Intimate Chanel

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by Isabelle Fiemeyer

Intimate Chanel was written with the help of Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie, Coco Chanel’s grand-niece, and promises an intimate insight into the private world of the designer. It includes never before published pictures of Ms. Chanel’s personal effects and reveals details about her love of symbolism and poetry, the men in her life, her family and her nephew Andre Palasse: “unveiling who ‘her Auntie Coco’ really was, a Chanel who was very different from her public persona.”

Books · Retrospective

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La Francaise

Rating ·

I hesitated before giving this book a five-star rating. However, it is the fifth biography I’ve read of this fascinating yet oh-so-enigmatic woman. But it truly is the best of the five, and after all that was Mademoiselle’s ‘lucky number’, which led her to naming her iconic first perfume ‘No.5’, and it certainly justified her confidence in that number: it went on to become the best-selling perfume of all time.

However, for all my sentimentality, it had to be the book itself that dictated my evaluation, and I think it JUST earns its five stars. I have long been fascinated by ‘Mademoiselle’. To my French mind, her style was nothing short of genius, and every time I wear a LBD, a Marinière-and palazzo-pants, or my favourite quilted ballerines, I sent up a silent ‘Thank You’ to her. BUT, and its a big but, this book didn’t give me any fresh insights. Perhaps no book could. Mademoiselle must be the most difficult person to capture in a biography, even one written with the help of her great-niece, because after years of study, I’ve come to the conclusion that nobody ever got ‘under the skin’ of this elusive woman who was constantly reinventing her own story. Did she end up believing her own myths?? I think perhaps she did, and inevitably her great niece will have heard the life-story her illustrious aunt wanted her to hear.

Certainly the book has some great pictures (many of which I had never before seen), yet none of them give us the elusive true portrait. Somehow, one is left feeling that pictures, captions and text, would all have had their subject’s own seal of approval. They tell her story as she would have wanted it told, and on that basis, the book does a very good job. So all-in-all if I were recommending a book on Coco Chanel to a reader who knows little about her life, I would pick this one. It comes closer, I feel, than any of its rivals, to giving us a glimpse into the woman behind the facade, even though it is, in my opinion, less objective. It glosses over, for example, the whole period when she was the mistress of a prominent Nazi, and how the ill-will that resulted forced her to close the Rue du Cambon salon for over a decade.

But perhaps my final conclusion has to be that Coco Chanel, a woman of humble origins, and the human failings that beset us all, nevertheless used her incredible design talents to liberate women from the constraints of Edwardian dress, AND left a legacy that still inspires the fashionista today; she had the right to retain her secrets, her unique aura of mystery concerning her personal life.

July 19, 2012 at 4:55 am

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