Coco Chanel

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was a French fashion designer and founder of the Chanel brand. Along with Paul Poiret, Chanel was credited with liberating women from the constraints of the "corseted silhouette" and popularizing the acceptance of a sportive, casual chic as the feminine standard in the post-World War I era. Few designers have changed what elegance means as completely. This page is the main door to her record in this guide.

From here, the series links lead to her collections, fall fashions and fashion week pages in this item, with her news, profiles, runway and spring fashions pages completing the series in the following item of this guide. The search routes in the references run Coco Chanel news, photo and video searches, and the official CHANEL website is linked there. Her Paris address, 31 rue Cambon, remains the house's historic home in the record this series follows.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

The Chanel Proposition

A prolific fashion creator, Chanel's influence extended beyond couture clothing. Her design aesthetic was realized in jewelry, handbags and fragrance, and her signature scent, Chanel No. 5, has become an iconic product. That breadth is the proposition: one aesthetic — ease, clarity and black-and-white elegance — applied to everything a woman wears and carries, from the tweed suit and the little black dress to the jewelry on her neck and the fragrance on her skin.

The liberation at the center of the record was practical before it was symbolic. Removing the corset changed how clothes were constructed, but it also changed how women moved through a day. Sportive, casual chic — clothes borrowed in spirit from ease and activity, cut with a couturier's discipline — became the feminine standard of the post-World War I era because it answered how women actually lived. Every page in this series returns to that exchange: comfort given form, and form never again allowed to imprison comfort.

News, Photos and Video

This page's route set — news, photos and videos — suits a designer whose imagery is part of fashion's permanent vocabulary: the tweed suit, the little black dress, strands of pearls and the white camellia are recognized at a glance in photographs across generations. Use the searches gathered in the references to follow that imagery and the continuing coverage of the house she founded, then use the series block to move into the collections for the work itself.

Set her record beside the other French names in this letter of the directory and her singularity sharpens: where couture before her had built elegance on restriction, Chanel built it on freedom — and made the freedom itself the luxury. Her record also rewards readers who follow it in this series' order: begin with the liberation itself, then watch it become a wardrobe in the collections, a cold-weather system in the fall pages and a recurring public ceremony at fashion week, until the whole achievement — a new definition of elegance, still in daily use — is visible at once.

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