EThey say Gabrielle is inscrutable. An enigma hidden behind the carefully cultivated image of Coco, the world’s most famous fashion designer. They say she didn’t want us to know her. It is said that she was ashamed of her origins and considered the elegant silhouette she presented of herself to be more socially acceptable and business-friendly than the truth.
“When it came to her own life, Chanel was an unreliable narrator,” says the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The sign hangs roughly in the middle of the exhibition “Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto”, under a portrait that shows her, as usual, in a tweed suit, with a multi-row pearl necklace and a mocking look: “She has mythologized a lot of her past, obscured some elements , others invented.” She never wrote her memoirs. She never saw the musical about her life. And when biographers spoke to her, she varied Gabrielle’s story each time. She couldn’t even pinpoint the year of her birth.
Of course, the facts have now been known for a long time. More than fifty years after her death, the life of Gabrielle Chanel, who adopted the name “Coco” as a nightclub singer, has been exhaustively researched. But it may be this exhibition in London, which focuses on Chanel’s fashion, that resolves the misunderstanding about her supposed reserve and closes the gap between Gabrielle and Coco.
After the exhibitions on Alexander McQueen (2015) and Christian Dior (2019), the Victoria & Albert Museum has curated the third sensational haute couture show with Chanel. And this time it was possible not only to show dresses, not only to indulge in fabrics, sketches and gowns and to give the gallery the appearance of a particularly enchanting boutique.
The diva has hidden nothing
This time the exhibits are placed in context. Chanel fashion serves as a medium to tell the eventful story of its creator and, conversely, reveals the astonishing realization that the diva has hidden nothing. She didn’t hide the tragedy of her life, the contradictions, the heartbreak, the shame and her workaholism. Rather, she let the world participate openly.
The exhibition teaches that everything you want to know about Coco Chanel is in her clothes. Her fashion is like a diary in which her injuries, her wishes, her dreams and her unconditional will can be read. She was born – now undoubtedly – in 1883 not into poverty, but into misery. She was one of several illegitimate children of a hawker who drank and a laundress. Her mother died when she was eleven, biographers assume, in her presence. The children came to the monastery. One sister would later kill herself and the other would drink to death. But Gabrielle learned to sew from the nuns.
The colors of the nuns
If you know her past, you can no longer miss it in her work. Throughout her entire career, Chanel preferred the colors of the nuns – black, white and beige. The legendary pearl necklaces that have become synonymous with the House of Chanel are reminiscent of rosaries. The designer never insisted on real pearls.
Pragmatically, as necessity has taught her, and with little arrogance, she used false ones. In her lavish jewelry collections, she often mixed real and fake gemstones, which is also interpreted as crossing social boundaries because she forced high society to get off their high horse and wear rhinestones. She was similarly unscrupulous when it came to tailoring fine clothing from cheap fabrics such as jersey and cotton.
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