Saturday, October 18, 2008

Coco Chanel



Tonight I watched the new Coco Chanel movie on Lifetime and loved it!! It came out on September 13 and I'm sure they will show it again. It starred Barbora Bobulova as the young Chanel and Shirley MacLaine portraying her in her later life.

I especially loved the fashion and scenery in France in the early 1900's. Her first shop was a hat shop and it was fun for me to watch because I have always loved vintage hats and hat boxes. I also was really impressed with how she influenced and changed fashion...I think I'll wear pearls to work tomorrow...

Coco Chanel's stylish, elegant designs revolutionized fashion during the 1910s, freeing women from the uncomfortable and stiff apparel worn at the end of the 19th century. Chanel furthered her own image: the woman of the 20th century, embodying independence, success, personality, style, and confidence.
The influential Chanel suit, launched in 1924, was an elegant outfit composed of a knee-length skirt paired with a trim, boxy jacket, traditionally made of woven wool with black trim and gold buttons and worn with large costume-pearl necklaces.
Chanel also popularized the little black dress which had a blank-slate versatility that allowed it to be worn for both day and night. The black Chanel dress was strapless, backless and more than a little risqué. It shocked the general public at large but quickly became a fashion sensation. The Chanel dress premiered in the third-ever edition of Playboy.[citation needed] This added to the controversy surrounding the Chanel name.
Much imitated over the years, Chanel's designs were manufactured across more price categories than any other in the high-fashion world. It was Chanel who also introduced costume jewelry to the fashion world, using a variety of accessories such as necklaces, chains or pearls of several strands. A bag with golden handles, an elegant pearl necklace, and a tailored dress in black are the symbols of elegance and status that marked forever the history of fashion. But it was Chanel No. 5[3] - the number-one selling perfume in the world - which helped her become a millionaire. The perfume was created in 1921 by Ernest Beaux at the request of Chanel, who said that it was "a woman's perfume with the scent of woman." Its Art Deco bottle was incorporated into the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1959. Chanel No. 5 was the first synthetic perfume to take the name of a designer. She famously said, "This perfume is not just beautiful and fragrant. It contains my blood and sweat and a million broken dreams."
All her clothes were emblazoned with the famous Chanel symbol, the interlocking "C"s. This, however, was not her own design. The symbol was given to her by the owner of the Chateau de Cremat (a Chateau on the outskirts of Nice in the south of France). In 1923, she told Harper's Bazaar that "simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance." Chanel always kept the clothing she designed simple and comfortable and revealing. She took what were considered poor fabrics like jersey and upgraded them. She was instrumental in helping to design the image of the 1920s flapper, a "new breed" of young women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz music, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. The flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles, and showing a lot of skin.



1 comment:

Unknown said...

Jana. i just book tagged you , come on over. mishelle