Coco Chanel 英文简介

Coco Chanel 英文简介

你可以去WIKI的英文版，查Coco_Chanel

She was born the second daughter of traveling salesman Albert Chanel and Jeanne Devolle in the small city of Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, France. There was a mis-spelling on her birth certificate that recorded her surname as "Chasnel", making the tracing of her roots almost impossible for biographers when Chanel later rose to prominence. Coco was born in a poorhouse. Her birth was recorded the following day. Two employees of the hospice went to city hall and declared the child of feminine gender. The hospice employees were illiterate, so when the mayor François Poitu wrote down the birth, no one knew how to spell Chanel so the mayor improvised and recorded it with an "s", making it Chasnel. Her parents married in 1883. She had five siblings: two sisters, Julie (1882-1913) and Antoinette (born 1887) and three brothers, Alphonse (born 1885), Lucien (born 1889) and Augustin (born and died 1891). In 1895, when she was 12 years old, Chanel's mother died of tuberculosis and her father left the family a short time later because he needed to work to raise his children. Because of his work, the young Chanel spent seven years in the orphanage of the Catholic monastery of Aubazine, where she learned the trade of a seamstress. School vacations were spent with relatives in the provincial capital of Moulins, where female relatives taught Coco to sew with more flourish than the nuns at the monastery were able to demonstrate. When Coco turned eighteen, she left the orphanage, and took up work for a local tailor.

While working at a tailoring shop she met and soon began an affair with the French playboy and millionaire Étienne Balsan who lavished her with the beauties of "the rich life", diamonds, dresses and pearls. While living with Balsan, Chanel began designing hats as a hobby, which soon became a deeper interest of hers. After opening her eyes, as she would say, Coco left Balsan and took over his apartment in Paris, France. In 1913, she opened up her very first shop which sold a range of fashionable raincoats and jackets. Situated in the heart of Paris, France it wasn't long before the shop went out of business and Chanel was asked to surrender her properties. This did not discourage Chanel; it only made her more determined. During the pre-war era, Chanel met up with an estranged and former best friend of Étienne Balsan, Arthur "Boy" Capel, whom she soon fell in love with. With his assistance, Chanel was able to acquire the property and financial backing to open her second millinery shop in Brittany, France. Her hats were worn by celebrated French actresses, which helped to establish her reputation. In 1913, Chanel introduced women’s sportswear at her new boutique in Deauville, in the Rue Gounaut-Biron; Marthe, Countess de Gounaut-Biron (daughter of American diplomat, John George Alexander Leishman), was Chanel's first aristocratic client. Her third shop and successor to her biggest store in France was located in Deauville, France, where more women during the World War I era came to realize that women were supposed to dress for themselves and not their men.

Later in life, she concocted an elaborate false history for her humble beginnings. Chanel would steadfastly claim that when her mother died, her father sailed for America and she was sent to live with two cold-hearted spinster aunts. She even claimed to have been born in 1893 as opposed to 1883, and that her mother had died when Coco was six instead of twelve. All this was done to diminish the stigma that poverty, orphanhood, and illegitimacy bestowed upon unfortunates in nineteenth-century France.

In 1920, she was introduced by ballet empresario Sergei Diaghilev to world famous composer Igor Stravinsky (Rite of Spring), to whom she extended an offer for him and his family to reside with her. During this temporary sojourn it was rumoured that they had an affair.

Chanel never married.

Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel (August 19, 1883 – January 10, 1971) was a pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired fashions, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion. Her influence on haute couture was such that she was the only person in the field to be named on TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century.