Sleepy History - Coco Chanel

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is Sleepy History. Sleepy History is a production of Slumber Studios. To listen ad-free, get access to bonus episodes, and support the ongoing production of this show. Check out our premium feed. Audrey Hepburn's Little Black Dress and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Jackie Kennedy's iconic suits. Quilted purses with gold chains.

Starting point is 00:00:39 Chanel number five perfume. The modern story of high fashion couldn't be told without Coco Chanel. Today the name Chanel is synonymous with sleek elegance and classic sophistication. But who was the woman behind the legend? And how did she rise out of poverty to take the world by storm? It's a rags to riches story. marked by destitution and betrayal, determination, luxury, and fabulous triumph. So just relax and let your mind drift as we explore the sleepy history of Coco Chanel.

Starting point is 00:01:27 Born by some accounts in a poor house and raised in an orphanage, Coco Chanel survived a childhood of want, an adolescence. spent in austerity and two world wars that ravaged her native France and tested her loyalty and character. Through it all, she channeled her innate charisma and artistic talent to not only survive but thrive beyond the wildest expectations. She built a life of fame and opulence for herself and bequeathed to the world a fashion legacy that continues to transcend time and place. Her story is one of growth, change, and perseverance, and it all began in a small town in France in the late 1800s. Coco Chanel was born Gabrielle Chanel in 1883. She was the second child

Starting point is 00:02:54 of a poor, unmarried couple who already had one baby daughter less than a year old. Her father was a peddler or streetbender who traveled around the French countryside. He was not present for Gabrielle's or her sister's births. Her mother apparently worked as a laundry woman. The couple married when Gabrielle was a toddler, and they went on to have four more children. Of the six children, four would survive, two brothers and two sisters. The family moved around from small town to small town until Gabrielle was 11 years old when her mother died, possibly from bronchitis, one freezing cold morning in 1895.

Starting point is 00:03:58 Years later, after poor Gabrielle became the glamorous and famous, famous Coco. She would claim to be several years younger than her actual age. In line with that fiction, she would later tell reporters that she had been six years old, not 11 when her mother died. This is one of many discrepancies and contradictions in the stories Coco Chanel told the world about herself and her difficult childhood. That fact, along with the passage of time and lack of historical records, sometimes makes it hard to untangle the specifics of her life story. Indeed, details are murky as to what happened next to the newly motherless Chanel children. But it appears that Gabrielle's father may have sent the children to stay with relatives for a short time.

Starting point is 00:05:12 Whatever happened, it's known that the next year, the Chanel girls were left in the care of nuns at the orphanage. Gabrielle would spend her teen years at the convent of the Abbey of Obazine in the care of nuns belonging to the orphanage. of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Years later, Coco Chanel would come back to visit one of the nuns, according to local oral histories, so she apparently formed some attachments there, but the environment was certainly austere. Its stern and colorless aspect is believed

Starting point is 00:06:04 to have influenced Chanel's eventual fashion aesthetic, with its minimalism, simple lines, and emphasis on black and white. Comforts must have been few, but no one living today knows exactly what young Gabrielle experienced in her childhood. Perhaps regular meals and a reliable roof over her head meant more than we can say. Later on, she would say that she'd had a revelation at 12 years old that money meant independence. Without money, you are nothing, she declared, but with money you can do anything. I would say to myself over and over, money is the key to freedom. This aligns with statements one of her biographers has made about Chanel's lifelong

Starting point is 00:07:13 pursuit of power as the means to being an independent woman. When Gabrielle was 18 years old, she left the convent and attended a boarding school called Notre Dame. As she had no money or family to speak of, she got what was called a charity spot at the school. In today's terms, she received a scholarship. Did that mean that the school or the not from the convent saw potential in the young Gabrielle? Perhaps. At any rate, little is known of her time at the school. But when she left, the school's mother superior found her and her younger sister, Antoinette, jobs in town. They worked as seamstresses at a local draper's shop. It was the beginning, however humble, of Gabrielle's life in the

Starting point is 00:08:22 broad world of fashion. Coco and her sister, or potentially a young aunt, again the details are murky, also began to sing in cafe shows that were popular with officers from the local army barracks. One of the songs Gabrielle would sing was about a young Parisian girl who loses her dog. The name of the song was Kika Vukoko. It may have to be a young, have been from there. Some historians believe that Gabrielle took the name that the world would know her by. The history that comes down of that time evokes a young woman, barely more than a girl, with great personal magnetism. Photos from later years show a slender and graceful young woman with a wide mouth and high cheekbones. But she seems to have been noted,

Starting point is 00:09:33 most for her persona, and the story is that she was a charismatic performer, more than a remarkable singer. She certainly must have had a forceful character and strong drive, as she was taking charge of her destiny by the time she entered her 20s. Around that time, Gabrielle or Coco, started becoming friendly with the army officers stationed in the town. She was transforming from the orphan at the convent into a young woman of the world. Then, at the dawn of the 20th century, as she was just entering her 20s, Coco's new life really took off. She went to spend this summer with her grandfather in Vichy, a famous spot.

