Fashion changes, style remains

When I was in high school, our English teacher required us to write a term paper on a famous and influential person. While most of my friends couldn’t remember who they chose to write about, I could not forget mine – the legendary Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel.

Coco Chanel is perhaps one of the few women I admired at an early age. Born in August 1883 into the French peasantry and then raised in a convent orphanage, how many would have forseen that she would determine what women wore and how they behaved for the next 50 years?

With the help of the men in her life – Etienne Balsan, a wealthy cavalry officer and racing enthusiast, and then "Boy" Capel, a brilliant young Anglo/French tycoon – Chanel slowly transformed her simple hat shop into the most successful fashion and perfume empire ever known.

Her girlfriends, thinking they were doing her a favor, wore her first creations. She was mocked for her boaters decorated with just one knot of big black beads, or for her stylish schoolgirl dresses. She once dressed up for a ball in the costume of a page boy at a village wedding.

Coco would plunder the wardrobe of the poor for ideas. Inspired by workmen’s and sailors’ clothes, her easy-fitting, flowing designs could be worn for exercise and for sport. She wore a college girl’s gabardine raincoat or a fisherman’s outfit in white twill, dark wool and chine jersey. She appropriated men’s fashion – cotton trousers and espadrilles. To the women tarted up in feathers, lace and pearls, Chanel’s designs seemed unsophisticated. Little did they know that Chanel was inventing a concept which was destined to shape the future.

Mademoiselle Coco stripped women of their corsets and feathers. Her skirts were short so she could move quickly up the ladder of fashion. She put women in bathing suits and sent them to get tanned in the sun.

She later introduced slacks, soft jackets with no interlining, gold chains, jewel-like buttons, and flat shoes with a bar across and a black toe to shorten the foot. In 1926, Chanel introduced the "little black dress." But her quilted handbags and the braid-trimmed, brass-buttoned two-piece suit became her trademarks.

Then in 1921, Chanel launched the first couture perfume – Chanel No. 5. Bottled in the famous square-cut flacon and embossed with its reference number, this fragrance was created from a secret cocktail of over 80 ingredients.

Five, without a doubt, was her lucky number. But in 1970, Chanel’s "other great number" was born – Chanel No. 19. It was a reminder of Coco Chanel’s birthday, which fell on the 19th of August.

It may not have 80 ingredients like No. 5, but Chanel No. 19 owes its warm fragrance to its main ingredient, the Florentine iris. It takes six years to obtain the "iris butter," making the iris one of the rarest and most expensive natural raw materials in the world. In a new design created by Jacques Helleu, artistic director for Chanel, the new spray bottle expresses elegance, strength, and boldness – the very same qualities that she possessed, sufficient to prolong her name, her couture house, and work well beyond her life span.

Chanel may have passed away in 1971, but her legacy continues to live on. Now, who would have expected six letters to sum up a legend of the 20th century? Only she did.

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Chanel is available at Rustan’s.