Chanel and Her World - Hardcover

Charles-Roux, Edmonde

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865651590 ISBN 13: 9780865651593

Publisher: Vendome Press, 2005

Synopsis

The best-selling, most abundantly illustrated biography available of fashion icon Coco Chanel, written by Edmonde Charles-Roux, her close friend and chosen official biographer.

“A model pictorial biography.” —New York Times   *  “This Chanel biography is as elegantly turned out as its subject.” —Washington Post
 
In this beautiful volume, the glorious life and world of the incomparable Coco Chanel shines again through lively text and a staggering collection of photographs, shedding new light on one of the great stories of the modern age.
 
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883–1971) is a fashion icon unlike any other, arguably the most influential designer of the 20th century, whose creations remain as popular today as when they were introduced a century ago.

She invented modern, chic clothing for women: she freed them from corsets, bobbed their hair, put them in simple bathing suits, and sent them out to get tanned in the sun. She introduced slacks, costume jewelry, the exquisitely comfortable and elegant knit suit, the “little black dress,” and the now-ubiquitous quilted handbag. She made the first couture perfume―No. 5―which remains the most popular scent ever created.

And she knew and collaborated with the leading creative minds of her day: the likes of Picasso, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Jean Renoir, and Visconti―as she matched their modernist innovations by liberating women from the prison of 19th-century fashion and introducing a whole new concept of style.
 

About this title

About the Author

Edmonde Charles-Roux began her journalistic career at Elle and ultimately became editor-in-chief of French Vogue.
 

Reviews

If style never goes out of fashion, then a biography of Coco Chanel shouldn't either. First published 25 years ago and out of print for the last decade, Charles-Roux's book was originally all black and white, but large color photos and illustrations have been added for this reissue, and the layout has been redesigned as well. (The text remains the same.) As a former editor-in-chief of French Vogue for 12 years and a longtime friend of Chanel, Charles-Roux collected a lot of photos of the fashion icon and of those allowed into her inner circle. She shares many of them in this massive biography, which follows Chanel's journey from her birth on August 20, 1883, to her days as a shop girl in Moulins to her triumph in, and transformation of, the fashion world. The book also provides insight into how Chanel's style developed and how its evolution was related to her defiance of the social conventions of her time; Coco was a great friend of the Cubists and she shared many of their avante-garde tastes. Charles-Roux's analysis may occasionally have more style than substance, but this balance would hardly have bothered Chanel, for whom style was always everything. And with a Chanel exhibition coming up at the Metropolitan Museum in May, 2005, it seems unlikely that this book will every be out of print for so long again.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Vendome Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865651590
• ISBN 13: 9780865651593
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384