Take a “self-help” book, combine it with high fashion and what do you get? A publisher who’ll agree to publish you, for sure. Set up a Facebook account and a certain critical mass of readership is also assured. So far, 720 admirers have signed up on the account titled “The Gospel According to Coco Chanel” to imbibe “life lessons from the world’s most elegant woman” who, in this case, happens to be the twenties’ fashion icon whose spare, ditzy style is enjoying a resurgence among edgy, young designers clothing the world’s beautiful people.
Distilled from the overt commercialism, much of the book consists of warmed-over facts about Chanel’s life with some “life lessons” thrown in. So, it is almost with chagrin that I have to admit that Karen Karbo has managed to pull off a hugely entertaining book all the same.
The reason the book works is that Karbo has not followed the standard formula for self-help books that usually make for excruciating reading with their earnest didacticism. Instead, she has leveraged the technique to cover a narrative biography rooted in the current fashionista debates and written in a light, unpretentious and mildly humorous style. This is really a fashion primer for current and aspiring RP3Fs (Regular Page 3 Features) but written with a chutzpah that her subject would have appreciated.
The common thread running through the book is the fact that Chanel’s oeuvre has never really gone out of fashion — whether it’s the little black dress, the long string of pearls or the attenuated lines. As Karbo points out: “Any black dress is a direct descendent of Chanel’s 1926 short model. A knee-grazing pencil or A-line skirt? Chanel. Jersey anything? Chanel again.”
Bell bottoms, drop waists, twin sets, sportswear and “the need to accessorize madly at all times” were all trademark Chanel. Yet, in her time, Gabriele Chanel broke every convention, both in her personal life and in the designs she created. “Chanel ran screaming from the latest fads,” Karbo writes. “She considered them to be expressions of cheesy grandstanding, and, anyway, they rarely held to her standards of simple elegance.” No grunge, ripped tights, or clothes that “flashed your lady bits” for her.
Each of the 12 chapters of the book run titles that reflect the “lessons” to be drawn from Chanel’s life that roughly correspond with the turning points in her career. So let’s start with her origins as a designer in the first chapter called “On Style”. Karbo has chosen Chanel’s quote: “A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous”.
In fact, Chanel was neither when she started out. She was born in a poor house and became the younger mistress of a dissolute French aristocrat who spotted her in a café in Vichy where she was a singing waitress (and not a very good one, at that). Unlike other kept women, though, she was unwilling to spend her days in splendid idleness, so her lover set her up as a hat-maker in Paris in 1909.
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Chanel soon set about fulfilling her prediction that “fashion would soon go out of fashion” by buying cheap straw boaters from a nearby department store and trimming them with a single ribbon or flower. This at a time when hats were elaborate creations that tested the neck muscles of the sturdiest matron and threatened to decimate whole species of birds for their feathers.
Ironically, Chanel’s first customer was her lover’s senior mistress, a lush courtesan with whom Chanel got on famously. And it was the “marvelous and strange hat” on Emilienne d’Alencon’s head that had the Parisian high society heading for Chanel Modes to check out this eccentric and gamin mistress of Etienne Balsan.
Chanel’s designs were very much a product of her life, way of thinking and the times she lived in. The classic jersey dress is a case in point. In the early part of the 20th century, jersey was only for underwear and, therefore, cheap. Where other fashion designers saw only lingerie, Chanel spotted the unadorned pencil-line jersey dress because, as she once said, “not all women have the figure of Venus” — though this timeless creation was designed to suit her own anorexic Victoria Beckham-type figure at a time when tastes ran to the Junoesque.
Unblessed by looks or the conventional talents of the day, Chanel’s career thrived on the strength of her intelligence and penchant for the unconventional. That is her “life lesson” in Chapter 3 (On Fearlessness): “The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.” As Karbo shows Chanel did just that and more, pioneering a revolutionary and ultimately durable style, having scads of affairs and chain-smoking while she was at it. Had it not been for her chosen profession, Chanel could well have been a feminist icon because she was the first to liberate women’s fashion from the fetters of corsets, conformity and men’s opinions.
If there is an overall “life lesson” to be derived from this perky little book, it is the clichéd one of living life on your own terms. If that helps create a fashion empire that has endured into another century, who’s to argue?
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO COCO CHANEL
Life lessons from the world’s most elegant woman
Karen Karbo
Om Books International
229 pages; Rs 295