Starting point is 00:10:36 town. There she met a cavalry officer and aired to a textile fortune who had a manor home grand enough that it had chateau in its name. They became lovers and he set her up as his mistress at his chateau. It was the first in a string of romances with wealthy and powerful men that would offer Coco luxury, protection, financial support, and entree into society. The most influential of these would be a wealthy polo-playing Englishman named Arthur Capel. Commonly known by the nickname Boy, Coco had known poverty and want from her earliest days. Her mother and some siblings had not survived their years of destitution, Coco herself survived on charity, and she entered adulthood with nothing. Yet she built a life and legacy that would be the envy of the world. At first, romance was her

Starting point is 00:12:00 ticket out of obscurity until her artistic talents and entrepreneurial instincts could take over and catapled her to celebrity and wealth. From early on, Coco exhibited a flair for fashion that drew the attention of those around her. She began designing stylish hats, very important fashion items for women at the time. With the financial support of her lovers, she eventually opened a small hat boutique in Paris.

Starting point is 00:12:44 Around this time, however, tragedy struck again in her personal life when her older sister Julia died. Julia left behind a son, Andre, who Chanel would care for. Rumors swirled around the relationship, with many speculating that Andre was actually Coco's biological son from one of her affairs. Not long after opening the hat studio, Chanel opened a clothing shop in the fashionable seaside resort town of Doville. It was followed by another boutique in another seaside town, Bia Ritz, in 1915. For her first boutiques, Coco created women's sportswear out of Jersey, a simple fabric that was mostly used at the time to make men's undergarments.

Starting point is 00:13:50 Although, recall that undergarments in that era were much more extensive than nowadays, think of something more like what we would call long underwear, also known as thermals or base layers, like those worn for snow outings. Coco's jersey designs were simple, uncomfortable, yet chic. They offered a breath of fresh air. and freedom in the era of corsets and elaborate restrictive gowns. It could be said that Chanel's early designs freed and empowered the women who wore them, much as Chanel freed and empowered herself when she took her destiny in her own hands. Wealthy women soon yielded to the allure

Starting point is 00:14:52 of Chanel's elegant yet freeing designs, and within five years, she was taking the fashion world by storm. In the interim, World War I broke out in Europe, and as it happened, the resulting shortages and austerity efforts contributed to the abandonment of the ornate fashions from the previous era. This further pushed Western women's clothing styles toward the simplicity and more comfortable chic of Chanel's aesthetic. After the war, simpler lines in fluid fabrics informed the fashion of the roaring 20s. In the midst of it all in 1926, Coco Chanel introduced what may be her most enduring legacy, at least in the realm of women's clothing, the little black dress. The custom at the time had been to wear black dresses only for mourning when someone had died,

Starting point is 00:16:14 but the young women of post-war society in Europe were all about breaking boundaries and pushing limits. And so black began to show up in the most cutting edge designs. And Chanel was perhaps among the sharpest of those fashionable cutting edges. The simple elegance and versatility of the little black dress made it both edgy, after all it was black, and of wide appeal. Vogue called it the Ford of Fashion, referencing the Ford Model T cars that were the first automobiles to break through from a rare luxury possession and reach the wider popular market. The place of Chanel's little black dress in fashion lore would be cemented years later with the iconic garment worn by Audrey Hepburn in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. And it

Starting point is 00:17:28 remains a fashion staple to this day. Meanwhile, at the start of the 1920s, the artist and entrepreneur had introduced another of her lasting legacies. Her signature perfume, Chanel No. 5. Its complex jasmine-based scent and simple chic bottle propelled it to a phenomenal popularity that in endures more than a century later. That popularity formed the foundation of Chanel's financial success. She received only 10% of the profits from the perfume sales. Due to a contract she signed early on with an established department store and a cosmetics company to help produce and market the scent. Over the decades, she would try many times to revisit that arrangement and claim more rights over the Chanel Empire, but without success. Nevertheless, the perfume sold so well that her share was still highly profitable.

