Coco Chanel
Last night - at 4:30pm! - London was cold, dark and rainy. My hormones were totally out of whack and all I really wanted to do was put on my pyjamas and eat mashed potatoes on the couch while watching Christmas movies.
Instead, I performed a small miracle: I managed to get myself all dolled up and went to an event that started at 8pm, which is basically midnight.
I KNOW! I’m an overachiever.
Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto is on at the V&A until 8 January. It’s a truly gorgeous exhibition featuring her life’s work, fashion philosophy and a handful of personal letters.
She was obviously an incredible artist and business woman. But there’s a lot more to her story than meets the eye. Namely, was she pro-German or was she a spy for the French resistance? No one seems to be particularly motivated to investigate these issues….
For example, she had a decade long affair with the (married) Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor. When he finally asked her to marry him, she declined and famously explained: “There have been several Duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Mademoiselle Chanel.”
That’s a great quote. What she didn’t say was that Grosvenor was a passionate anti-Semite.
Wow! that got dark! I hadn’t planned on that tangent, sorry about that. Let me get back to one of my favourite chanel creations: Chanel no. 5.
The iconic bottle was designed to be both masculine (it’s essentially a whiskey/hip flask) and feminine (fragile and elegant). The result is a simple design that has hardly changed since its creation in 1921.
And it happens to be the only perfume I wear… :)
image via hashtaglegend
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