The story behind the myth of mademoiselle Coco Chanel has already inspired plenty of works – among with biographies, romances and movies – but there is one piece of work that caught our eye recently.
Written by Elle France columnist, Pascale Frey, and illustrated by Bernard Ciccolini, Editions Naïve’s collection Grand Destins de Femmes features biographies of iron ladies such as Coco Chanel, Isadora Duncan, Virginia Woolf, Diane Fossey and Françoise Dolto. The real news about this edition is the ironic way that Coco’s life is communicated through the illustrations. From her tough childhood to the way she started sewing, the time spent as a sales assistant at Maison Grampavre, up to the quite memorable singing performance at the café-concert in a Moulins pavilion, “La Rotonde”; funny expressions and hilarious circumstancesgive us an image of a woman who is pretty far from the podium of fashion dictators we are used to think of.
Not even her private life, characterized by two main lovers, Etienne Balsan and Arthur Capel, has been forgotten. The book tells the stories of her move to Paris at the beginning of 1900, of the creation of her iconic scent and the famed silhouette.
The watercolor illustrations not only retrace her life but also give us an idea of what was the French society back then: Ballets Russes, artists of the interwar, people around and inside her everyday routines. They also tell a bit about her adventures in Hollywood, a quite short time in which she worked as a costume designer overseas.
We find narrated the whole life of a woman who never gave up and who changed the rules of fashion, a story that is loved mostly because it represents the classical success story, from poor and abandoned to rich and loved. This book gives us the chance to perceive the figure of Coco Chanel from another perspective, not only more comical but also more human.
Coco Chanel has been released in conjunction with the 100-year anniversary of the maison’s first boutique at the Deauville’s Hotel placed in Normandy.
Francesca Crippa
