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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Certain lives are at once so exceptional, and yet so in step with their historical moments, that they illuminate cultural forces far beyond the scope of a single person. Such is the case with Coco Chanel, whose life offers one of the most fascinating tales of the twentieth century--throwing into dramatic relief an era of war, fashion, ardent nationalism, and earth-shaking change--here brilliantly treated, for the first time, with wide-ranging and incisive historical scrutiny.
Coco Chanel transformed forever the way women dressed. Her influence remains so pervasive that to this day we can see her afterimage a dozen times while just walking down a single street: in all the little black dresses, flat shoes, costume jewelry, cardigan sweaters, and tortoiseshell eyeglasses on women of every age and background. A bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume is sold every three seconds. Arguably, no other individual has had a deeper impact on the visual aesthetic of the world. But how did a poor orphan become a global icon of both luxury and everyday style? How did she develop such vast, undying influence? And what does our ongoing love of all things Chanel tell us about ourselves? These are the mysteries that Rhonda K. Garelick unravels in Mademoiselle .
Raised in rural poverty and orphaned early, the young Chanel supported herself as best she could. Then, as an uneducated nineteen-year-old café singer, she attracted the attention of a wealthy and powerful admirer and parlayed his support into her own hat design business. For the rest of Chanel's life, the professional, personal, and political were interwoven; her lovers included diplomat Boy Capel; composer Igor Stravinsky; Romanov heir Grand Duke Dmitri; Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster; poet Pierre Reverdy; a Nazi officer; and several women as well. For all that, she was profoundly alone, her romantic life relentlessly plagued by abandonment and tragedy.
Chanel's ambitions and accomplishments were unparalleled. Her hat shop evolved into a clothing empire. She became a noted theatrical and film costume designer, collaborating with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Luchino Visconti. The genius of Coco Chanel, Garelick shows, lay in the way she absorbed the zeitgeist, reflecting it back to the world in her designs and in what Garelick calls "wearable personality"--the irresistible and contagious style infused with both world history and Chanel's nearly unbelievable life saga. By age forty, Chanel had become a multimillionaire and a household name, and her Chanel Corporation is still the highest-earning privately owned luxury goods manufacturer in the world.
In Mademoiselle, Garelick delivers the most probing, well-researched, and insightful biography to date on this seemingly familiar but endlessly surprising figure--a work that is truly both a heady intellectual study and a literary page-turner.
Praise for Mademoiselle
"A detailed, wry and nuanced portrait of a complicated woman that leaves the reader in a state of utterly satisfying confusion--blissfully mesmerized and confounded by the reality of the human spirit." -- The Washington Post
"Writing an exhaustive biography of Chanel is a challenge comparable to racing a four-horse chariot. . . . This makes the assured confidence with which Garelick tells her story all the more remarkable." -- The New York Review of Books
"Broadly focused and beautifully written." -- The Wall Street Journal
Author Notes
Rhonda K. Garelick writes on fashion, performance, art, and cultural politics. Her books include Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism, and, as co-editor, Fabulous Harlequin: ORLAN and the Patchwork Self . Her work has also appeared in The New York Times , New York Newsday , International Herald Tribune , and The Sydney Morning Herald , as well as in numerous journals and museum catalogs in the United States and Europe. She is a Guggenheim fellow and has also received awards from the Getty Research Institute, the Dedalus Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Whiting Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Garelick received her B.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature and French from Yale University.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Iconic fashion designer Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883-1971) wanted to both hide her life story and to share it, a contradiction that confounded previous potential biographers. In this well-researched and buoyant biography, fashion writer Garelick's stated goal is to analyze the "uncanny historical reach of Coco Chanel" and the ways in which Chanel's constant reinvention provides a model for modern women. From Chanel's childhood in the Loire Valley-characterized by illness, poverty and abandonment-to her infirm final years, when her closest companion was her butler, Francois Mironnet, Garelick (Rising Star) reveals the dramatic details that Chanel decided to publicly disclose and those facts she hid or embellished. While the book is even-handed in its critical, probing approach to Chanel's life, its strongest chapter concerns its very core: the designer's intimate relationship to fascism and fascists, such as writer, diplomat, and Vichy official Paul Morand, the German intelligence officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Garelick deftly situates Chanel in political and cultural history; in addition, the book's extensive archival sources and new interviews make it a valuable resource for scholars. Photos. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
John Updike once proclaimed, Chanel was, in a way, France itself. Coco Gabrielle Chanel (1883-1971), the couturier and real woman, was fully transformed by her times into an aesthetic, a symbol, and a way of life. In this captivating biography, Garelick, whose many honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, takes on Chanel's relationship to French nationalism and to the changing currents of European society. While the fashion designer herself remains a somewhat contradictory and elusive figure, she is newly illuminated as a major player on the world stage, a figure who precisely maneuvered within the unstable politics and economy wrought by the two world wars. Chapters focusing on Chanel's many friends and lovers illustrate the complexity of her political circumstances. Garelick argues that it is through the prism of her relationships (which included leftists, royalty, fascists, and spies) that Chanel filtered the rapidly changing times and translated them into her unique design aesthetic. While fashonistas will find much of interest in the book's revelations of Chanel's influences, these tales of couture are deftly woven into a larger narrative of twentieth-century history.--Bosch, Lindsay Copyright 2014 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Biographies of Coco Chanel (1883-1971) abound, reflecting the embellishments and inconsistencies of the designer's own tales. Beyond those are novels, children's books, films, and the 1970 musical Coco starring Katharine Hepburn. Recent exhibitions revere Chanel and her creations (the little black dress, Chanel No. 5) as sacred objects. In this monumental biography, Garelick, who writes widely on fashion, gender, and performance, anchors Chanel's remarkable story within larger cultural, social, and political forces, including gender norms, French nationalism, and the rise of Nazism. She supports and questions existing narratives of the designer as a self-made social climber with new research into primary sources and the historical milieu. The author focuses particularly on the lives of lovers and friends, drawing out connections between the designer's private life and the aesthetic she created. Above all, Garelick unpacks Chanel's genius at selling her own transformative myth to women everywhere. VERDICT With more rigor and less hyperbole than its predecessors, this exhaustively researched yet highly readable biography secures a prominent place among countless books on Chanel. [See Prepub Alert, 4/21/14.]-Lindsay King, Yale Univ. Libs, New Haven, CT (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.