coco chanel biography justine picardie

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Coco Chanel : the legend and the life

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9780008595739

Justine Picardie

HarperCollins Publishers

31 August 2023

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Parent item expand the sub menu, alberta ferretti steps down from eponymous brand, ‘you can swim in louboutins,’ david lachapelle says, the rising stars of spring 2025 for paris fashion week, the life of coco chanel explored further in new book.

More than a decade after her first edition, Justine Picardie is back with a new look at the life of Gabrielle Chanel.

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It’s been more than a decade since Justine Picardie released her book “Coco Chanel ,” during which time interest in the late designer’s life and work has only seemed to expand.

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“You can’t really understand Chanel without understanding Dior, and you can’t really understand Dior without understanding Chanel, in terms of French history,” Picardie says. “I’ve never stopped being interested in the life and work of Gabrielle Chanel. She’s endlessly fascinating, but because there were so many mysteries surrounding her that I’d never stopped looking into.”

Her original research, which she began in the late ’90s, included full access to the Chanel archives, as well as the Winston Churchill archives (he and Chanel were friends), but for her new edition she was granted access to the Royal Archives for the first time. 

“They had some really interesting material about royals wearing Chanel and her time in London in the 1920s and ’30s, when she started dressing British royalty as well as the British aristocracy,” she says. She also is close friends with the V&A exhibit’s curator Oriole Cullen, and they have long had a relationship of comparing notes. 

“There just seemed to be so much new material. I could have almost written an entirely new book,” Picardie says. “Well, I effectively did.”

The Royal Archives led her to learn more about Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s history of wearing Chanel as a young woman, before becoming Queen.

“What really surprised me was that she was this fashionable young woman in the 1920s, and even before her marriage to Prince Albert, who would become George VI, she was wearing Chanel, and then there were other members of the royal family that were wearing Chanel. Even Queen Mary,” Picardie says. “We think of Chanel as being so associated wholly with Paris and that idea of Parisian chic. But [Chanel] was so famous by the 1920s, and obviously she had become famous in America too. But the fact that she was dressing members of the British royal family and the British aristocracy is very interesting and is completely new.”

Between Picardie’s books, Karl Lagerfeld, who Picardie first interviewed in the late ’90s, died.

With several decades of work devoted to Chanel’s life, Picardie is clearly personally interested in her —but she remains constantly surprised by how much broad intrigue there is into Chanel’s life.

“Every generation continues to be fascinated by Gabrielle Chanel. If I do a talk about her, there’ll be 18 year olds in the audience. And I’ve always been struck by that,” she said. “Chanel means different things to different people, but she herself kind of embodied the spirit of independence, of choosing her own destiny, the taking away corsets, cutting her hair, all those things,” Picardie says. “But there was something more profound than that too, where one of her sayings, which always resonates for me, is ‘elegance is refusal.’ And she refused to conform to anybody’s idea of what a woman should be, apart from her own. So she was always so entirely herself. And that is something that I think continues to resonate, which is why we are seeing this return of so much interest in the story of Gabrielle Chanel.”

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Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life Hardcover – 31 Aug. 2023

SLEEK. CHIC. NOTORIOUSLY GUARDED. WELCOME TO THE SECRET WORLD OF COCO CHANEL.

Justine Picardie’s definitive biography explores the dark mysteries hidden beneath the shimmering surface of a fabled fashion icon. Unveiling remarkable details about Coco Chanel’s traumatic childhood and her flight into unconventional adulthood, this beautifully constructed portrait reveals her passionate and painful past, her turbulent loves and losses, her quest for fame and fortune, and how she transformed herself into her own most powerful creation.

Feared and revered by her contemporaries, Chanel died in 1971, but her legacy lives on as an enduring global brand. Drawing on interviews with her last surviving friends and relatives, and unprecedented archival research, Justine Picardie brings Chanel out of hiding, unpicking the seams between reality and myth, and telling a timeless story that uncovers the true art and heart of fashion.

This special new edition has been extensively revised and updated, and offers a uniquely authoritative account of the greatest designer in the world. Adding fresh insights and discoveries, it comes complete with a compelling array of previously unseen images from the Chanel archives.

