Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel was a French designer. With her patterns she revolutionised  women's clothing. She was the most important designer during the twentieth century. Up until the First World War, women's clothing were characterized by full-length skirts that were impractical for a lot of activities. Coco Chanel helped create women's clothing that was more practical, for example: trousers and suits. She also created her famous Chanel number 5 scent.

                                                                  

                                                                   Life

Her real name was Gabrielle Chanel, she was born in 1883 and she didn't love revealing her birth date. Her education was marked by poverty. When she was 12 years old, her mother died and her father sent his three daughters including Gabrielle to a convent. Life in the convent was very difficult, but there she learnt to sew. At the age of 18 she left the convent and moved to Moulins where became a seamstress and started a secondary career singing at cabaret events. Then Chanel began an affair with Balsan, a rich aristocrat. Thanks to financial aid from a lover Capel, Chanel opened a boutique where she makes an innovative use of jersey cloth. In 1919 Chanel opened her first boutique in Paris on 31 rue Cambon. In the post-war, she felt the need for a revolution in women's clothes. She started by liberating women from the corset and encouraged a casual but elegant range of clothes. Then she retired from the fashion business but 16 years later she made a comeback and combined fashion and practicality. She developed "Chanel bag". Her bags had a thin strap allowing hands to be kept free. At the start of the second world war Chanel closed her shops and  her workers lost their jobs. During the German occupation of Paris, Chanel was involved in romantic liaison with a German officer, this helped her to gain a luxury apartment in the Ritz for the duration of the war. After the war, there was the emergence of new male designers, like Christian Dior who started to eclipse Chanel, she returned to Paris and reopened her couture house, she was successful in America and Britain but less in France. Chanel never married or had children, but during her life she had a lot of relationships with influential men. She died when she was 87 years at the Ritz hotel. An important Chanel's quote is "In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different".