Few 20th century fashion designers had a more radical influence on women’s fashion than Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. She understood that what women wanted was liberation. Just as suffragettes had wanted the freedom to vote, so women who already had the freedom of being able to afford couture clothing wanted liberation from their corsets, their elaborate hairdos held together with metal pins, the ankle length dresses that made a long stride nearly impossible, the diamond jewellery and plumed hats.

Chanel complained vociferously about what she saw as male dominance in Parisian fashion. “They don’t know how to make clothes for women,” she once told a magazine interviewer. “All this fantastic pinching and puffing. How can a woman wear a dress that’s cut so she can’t lift up her arm to pick up a telephone?”

“Nothing goes out of fashion sooner than a long dress with a very low neck,” she quipped. So she put women into

trousers and jumpers, slouchy knits, simple bobbed hair, and costume jewellery. Her designs were deliberately androgynous; ironically, that made them all the more teasingly feminine. She even took jersey, a simple fabric previously confined to men’s underwear, and used it in women’s sports clothes. The most enduring of her designs, the two piece suit with braided trim and brass buttons, has a boxy jacket constructed more like a cardigan sweater than the traditionally complex couture jacket design.

One of those suits became what is probably the most photographed female garment in history. The pink outfit that Jacqueline Kennedy wore on that horrifying 1963 day in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was shot was by Chanel. Although the signature Chanel jacket dates from the 1920s, it is so classic that in the 21st century it doesn’t look the least bit dated. It is also so versatile that a woman can wear it virtually anywhere other than an

opera ball. Chanel did, of course, design evening gowns as well, but in a fluid, easy to wear style that showed off a slender body, whether it was her own, her models’, or her clients’. In the 1910s she already anticipated the physical fitness that would become such an important component of women’s lives by the end of the century. She even put women in tight swimsuits – no more blousy bloomers – so they would have to be in shape. “I invented sportswear for myself,” she said. “I set the fashion for the very reason that I was the first 20th century woman.” Eventually, her impact on what modern women wore was so powerful that she was the only person in couture to be named to TIME Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Gabrielle Chanel was an illegitimate child born in a workhouse in the French town of Saumur, in the Loire Valley, in 1883, although she later claimed that her birthday was

1893 in an effort to convince people that she was a decade younger. Her mother died when she was six, and her father farmed her out to a Catholic orphanage where the nuns taught her to sew. during school vacations she worked in Moulins, where her relatives taught her more sophisticated sewing techniques than the nuns knew. After leaving the orphanage at 18 she worked for a local tailor. By age 25, however, she began to chafe at her provincial existence. A beauty, she moved to the outskirts of Paris with a wealthy lover, Etienne Balsan, whose other passion was thoroughbred horses. “The austere elegance and the almost militaristic streamlining of the riding habit made a lasting impression on her,” writes the French fashion historian Francois Baudot.

Her career as a milliner began on the ground floor of Balsan’s flat and launched her success in the world of fashion. Her broad-brimmed, simply designed hats contrasted with the fantasy

headgear still to be found at occasions like the Ascot races that are such a feature of the London season. By the 1920s her headquarters were established at 31 rue Cambon, a particularly chic Paris address that is still the hub of her empire, which today is run by designer Karl Lagerfeld. Chanel in the ’20s had one of the most productive periods of any fashion designer ever. She launched Chanel No. 5, the world’s most famous perfume, which was the invention of perfumer Ernest Beaux. At a time when other perfumes smelled of a single, usually floral, scent, Beaux combined over 80 ingredients in an unidentifiable mystery. Decades later, Marilyn Monroe responded to the question of what she wore to bed with the line “two drops of Chanel No. 5,” and the celebrity-obsessed Pop artist Andy Warhol made a series of silkscreens of the famous Art Deco Bottle

Another achievement of the ’20s was Chanel’s introduction of the little black

dress, which she advocated as a must in every woman’s wardrobe. And herjersey dresses became ever more popular for their softly draped style. In 1923, she told the fashion magazine “Harper’s Bazaar” that “simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.” It was a creed she stuck to all her life. Among her many other innovations are the quilted shoulder bag that allowed a busy woman’s hands to be free, and the two-toned shoe, which she is said to have designed to make feet look shorter. (Not all her signs of modernity proved to be beneficial. She was also an early advocate of the suntan as a sign of healthy outdoor exercise, long before it became associated with skin cancer. And many iconic photographs of her, including the famous one by Horst, show her smoking, a sign of women’s equality with men at a time when the habit was yet to be associated with lung cancer.)

