Description
Coco before the myth calcified. Axel Madsen’s Chanel: A Woman of Her Own strips the varnish from fashion’s founding legend: Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, the orphan who invented modern chic — the little black dress, the jersey suit, No. 5 — and lived a life as dramatic as her designs, from convent to couture to controversy.
Madsen doesn’t flinch: the lovers (from Boy Capel to a Nazi officer), the wartime years, the ferocious comebacks. But he never loses sight of the genius: the eye that saw women wanted freedom before women did, the hand that cut clothes like architecture. This is biography with the seams showing — all the better for its honesty about a complicated icon.
The essential Chanel: glamorous, troubling, and utterly readable. For fashion lovers and anyone fascinated by the dark side of genius. The woman behind the interlocking Cs. Madsen’s Chanel is no saint and no monster — just the most interesting woman in fashion, flaws and genius intact.
Born an illegitimate pauper in a French charity hospital, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel rose to become the reigning queen of fashion — the woman who freed women from the corset, dressed them in jersey and the little black dress, and made Chanel No. 5 a legend. In this revealing biography, Axel Madsen brings the most formidable woman of twentieth-century fashion vividly to life.
Madsen, a seasoned biographer, traces Chanel’s extraordinary arc: the convent orphanage childhood, the years as a cabaret singer, the lovers who opened doors and the ones who broke hearts, the rise of a fashion empire — and the darker chapters, from wartime controversies to her dramatic 1954 comeback at the age of seventy.
Sympathetic but never sycophantic, this is the definitive life of a woman who was, as Madsen shows, entirely a woman of her own. For fashion lovers and biography readers alike, it is an irresistible portrait of ambition, reinvention, and style.
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