Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life

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Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel was a woman of singular character, intelligence and imagination. These attributes enabled her to survive a childhood of deprivation and neglect and reinvent herself to become one of the most influential women of her century. Unlike any previous female couturier, her own life quickly became synonymous with the revolutionary style that made her name. But dress was only the most visible aspect of more profound changes Gabrielle Chanel would help to bring about. During the course of an extraordinary and unconventional journey — from abject poverty to the invention of a new kind of glamour — she helped to forge the idea of modern woman.

Leaving behind her youth of incarceration in religious institutions, Gabrielle became a shop assistant in a town thronging with well-to-do young military men from the regiments stationed on its perimeter. She then threw away any chance of respectability by becoming mistress to one of them, and over the years her numerous subsequent liaisons were much talked about. Her relationship with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich was a remarkable reflection of changing times, while that with the fabulously wealthy Duke of Westminster was the stuff of legend. Her love affair with one of Europe’s most eligible men, the enigmatic playboy Arthur Capel, enabled her to flourish, but would end in tragedy.

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