8 Quotes by Rhonda K. Garelick

Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie believed her aunt deliberately suppressed any early aptitude she’d had with a needle: “She refused to sew, not even a button. She used to sew when she was younger of course, but she’d forgotten it all.” Instead, Coco dreamed up her creations, communicated her vision to the workers, and let them assume the responsibility of execution. She was a creative visionary – management not labor.

Coco had a deep, physical relationship to her materials, an innate sense of how fabric should drape and flow over a body. She threw herself physically into the act of creation.

She had never formally studied fashion or apprenticed in a couture house. Her strength lay in imagination and instinct. Coco knew what she wanted to look like, and she understood how much her vision could appeal to other women.

When Coco couldn’t squeeze herself into something one way, she simply found – or created – another way, even if she needed a sharp instrument to do it.

There was virtually never anything revealing or overtly sexual about her clothes, but they were indisputably sensual – precisely because Chanel gave pride of place to the body’s simple materiality: the flesh, muscle, and bone beneath the cloth. “For an outfit to be pretty, the woman wearing it must give the impression of being completely nude underneath it,” she said.

One of her earliest innovations involved cutting open the front of men’s sweaters and adding buttons or ribbon trim – thus giving rise to the precursor of the cardigan, which later became one of her staples. The origin of this idea had been simple: Coco disliked pulling men’s sweaters, with their tight neck openings, over her head and mussing her hair.

I wanted to escape, and to become the center of a universe of my own creation, instead of remaining on the margins or even becoming part of other people’s universe.

Thin, androgynous, simply dressed in striped naval-uniform-style suits, or schoolboy sports clothes and blazers, the “Chanel woman” conjured the silhouette of the war’s millions of soldiers – the young men dying just out of sight of the general population.