Starting point is 00:18:58 Coco's soaring assent continued, with movie stars like Marlena Dietrich and Greta Garbo wearing her designs. During her heyday, the designer was in the middle of a wild social world of the rich, the famous, the brilliant, and the extravagant. She spent time or shared beds with the likes of Picasso, the composer Stravinsky, the Duke of Westminster, and the grandson of Tsar Alexander II of Russia. In the interwar period, France, like much of Western Europe, played host to social upheaval that saw artists and socialites embracing a decadent and convention-breaking lifestyle. Gender roles and Victorian expectations were flung aside, as champagne and illicit substances

Starting point is 00:20:04 flowed freely, and Chanel was in the midst of it all. But at the end of the 1930s, the dark specter of war once again descended on Europe and on the life Coco Chanel had so carefully constructed for herself. Chanel shuttered her fashion house in 1939. She was living in the stylish Ritz Hotel in Paris at the time. In 1940, the unthinkable happened, and France fell to the indesionable. invading German army. The Ritz became Nazi headquarters after the Germans took control of the country. Coco began a romantic affair with Baron Hans Gunther von Dinklaka, a half-German

Starting point is 00:21:01 half-Engliette and, as it transpired, German spy, had Coco Chanel, then 58, clutched again at the romantic charm that had allowed her to escape destiny in her young adulthood. We can't know her motives, but she would go on to live with von Dinklika for a number of years during and immediately after the war, communicating in their common language of English. Coco mixed with the German army and was accused of collaborating with the occupation. The story of those years is cloud. and many participants took their stories to the grave. In 2023, a museum exhibition reportedly showed a mixed picture

Starting point is 00:22:00 of Chanel's activities and loyalties during the occupation of France. The exhibit included evidence of her collusion with the Nazi authorities occupying Paris. And provocatively, it also presented new evidence claiming that Chanel was also connected to the French resistance. Whatever the truths that must have been lost to time, however, it seems certain that her relationship with von Dinklaga and association with the German army

Starting point is 00:22:37 must have provided great personal benefits during the war that were not enjoyed by other French citizens. Those benefits may also have extended to her nephew, André, her late sister Julia's son, the one who had sometimes been rumored to be actually Chanel's biological child. Andre was a French soldier being held as a prisoner of war in a German detention camp. The historical record indicates that in 1941, Coco traveled to Madrid with a German intelligence officer. Soon afterward, Andre was released. After France was liberated in 1944, the new French authorities briefly arrested Chanel,

Starting point is 00:23:39 but no charges were brought against her. The erstwhile artist moved to Switzerland and for some years seemed to be in retirement, but the designer couldn't remain in obscurity for long. Meanwhile, in the period right after World War II ended, Christian Dior had upended the fashion. world with his new look. It featured an exaggeratedly feminine outline of tightly cinched waists and flared skirts. Chanel did not approve of the structured restrictive designs, which must have recalled the Victorian clothing she was instrumental in rejecting in her youth.

Starting point is 00:24:38 Dior doesn't dress women, he upholsters them, she criticized. Perhaps this helped nudge Coco to begin designing again. In 1954, the year she would turn 71 years old, she presented her first fashion collection in a decade and a half. It's when she gave the world another of her iconic legacies, an elegant cardigan-style suit of the kind that Jackie Kennedy would later favor. It was a huge hit, including with Grace Kelly, the movie star-style icon and heiress, who would soon become Princess Grace of Monaco through marriage.

Starting point is 00:25:42 Then in 1961, Breakfast at Tiffany's came out, and Audrey Hepburn's chic character, Holly Golightly, returned the little black dress to the spotlight. Over the final years of her life, Chanel remained a high priestess of Ote Couture until her death in 1971. Since then, her brand and legacy have endured. Some 12 years after her passing, the designer Carl Lagofeld took the helm of the house of Chanel in 1983. He went on to lead the brand through many more decades. of prominence. Lagerfeld's spearheaded, decadent fashion shows and daring designs that pushed new boundaries, ones that would have been inconceivable in the days when young Coco first gave women

Starting point is 00:26:59 comfortable chic in the form of Jersey sportswear. What remains ahead for the iconic brand, that's the creative bequest of that determined complicated, charismatic artist who burst forth from the convent and poorhouse more than a century ago? That remains to be seen. But one thing seems sure. Coco Chanel's sense of chic and her artistic legacy look destined to maintain their place in fashion history for a long time to come

Sleepy History - Coco Chanel

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.