© Apis/Sygma/Corbis
Sleek. Chic. Notoriously guarded. Welcome to the secret world of Gabrielle Chanel.
The story of Chanel begins with an abandoned child, as lost as a girl in a dark fairytale. Unveiling remarkable new details about Gabrielle Chanel’s early years in a convent orphanage, and her flight into unconventional adulthood, Justine Picardie explores what lies beneath the glossy surface of a mythic fashion icon.
Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation. An authoritative account, based on personal observations and interviews with Chanel’s last surviving friends, employees and relatives, it also unravels her coded language and symbols, and traces the influence of her formative years on her legendary style.
Feared and revered by the rest of the fashion industry, Coco Chanel died in 1971, at the age of 87, but her legacy lives on. Drawing upon her unprecedented research, Justine Picardie brings Gabrielle Chanel out of hiding and uncovers the consequences of what she covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and myth, in a story that reveals the true heart of fashion.
‘Justine Picardie’s thoughtful and beautifully illustrated biography illuminates the iconoclast who might justifiably be said to have invented the twentieth-century woman’
Times Literary Supplement
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 This revised edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
© Justine Picardie 2010, 2017
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 Cover photograph © Apis/Sygma/Corbis
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Justine Picardie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN 9780007318995
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780007346295 Version 2017-04-24
‘I imposed black;it’s still goingstrong today,for black wipes outeverything else around.’
Coco Chanel
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