread and I ordered both books. Chanel and Her World (Edmonde Charles-Roux) was quite a surprise - it's more like an art book, the second (by Alex Madsen) I'm reading now (I'm a bit slow since English is not my native...) and I'm totally amazed by her story. I wonder if not to marry and have children was her decision because she wanted to dedicate herself to work or destiny... I also hope that the movie with Audrey Tautou will be available in English soon, she has such a resemblance with Coco! But an actress choice for the second movie is a bit weird IMO , I remember I saw her in Chanel adds too in past and I thought she doesn't really suit them that well, but it's just my opinion

And I also wonder if Chanel designs today have much to do with real Chanel style (I have a lot to say on this subject, but I won't do it since I prefer to say positive things or not to say at all...). I personally think that best/worth (I mean "best value for the money") Chanel thing today are they sunglasses....but it's a matter of taste of course
 
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^^ Oh, I'm so glad you got the books and they are interesting!! :flower:
I wonder how this all became such an obsession sometimes- and then I realize Coco and Karl touch so many worlds- I now read about art, ballet, writers from the 1930s, British aristocrats, jewelery, French magazine editors- people I would never have been exposed to if it were not for Chanel! It looks like the planned new Chanel store near me that I was dreaming of working for will not happen now due to the economy- what will I do with all of this study!!? :cry: :lol:
I just came across a long article from Vanity Fair in 1994...I'll scan it and post...It is very interesting (love affairs with Misia and some of her models, hard dr*g use through the years, a Gestapo agent) !!? :shifty:
 
1.Boomer, thank you so much for sharing the scans - it will be my entertainment for next few evenings...

2.
....I wonder how this all became such an obsession sometimes- and then I realize Coco and Karl touch so many worlds- I now read about art, ballet, writers from the 1930s, British aristocrats, jewelery, French magazine editors- people I would never have been exposed to if it were not for Chanel! ....

So true :lol: , I owe Coco for filling so many holes in my culture related education....
 
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^ You're very welcome- I enjoy passing them on if someone can benefit from them! :flower:

The second page in #312 seems to be bad, here it is again, I hope..

 
From a lovely blog called A Femme d'un Certain Age :cool:

We're experiencing high velocity Coco mania in France.
The much touted film "Coco Avant Chanel" ("Coco Before Chanel") starring Audrey Tautou of "Les Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain" fame, directed by Anne Fontaine with costume design overseen by none other than Karl Lagerfeld has everyone talking about the fabulous destiny of Coco Chanel.
As one would expect the film and two other recent biopics of her life, one with Shirley MacLaine, the other with Anna Mouglalis, have everyone chattering about what she dared to do for us. Talk about women's liberation.
The bows, the bag, the beads, the bangles and those were just the accessories for the fashion revolution she instigated at the debut of the 20th century. Coco Chanel bobbed her hair; donned men's trousers; made the French Navy's striped T-shirt her own; took simple jersey -- a common, in both senses of the word -- fabric, added couture details and proved in one smooth move how comfort and chic can coexist.
She released women from the constraints of their corsets and showed them a new elegance without the fusty fuss that marked her epoch.
Her iconic suit that falls just-so because of the chains sewn within is as contemporary now as it was then. Surely she would have understood how a woman today would wear her jacket with a T-shirt and jeans, the skirt with a black turtle neck sweater. Both perhaps with her signature black-toed, beige body pumps or ballerinas. Or in any number of the color combinations on her original theme.
The French have a saying: "If he didn't exist, we'd have to invent him (or her)." Perhaps that person is Karl Lagerfeld, the genius who somehow managed to re-ignite the passion for her fashion while making it his own. As the French also say, "there are no wrinkles" on her reputation thanks to his creativity and wit.
You could wear her LBD from 1926 to a cocktail party tonight -- just add masses of beads, cuffs, her black-on-black sling-back pumps and a Chanel bag, maybe in a bright color.
Her Chanel No. 5, the first couture perfume was created in the Roaring Twenties and is to this day the world's most popular scent. Her quilted bag is all a woman needs to own, a camellia on a lapel, in the hair, at the neck -- anywhere -- is the ultimate adornment particularly if one adds upwards of seven strands of pearls and beads to the mix. (Chanel reputedly liked to wear seven strands of pearls.)
If miracles exist in the quixotic world of fashion it is when somehow, simultaneously one can see the past, the present and the future in a single design. How Karl Lagerfeld manages this sleight of hand is the enduring mystery.
 
Chanel reminds me so much of Anna Wintour - her posture, her frame, her voice, her air, her gestures.

I have to say; I absolutely adore the History of Style forum - I have learnt so much from it - most importantly the specific silhouettes of designers and the characteristics of their clothes.
This forum really has inspired me.

I love how simple a lot of Chanel's garments look, but when you look closer you see her obsessive eye for detail.
 

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