From the TelegraphUK:
Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life by Justine Picardie: review
Coco Chanel is brought out of hiding, says Frances Wilson, as she admires Justine Picardie's new biography of the elusive designer
Clothes, for Coco Channel, were for freedom and forgetting. Women should be able to walk, to drive, to ride their bicycles and to forget what they are wearing. She replaced whalebone corsets and bird’s nest hats with loose trousers, Breton tops and sailor blouses, clothes that “women can live in, breath in, feel comfortable in and look young in”. The baroque evening gown was exchanged for that little black dress, worn with a single string of pearls.
“Extravagant things didn’t suit me,” Chanel said, meaning that extravagant things didn’t suit any woman. Black, however, “wipes out everything else around”. It is the “absence of colours”, Chanel explained in one of her dazzling artistic statements, which has “absolute beauty”.
But as Justine Picardie shows in this elegant book, the figure who introduced simplicity into women’s wardrobes was far from simple herself. Gabrielle Chanel was born in a poorhouse in 1883; her parents were unmarried and, according to Chanel, when she was six, her mother, Jeanne, died of tuberculosis. Picardie suggests that Jeanne in fact died of “poverty, pregnancy and pneumonia” when her daughter was 11.
According to Chanel, her father then left her in the care of two spinster aunts; he in fact placed her in a convent in the medieval village of Aubazine. Chanel says that he was in his late twenties when he abandoned her; he was approaching 40.
Throughout her life, Chanel referred to herself as a poor child and she doctored her age on her passport; another poor child, Andre, who was left in her care, may have been her nephew or he may have been her son. “I don’t know anything more terrifying than the family,” Chanel once said, “you’re born in it, not of it”, and she reworked her own past history as she would remodel an outfit, trimming, unpicking, restitching. The austerity and purity of her life in the convent, however, found its way into her designs.
Aged 18, Chanel left the nuns and worked in Moulins as a cabaret singer. Here she met the roué
Etienne Balsan, who set her up as his mistress and introduced her to an English playboy,
Boy Capel. During these years, when asked if she was happy or unhappy, she replied that she was neither; she was “hiding”, and it may have been now that Gabrielle became Coco.
Boy was her great love and her first muse; she was soon cutting up his polo clothes and turning them into the languid, androgynous style she made her own. With his financial backing, Chanel opened a hat shop in 1909 in Paris; four years later her particular chic had taken over fashionable Deauville, and by 1919, the year that Boy was killed in a car crash, she had her own Maison at 31 rue Cambon.
“I was witnessing the death of luxury,” she said of her era, but luxury had not died in the House of Chanel; it was – like Coco herself – hiding.
Her straight, utilitarian skirts and jersey jackets struck the right note during the years of the Great War, just as the Chanel suit has defined the independent woman since the mid-Fifties.
When Chanel No 5 was introduced in 1921, she became an international brand, but the perfume’s origins are as embroidered as her childhood.
Coco claimed that following the death of Boy, she took refuge in the Côte d’Azur where, breathing in the flowers, she invented the perfume. It was actually created by a perfumer called Ernest Beaux, who was introduced to Chanel by her then lover, the
Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. Sales figures were helped when Marilyn Monroe announced that No 5 was all she wore to bed.
Chanel’s lovers accumulated, each grander and less faithful than the last. An affair with the Duke of Westminster led to a friendship with Winston Churchill, which helped when she was involved with a German officer during the occupation.
Other friends included Stravinsky and the Russian impresario Diaghilev; her best friend was a perfect minx called Misia Sert, who inspired Mallarmé, Proust, Debussy and Ravel, and was painted by Renoir, Vuillard, Lautrec and Bonnard.
Their semi-erotic, highly competitive intimacy contained more energy and emotion than all of Coco’s other relationships put together. “Where Misia has once loved,” she concluded, “the grass doesn’t grow anymore.”
The Chanel uncovered by Picardie is a storyteller. She spun her own myth, but each of her creations was a story as well and each contains a story.
The most famous perhaps is the vivid pink Chanel suit worn by Jackie Kennedy in Dallas on November 22 1963, which she didn’t remove for a day and a night, and is now in storage, still caked in the blood of her husband.
“Fashion,” Chanel said, “should die and die quickly”, but the icon of fashion lived on through the century, dying when she was 87.
She had achieved her freedom, but was Coco happy or unhappy? It’s hard to tell, but she has at least, in these pages, come out of hiding.
I am rereading Edmonde Charles-Roux's first book- by the time I get through it again I may be able to order this one! 
