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Coco Chanel, 1920
Born：Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel
19 August 1883(1883-08-19)
Saumur, France
Died：10 January 1971(1971-01-10) (aged 87)
Paris, France
Nationality：French
Education：Catholic Monastery in Aubazine
Occupation：Fashion designer
Awards：Neiman Marcus Fashion Award, 1957
Gabrielle "Coco" Bonheur Chanel (19 August 1883 – 10 January 1971) was an influential French fashion designer, founder of the famous brand Chanel, whose modernist thought, practical design, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important and influential figure in 20th-century fashion. She was the only fashion designer to be named on Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century.
Early life
Chanel was born to an unwed mother, Jeanne Devolle, a laundrywoman, in a facility for the indigent in Saumur, France. This was Devolle's second daughter. The father, Albert Chanel was an itinerant street peddler who with horse and cart lived a nomadic life, traveling to and from market towns, the family residing in rundown lodgings. He married Jeanne Devolle several years after Chanel was born. At birth Chanel’s name was entered into the official registry as “Chasnel.” It is speculated that this spelling was a clerical error or an ancient spelling of the family name. The couple eventually had five other children: Julia-Berthe, (1882–1913), Antoinette (born 1887) and three brothers, Alphonse (born 1885), Lucien (born 1889) and Augustin (born and died 1891).
In 1895, when she was twelve years old, Chanel’s mother died of tuberculosis. Her father sent her two brothers out as farm laborers and the three daughters to a bleak area of central France, the Corrèze, into the hands of a convent for orphans, Aubazine. It was a stark, frugal life demanding strict discipline but raised with the charity of the Catholic faith. At age eighteen, Chanel, now too old to remain at Aubazine, went to live in a boarding house set aside for Catholic girls in the town of Moulins.
Having learned the sewing arts during her six years at Aubazine, Chanel was able to find employment as a seamstress. When not plying her trade with a needle, she sang in a cabaret frequented by cavalry officers. It was at this time that Gabrielle acquired the name “Coco,” a name possibly derived from a popular song she sang, or an allusion to the French word for kept woman: cocotte.
Later in life, she concocted an elaborate, fabricated history to cover up her humble beginnings with a more compelling light. Of the various stories told about Coco Chanel, a great number were of her own invention. These legends were to be the undoing of the earliest of her biographies. These were ghosted memoirs commissioned by Chanel herself, but never published, always aborted before fruition, as she realized that the facts exposed a personage less laudatory than the mythic Chanel she had self-invented. Chanel would steadfastly claim that when her mother died, her father sailed for America to seek his fortune and she was sent to live with two cold-hearted spinster aunts. She even claimed to have been born in 1893 as opposed to 1883, and that her mother had died when Coco was six instead of twelve.
Personal life and early career
It was at Moulins that Chanel met a young, French, ex-cavalry officer, and wealthy textile heir Étienne Balsan. At age twenty-three, Chanel became Balsan’s mistress and for the next three years lived with him in his chateau Royallieu near Compiègne, an area known for its wooded equestrian paths and the hunting life. It was a life style of self-indulgence, Balsan’s wealth and leisure allowing the cultivation of a social set who reveled in partying and the gratification of human appetites with all the implied accompanying decadence. Balsan lavished Chanel with the beauties of "the rich life"— diamonds, dresses, and pearls. It was while living with Balsan that Chanel began designing hats, initially as a diversion that evolved into a commercial enterprise. Biographer Justine Picardie, in her 2010 study Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life (Harper Collins), suggests that the fashion designer's nephew, André Palasse, supposedly the only child of her sister Julia- Berthe who had committed suicide, actually was Chanel's child by Balsan.