She loved famous people, and became one herself, thanks

to being photographed with titled men and women, with socialites and film stars. No mere hanger-on she, though. As soon as she’d begun making a fortune, she became a patron of the arts, bailing out, on one occasion, the great ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, who was chronically desperate for cash. She wrote him a check on condition that he never breathe a word that she had done so. But Diaghilev mentioned her name to an associate, Boris Kochno, who eventually clarified the identity of “Mlle. C.” The ballet she subsidized? “The Rite of Spring.”
She contributed her design skills as well as her money. The 1924 Ballets Russes production of “Le Train Bleu” was a landmark, with a libretto by Jean Cocteau, music by Darius Milhaud, choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, stage curtain by Picasso – and costumes by Chanel. “Cocteau had been quick to realize that she was to couture what Picasso was to painting,” writes Diaghilev

biographer Richard Buckle. The title “Le Train Bleu” came from the name of the fastest and most opulent train of the day, on the Paris-Cote d’Azur route. Diaghilev was as committed to modernism as Chanel was. She, for her part, dressed the dancers in short skirts, long, loose tunics, and tight-fitting bathing suits that were forerunners of the modern leotard. She also re-designed the initial unsuccessful costumes of one of the greatest of 20th century ballets, the 1928 Balanchine/Stravinsky “Apollo.” Chanel and Diaghilev became so close that she visited him in Venice on the eve of his death, on August 19, 1929. Rich and famous – and often unhappy, partly because of a chronically miserable love life – Chanel closed her fashion business in 1939 and escaped Occupied France for long years in exile in Switzerland. The postwar success of Christian Dior’s “New Look” galled her. She saw nothing new in it, merely a return to

petticoats, tiny waists and long skirts. In 1954, she decided to stage a comeback. She was 71 years old. The French scoffed at her. Americans, feeling their pull and power in the wake of the war, supported her. They loved the ease of her fashion. They won, and eventually the French joined in as well. Women didn’t want to whittle their waists again.
Some great actresses were Chanel devotees, Katharine Hepburn among them. Like Chanel, Hepburn dressed in a mannish way and was all the sexier for it.
In 1969, she starred in the Broadway musical “Coco.” Chanel, always sensitive on the subject of age, was then in her late 80s. She complained that Hepburn, then 60, was too old to be playing her.

Some years ago, I had the pleasure and privilege of visiting Chanel’s apartment over her shop on the rue Cambon, which is maintained as something of a shrine to her. (Alas, it’s not open to the public.) I was startled to find that what the

high priestess of simplicity in dress favored in interior décor was....clutter. Not the kind of clutter other people had at the time. Other people had things that matched, whole sets of Sevres lining china cabinets,
whole series of botanical prints blanketing walls. Chanel, on the other hand, mixed Russian icons, Spanish mirrors, Chinese bronzes, gilt bronze fireplace andirons designed by sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, sentimental trinkets, flea market finds, and vermeil boxes given to her by the Duke of Westminster, her lover for a decade. (“Westminster is elegance itself,” she said. “He never has anything new – I had to go and buy him some shoes. He has been wearing the same jackets for 25 years....It’s just as bad being too rich as it is being too tall. In the first case, you can’t find happiness and in the second, you can’t find a bed.”

On the first floor of the rue Cambon headquarters, just over the luxury goods shop

at ground level, is a large salon where Chanel introduced her collections, where she held court, and where husbands still wait while their wives have fittings. The staircase that winds its way up to Chanel’s apartment has a jazzy black Art Deco banister. Its walls are mirrored, and cleverly so: Chanel could stand unseen at the top and watch the goings-on below. She was a spy in her own house. Mirrors have been big in French interiors since Louis XIV’s architect Francois Mansart designed the 233 foot long Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Chanel was so keen on mirrors that she hung framed ones on mirrored walls. They complicate the space to the point where you don’t notice that Chanel’s rooms, far from having the palatial proportions of Versailles, are actually quite small. Her dining chairs were covered in beige suede, a material she was the first to use for upholstery, just as shewas the first to use jersey for women’s clothing.

She used placemats, not tablecloths, which was the equivalent of using two yards of fabric in a dress instead of twenty. The neutrality of the beige had a role: It wouldn’t fight with whatever her guests were wearing.

Beige suede also covered the huge sofa in the sitting room, which Chanel designed herself and where she often napped. And the bedroom? There isn’t one. Every night, after she’d finished working, Coco Chanel crossed the street and went to sleep in a deliberately Spartan suite at the Ritz Hotel, where, in 1971, she died.