Chanel Women's Fashion Brand

Chanel S.A. is a high fashion house that specializes in haute couture and ready-to-wear clothes, luxury goods and fashion accessories. In her youth, Gabrielle Chanel gained the nickname Coco from her time as a chanteuse. As a fashion designer, Coco Chanel catered to women's taste for elegance in dress, with blouses and suits, trousers and dresses, and jewellery of simple design, that replaced the opulent, over-designed, and constrictive clothes and accessories of 19th-century fashion.

The ownership is part of the profile too: Chanel S.A. is a French, privately held company owned by Alain Wertheimer and Gérard Wertheimer, grandsons of Pierre Wertheimer, who was an early business partner of the couturière Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. Private ownership at this scale is a fashion fact in itself - the house answers to a family, not to a stock market - and Apparel Search's Chanel coverage is correspondingly deep, with the Coco Chanel designer pages for collections, fall fashions, fashion week, news, profiles, runway and spring fashion all linked from this profile.

Elegance by Simplification

The design revolution the profile describes is a subtraction story. Against 19th-century fashion's opulence and constriction, Chanel offered blouses and suits, trousers and dresses, and jewellery of simple design - clothes that assumed a woman had a life to live in them. Trousers for women, the un-constrictive suit, the simple jewel instead of the parure: each was a liberation disguised as a style, and together they wrote the template that a century of women's dressing has followed.

The Chanel product brands have been personified by fashion models and actresses, the profile continued, including Inès de La Fressange, Catherine Deneuve, Carole Bouquet, Vanessa Paradis, Nicole Kidman, Anna Mouglalis, Audrey Tautou, Keira Knightley and Marilyn Monroe. That list is the house's second language: faces as emblems, chosen across generations, so that the brand is always embodied by a woman of the moment while the clothes stay recognisably themselves. Haute couture and ready-to-wear sit under the same discipline - the silhouette changes, the simplification does not.

Buying Chanel for Women

At this level the first discipline is authenticity, because a house this famous is copied at every price. Buy from the house, its authorised channels, or resale sellers who document labels, hardware, stitching, serial details and provenance piece by piece; the genuine article's finishing - the hand of the fabric, the precision of the quilting or the suit's trim, the weight of the jewellery - should be evident in the hand before it is evident in photographs. A price far below the market is information, and not good information.

Then buy the garment as clothing. The suit and the little dress are the house's thesis pieces for women; try them as you will live in them, and favour the classic you will wear for a decade over the seasonal piece you will admire for a month, because Chanel's own design logic - simple design replacing the over-designed - rewards exactly that choice. Care is correspondingly serious: specialist cleaning, stored knitwear and tailoring given room to breathe, jewellery kept separate and soft-wrapped. Looked after, a Chanel piece is the argument of this profile made wearable: elegance, simplified, lasts.

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