Free The Great Fashion Designers by Brenda Polan

words. Publisher and journalist John Fairchild watched Chanel at the age of eighty cut an armhole on a live model, drawing blood.
    To her artist connections, she was often extravagantly generous. In the atelier and with her employees, she was tough, demanding and ruthless—qualities that won her few friends and made her increasingly isolated in later life. Money, and the making of money, certainly transfixed her, giving her the independence she cherished so much. ‘She possessed the wily foxiness of a country horse trader,’ her lawyer Robert Chaillet said.
    But there was something more to Chanel. She had an exceptional ability to scent change in the air, an attribute common to the handful of designers who were influential throughout their careers. ‘Fashion is something in the air,’ she said. ‘You feel it coming, you smell it.’
    Her life story is as remarkable as her talents as a designer. She was born Gabrielle Chasnel, the illegitimate daughter of market traders, in a poor-house hospice in Saumur in 1883. Her mother died when she was only twelve, so the young Gabrielle spent much of her childhood in an orphanage near Brive-la-Gaillarde. At the age of eighteen she was accepted as a charity student at a convent boarding school in Moulins and attracted attention for her striking looks, particularly her elegant long neck and deep black eyes. Local trader Henri Desboutin hired her as a shop assistant in his lingerie and hosiery shop. Chanel sang for a while at a local music hall, La Rotonde, where she gained the name Coco, after a lost dog in a popular song of the time. She was boosted in her early career by the support of a succession of wealthy and well-connected lovers; these connections also permitted her to rise far beyond the social status usually associated withdressmakers or couturiers. Her first lover, Etienne Balsan, owned an estate in Royallieu, where she lived for several years: he subsidised her first solo business selling hats from his apartment on boulevard Malesherbes. There then followed a passionate liaison with Captain Arthur Capel, known as Boy, an English playboy and polo player. He financed her first project in the rue Cambon, the Paris street that has become synonymous with her name. A small hat shop opened in 1910, followed by a boutique in the seaside resort of Deauville in 1913, selling knit separates and dresses. Biographers agree that Boy was the big love of her life; his death in a car crash in 1919 was a devastating blow.
    Her rise to fame was rapid and based on applying her own pared-down personal style to her business. That style was founded on knits and flannels, materials generally considered only appropriate for sports clothing. In later life, she liked to say her fortune was built on an old jersey jumper borrowed from Boy that she had customised by snipping through the front to create a cardigan. She borrowed ideas heavily from men’s clothing, ransacking her lovers’ wardrobes for inspiration, dressing her adolescent-boy physique in clothes that had been endlessly reworked to achieve the perfect fit. In her personal life, men brought her both great happiness and sadness. But in her professional life, there was no contest: magazine editor Alexander Liberman believed she learned all her sense of elegance from men.
    By 1915, she had opened a fashion house in Biarritz, subsidised by Boy. A year later, she produced her first full collection, unveiled in Biarritz to immediate and widespread acclaim. It included her take on a men’s sweater, with the neckline cut lower and a ribbon through the buttonholes, paired with a pleated skirt. Also included was a khaki jersey skirt suit with a jacket shape like a male army jacket. It should be remembered that this was wartime, when practical dressing was de rigueur. A year after the First World War ended, Chanel officially registered as a couturière and set up at 31 rue Cambon, where the house of Chanel is still