• Print length 384 pages
• Language English
• Publisher HarperCollins
• Publication date 31 Aug. 2023
• Reading age 13 years and up
• Dimensions 17.6 x 3.5 x 24.6 cm
• ISBN-10 0008595739
• ISBN-13 978-0008595739
• See all details

From the Publisher

Product description

Book description, about the author.

JUSTINE PICARDIE is the author of four books, including her critically acclaimed memoir, If The Spirit Moves You. The former features director of British Vogue, and contributor to the Sunday Telegraph and Red magazine, she is now Editor in Chief for Harper’s Bazaar.

She lives in London with her two sons.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins; Updated and revised edition (31 Aug. 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0008595739
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008595739
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 13 years and up
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 17.6 x 3.5 x 24.6 cm
• 127 in Fashion Photography (Books)
• 223 in Fashion History
• 279 in Fashion & Style (Books)

About the author

Justine picardie.

Justine Picardie is the author of four books, including her critically acclaimed memoir If the Spirit Moves You and her most recent novel, Daphne. The former features director of British Vogue and editor of the Observer magazine, she is currently a fashion columnist for the Sunday Telegraph, and also writes for several other newspapers and magazines, including Harper's Bazaar and the Times of London. She lives in London with her two sons.

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Justine Picardie Discusses Coco Chanel's Many Lovers, Permeating Fragrance and Ever-Present Ghost

Web editor, W magazine

Justine Picardie, author of new Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel biography, “Chanel: Her Life” has a deep connection to the designer: “It all goes back to my mother's Chanel N°5.” Her recently released book brought Picardie on a series of adventures as she explored previously unstudied areas of Chanel’s life including a fishing trip to Scotland with Winston Churchill and the Duke of Westminster, her cross-country trip from New York to Los Angeles and the Aubazine orphanage where Chanel grew up.

One of Picardie’s adventures took her to the home of Gabrielle Labrunie, the 85-year-old grand-niece (and possible grand-daughter) of Coco Chanel, “I went to Paris to see Gabrielle Labrunie and I ended up staying the night there. She took me down this long corridor and opened the door and there was a row of original Chanel couture and this was Chanel’s original clothes. ‘Just try something on,’ she said, but I thought ‘this is sacrilege!’ so I tried on a coat of the softest cashmere tweed and I put that away and then I tried on a cream coat with black trim she's wearing in a photo we have in the book put my hands in pocket. In the pocket there were gloves that smelled of Chanel N°5. I thought it was an aural hallucination, but Gabrielle said the smell followed her everywhere.”

Chanel N°5 isn’t the only remnant of Coco that followed Picardie throughout the ten years she spent writing the book: the ghost of Chanel herself felt ever present. While writing at the Ritz in Paris, the hotel Chanel lived and died in, the lights began flickering as if Chanel was asking Picardie to write while watching over her. The ghost of Chanel even sent her a new boyfriend... but that's all for Picardie's next book.

Take a peek at Lagerfeld's sketches, which appear throughout the book, below:

Chanel: Her Life by Justine Picardie is currently for sale by Steidl for $58.00 http://www.steidlville.com/books/1244-Chanel-Her-Life.html.

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Coco Chanel's Legacy: A Chat with Biographer Justine Picardie

The author of Chanel: Her Life reveals some seriously enlightening anecdotes about the legendary designer and fashion icon.

It's hard not to be obsessed with Coco Chanel. The legendary designer brought us the classic quilted leather chain bag, all things tweed, and No. 5, after all. And although author Justine Picardie used the word "obsessed" to describe her emotional state while penning the icon's biography, we have a feeling it's a bit of an understatement.

Her obsession paid off:  Chanel: Her Life , published by Harper Collins last year with a second edition set to come out this month, was the culmination of 12 years of constant research, and it is one of the only Chanel biographies in history to receive the fashion house's interlocking-C seal of approval. (In fact, Chanel head designer Karl Lagerfeld illustrated the newest version of the book with his trademark sketched silhouettes, like the ones above.)

"I went to many different places on the trail of Chanel," says Picardie, who was the first author to examine previously undiscovered private archives in France and the U.K., and who was lucky enough to try on some of her subject's coats and jackets, including one that had a handkerchief that still smelled of her fragrance du jour. "You could smell the scent of No. 5 wherever she went."

