Mademoiselle

Chapter One

Early Life

If there s one thing that interests no one, it s someone s life. If I wrote a book about my life, I would begin with today, with tomorrow. Why begin with childhood? Why youth? One should first offer an opinion about the era in which one is living ­that s more logical, newer, and more amusing.

­Coco Chanel

Gabrielle Chanel turned her existence into a glamorous, cinematic soap opera that garnered near-­constant chronicling by the press, but she always refused to offer concrete details of her earliest years. Instead, she chose to dispense occasional tidbits of truth, hidden amid the ever-­changing fantasies she used to embellish the grim reality of her childhood and, perhaps, to soften for herself the legacy of a youth beset by poverty, tragic loss, and wounding betrayals by those closest to her.

Ferociously determined till the very end to obscure her true origins, Chanel lived in the present tense. Such insistence upon the now, upon the era in which one is living, as she put it, may help account for the saving grace of her life: her startling ability to interpret the moment, to create relevant fashion for most of sixty years. Perhaps if Chanel had had a more accepting relationship to her own nineteenth-­century rural childhood, she would never have become a standard-­bearer for twentieth-­century urban womanhood.

But Chanel s modernist revolution and its ongoing power have their roots in that long-­buried childhood of hers, in the flinty soil of France s Cévennes region where she was born, in her hardscrabble, peasant ancestors, and in the two major institutions that left their aesthetic, moral, and psychological stamp on her: the Roman Catholic Church and the military.

Chanel liked to tell people that she was a native Auvergnat, born in the south central region of Auvergne, in France s Massif Central ­a gorgeous, still heavily rural area known for its agriculture, its myriad volcanoes ­all extinct for thousands of years

Rhonda K. Garelick writes on fashion, performance, art, and cultural politics. Her books include Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism, and, as co-editor, Fabulous Harlequin: ORLAN and the Patchwork Self. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, New York Newsday, International Herald Tribune, and The Sydney Morning Herald, as well as in numerous journals and museum catalogs in the United States and Europe. She is a Guggenheim fellow and has also received awards from the Getty Research Institute, the Dedalus Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Whiting Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Garelick received her B.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature and French from Yale University.

A detailed, wry and nuanced portrait of a complicated woman that leaves the reader in a state of utterly satisfying confusion blissfully mesmerized and confounded by the reality of the human spirit. The Washington Post
 
Writing an exhaustive biography of Chanel is a challenge comparable to racing a four-horse chariot. . . . This makes the assured confidence with which [Rhonda K.] Garelick tells her story all the more remarkable. The New York Review of Books
 
This monumental biography . . . anchors Chanel s remarkable story within larger cultural, social, and political forces. Library Journal (starred review)

Broadly focused and beautifully written. The Wall Street Journal
 
Garelick can convincingly, and engagingly, illuminate a succession of parallels between fashion and politics. The New York Times Book Review
 
A true coup de grâce . . . a vital entry in the extensive library of Chanel scholarship. Yale Alumni Magazine
 
This is the definitive biography of Chanel. It is also the life of one of the most successful world conquerors who has ever imposed her will on a vast subject population. It is gripping, astute, and elegantly written. And if it leaves you leery of ever wearing a Chanel jacket, or carrying a Chanel bag, you will understand where the desire for it came from. Judith Thurman, author of the National Book Award winning Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller
 
In this magisterial, affecting portrait, Rhonda K. Garelick traces Chanel s history as a woman and as a designer and in doing so illuminates the troubling contradictions of twentieth-century Europe. Her book is a masterwork of original research and psychological nuance, remarkable in combining insight into her subject with insight into modernity entire. It s a Jamesian portrait of the curious mix of sadness and sadism that loneliness can hatch. It is also a deeply