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I'm starting a new section of the blog called mademoiselle. It's mainly a place for me to store info on all the interesting bios I run across. I have a million I want to add: Frida Kahlo, Marian Davies, Courtney Love...
I just saw Coco Before Chanel. So my inaugural mademoiselle is Ms. Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel. Chanel's been my favorite brand I can't afford for a long time and I have a big interest in fashion as a means of expression or art and consider it to be a valuable piece of popular culture.
All I knew of Coco Chanel was that she invented the little black dress and she was a workaholic until her death in the 1970s. I also love those Coco perfume ads in Vogue or Vanity Fair. I started wearing Chanel perfume based off of those ads.
It starts with her being dumped at an orphanage at the age of 9 and traces her steps from lounge singer in low-class cabarets to the (sometimes mistreated) mistress of a French aristocrat. It ends with her hat-making shop just beginning to take off.
When she finally has the ability to change her life permanently and for the better, the choices she makes are unique and life-altering. She is offered a marriage proposal by the aristocrat, but she is in love with a married Englishman who supports her sense of style and thinks she should pursue it in Paris. She chooses Paris over marriage.
She's no saint, however. She is most definitely someone who slept her way to the top. Alternately, she's no whore. If the talent didn't exist, and these men didn't see it in her, she may have stayed a lowly cabaret singer her whole life. I would call her resourceful, using what she had and making the best of it until she eventually managed everything on her own.
I sat there and thought about it for a long time. What would I have done if I'd been Coco? Would I have been that brave? Would I have taken the easy way out? Would I have married? Would I have even slept my way into those circles to start with? Or would I have wasted away in the basement of a dress shop, mending hems for the rich and sharing a bedsit with my spinster sister?
I do not have an answer, which is why Coco gets a place on my muse list.
If you don't see the movie at all, but are a House of Chanel fan, the last scene is worth watching on youtube. You can trace the fashion seen in the movie, through the black dress with beads phase, through the tweed an quilted suits, all the way through today's Karl Lagerfeld creations...It was like watching a child age into adulthood via fashion and it was delicious!
