Saturday 16 June 2012

The most famous and the best fashion designer-Gabrielle Chanel

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883–1971) and the House of Chanel

Born in August of 1883, Gabrielle Chanel was a French native who was destined to liberate women from the constraints of corsets and other uncomfortable garments. A true rebel and visionary, Chanel, who changed her name to Coco after a brief career as a singer, preferred to wear clothes she could move freely in; often, her style were imbued with a mannish aesthetic. Indeed, Coco Chanel, who designed her first cardigan to avoid pulling any garment over her head, was really the originator of modern women’s sportswear. Her desire for freedom and self-expression gave women style without sacrifice…
Her childhood was not easy; her mother died young, when Gabrielle was just twelve years old, and in time, the young girl was sent to live in an orphanage…the nuns who cared for her also taught her the rudiments of sewing.

It was in 1931 while in Monte Carlo that Chanel made the acquaintance of Samuel Goldwyn. The introduction was made through a mutual friend, the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, cousin to the last czar of Russia, Nicolas II. Goldwyn offered Chanel a tantalizing proposition. For the sum of a million dollars (approximately seventy-five million today), he would bring her to Hollywood twice a year to design costumes for MGM stars. Chanel accepted the offer. En route to California from New York traveling in a white train car, which had been luxuriously outfitted specifically for her use, she was interviewed by Colliers magazine in 1932.
Chanel's own lifestyle fueled her ideas of how modern women everywhere should look, act, and dress. Her own slim boyish figure and cropped hair became an ideal, as did her tanned skin, active lifestyle, and financial independence. Throughout her career, Chanel succeeded in packaging and marketing her own personal attitudes and style, making her a key arbiter of women's taste throughout the twentieth century.

 The designer's passionate interests inspired her fashions. Her apartment and her clothing followed her favorite color palette, shades of beige, black, and white). Elements from her art collection and theatrical interests likewise provided themes for her collections. When Chanel attended a masquerade ball dressed as a figure from a Watteau painting, she later reworked the costume into a woman's suit. She hired Russian émigrés from her circle of friends to work in her embroidery workshop, creating designs to her exacting specifications. Known for a relentless drive for perfection, whether in design or fit, and strong opinions in all matters of taste, Chanel backed her clothing with the authority of her personal conviction.

0 comments:

Post a Comment