Chanel Dies at the Ritz: Fashion's Revolutionary

Coco Chanel was fifty-eight when she launched Chanel No. 5 in 1921. She had already remade women's fashion by then: jersey fabrics pulled from underwear and sportswear into haute couture, short hair as a statement of independence, the little black dress as a universal wardrobe staple, costume jewelry worn unapologetically with evening gowns. The perfume was what lasted longest. Born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in Saumur, France on January 10, 1883 (some sources say 1883, some 1871; she lied about her age throughout her life), she was raised in an orphanage run by nuns after her mother died of tuberculosis when Chanel was twelve. Her father disappeared. The austerity of the orphanage, its clean lines and monochrome simplicity, influenced her aesthetic for the rest of her career. She began as a cabaret singer, where she earned the nickname "Coco" from a song she performed. She opened her first millinery shop in Paris in 1910 with the financial support of wealthy lovers, and expanded into clothing. Her approach was revolutionary: while other designers corseted, layered, and decorated, Chanel stripped away. She made comfortable clothes for women who actually moved through the world. Chanel No. 5, created with perfumer Ernest Beaux, was the first fragrance to use synthetic aldehydes in large proportion, giving it an abstract, non-floral scent that didn't smell like any single flower. It became the best-selling perfume in history. Marilyn Monroe famously said she wore "five drops of Chanel No. 5" to bed and nothing else. She closed her fashion house during World War II and lived at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where she maintained a relationship with a German intelligence officer. This wartime collaboration became public knowledge after the war but did not destroy her career. She reopened the house in 1954 at seventy-one. The Paris press savaged the collection. American buyers loved it. The Chanel suit, collarless jacket and skirt in boucle tweed with chain-weighted hems, became one of the most copied garments in fashion history. She died on January 10, 1971, at the Ritz, where she had lived for over thirty years. She was 87.