Over lunch this week, Picardie chatted about the new release of her book, disputed those recent allegations of Coco's lesbianism and Nazi sympathizing, and imagining what the icon would think of today's trends in fashion.

On Chanel's oftentimes complicated relationships:

She had a talent for staying friends, she was good at staying friends with her ex-lovers, but she also, for someone who's often described as either a bitch or a lesbian, or a narcissist — which are kind of misogynistic and sexist descriptions of her — she  did  have a talent for friendship.

On her struggle to own her eponymous fragrance, Chanel No. 5:

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When she first came out with Chanel No. 5 in 1920 to 1921, it was just manufactured on a really small scale, and there wasn't the capacity to manufacture enough of it, so she was introduced to Paul and Pierre Wertheimer, two Jewish brothers who already owned a very big cosmetics company in France. And so a deal was done for Chanel perfumes where they owned 90 percent of the business and she owned 10 percent. But it was in her name, and it was Chanel Perfumes. And as it is often the case in fashion, she was incredibly successful when she came to America in 1931, and the perfume was where the huge revenue came from and she was only getting 10 percent of it. Pretty quickly she started regretting that decision and started taking out legal cases against them to such a degree that they employed a full-time lawyer just to deal with Coco Chanel. And yet, it's this massive contradiction because she and Pierre were very close. They were good friends. But she tried to sue and always lost.

On why she closed the House of Chanel at the start of World War II:

I actually think Chanel's decision to close down was the honorable thing to do, as it was no time for fashion, and everybody else kept their fashion houses going. And, yes, they said it was an act of patriotism. But they were also designing for Nazis and their wives, their mistresses, the collaborators, the black-marketeers.

On the recent allegations that she had Nazi ties:

I know there's been a lot of publicity about this new book [ Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life  by Lisa Chaney], about Chanel during the Second World War. I don't think anyone should be rude about another writer's book… I have read all the same sources, they're all in my book, and it's not like I'm saying suddenly it's all different, and I think that it's a much more complicated story, much more nuanced story, much more interesting story. Nonetheless, what did happen, during the occupation of Paris, and this is the dishonorable thing she did, is that she thought, 'I want to get my company back by any means possible.' So she tried to use the anti-Jewish laws in occupied Paris to get her company back.

On how an unlikely corset brought Chanel back into fashion:

Everything Chanel had done up until now was to liberate women literally from the tyranny of corsets and liberating women from the idea of being defined by who their husband was, who their father was… Independence was part of what Chanel stood for. And so, when Christian Dior came out with the post-war "new look," it was the absolute antithesis of what Chanel stood for because it brought back corsets. She was so enraged by the return of them, that she thought, 'I didn't spend all those years taking corsets away for somebody to bring them back.' So she went back into business — the French hated it, but the Americans loved it. America was crucial to her comeback.

On the timelessness of Chanel's creations:

She always said she designed for herself, so if it would work for her then it was likely to work for other women. So most of us, unless you're Isabella Blow, we're not going to walk around with a lobster on our heads. And I think that she was less interested in fashion than in clothes. And to me that's what separates her from everybody else. She was also designing for the contemporary woman, the woman who was working, just as Chanel had to work, who was running, dancing, going from the office to a party. That is what sets her aside. She was also one of the very few female fashion designers. I mean, most of them were men. And they were designing for a certain kind of idealized version of a woman. Whereas Chanel said it didn't matter to her whether a woman was fat or thin, or small or tall, she wanted to make clothes that women were comfortable in, could breathe in, could feel happy in. I don't think anybody else did that.

On what she'd think of today's casual style sensibilities:

She thought that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. She never minded copies, and I think that if she'd seen how people dress now… Like, I'll wear a pair of Gap jeans and a denim jacket, and I think she would have been totally relaxed about it. Because there are pictures of her wearing very loose fitting, kind of sailor trousers in the 1920s and '30s. I just don't think she would have made a fuss about it.

On Chanel's legacy:

Chanel, like all of us, is incredibly complicated and nuanced and full of contradictions as we all are, but when you look at any kind of hugely iconic figure, they will be often a mixture of darkness and light. And in Chanel, you see that real mixture of intense darkness as well as, if fashion is among the things we understand as light and the surface of things, then she also had to have a powerful personal understanding of the darkness that she came from.

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