The World According To Coco

A compact, illustrated collection of quotations on fashion, women, love, and life by one of the most influential designers of the twentieth century, Coco Chanel. One of the most recognizable and revolutionary names in twentieth-century women’s fashion, Coco Chanel created an empire that continues to be one of the biggest names in the industry today. Famous for innovations such as the Chanel suit, shoulder bags, and the iconic “little black dress,” Chanel’s timeless and elegant style reflected her ideas of what a modern woman should be—ideas she was never shy about expressing. This thematically organized collection of quotations by Coco Chanel pays homage to the legendary designer, sharing her witty and wise views on matters of fashion, style, women, and life. Bold, amusing, and unapologetic, Chanel’s insight is impossible to ignore.

NOW IN PAPERBACK! A modern look at the life of a fashion icon—with practical life lessons for women of all ages Delving into the extraordinary life of renowned French fashion designer Coco Chanel, Karen Karbo has written a new kind of self-help book, exploring Chanel's philosophy on a range of universal themes—from style to passion, from money and success to femininity and living life on your own terms.

Karl Lagerfeld’s legendary maxims in a fashionable gift format. Karl Lagerfeld was a modern master of couture. He was also legendarily outspoken—his wise and surprising statements popped up like offbeat news flashes. This compact collection of quotations pays homage to the renowned éminence grise of the fashion world. Lagerfeld’s pronouncements on fashion, women, art, politics, love, and life—high and low—are famously oracular, seized upon by fashionistas, acolytes, and sages around the world. Created with the full approval of the late designer, this cornucopia of Lagerfeld’s maxims is required reading for all of us as we negotiate the trickiest curves of modern life. Cultivated, unpredictable, provocative, and sometimes shocking, Lagerfeld’s bons mots are impossible to ignore.

This explosive narrative reveals for the first time the shocking hidden years of Coco Chanel’s life: her collaboration with the Nazis in Paris, her affair with a master spy, and her work for the German military intelligence service and Himmler’s SS. Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was the high priestess of couture who created the look of the modern woman. By the 1920s she had amassed a fortune and went on to create an empire. But her life from 1941 to 1954 has long been shrouded in rumor and mystery, never clarified by Chanel or her many biographers. Hal Vaughan exposes the truth of her wartime collaboration and her long affair with the playboy Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage—who ran a spy ring and reported directly to Goebbels. Vaughan pieces together how Chanel became a Nazi agent, how she escaped arrest after the war and joined her lover in exile in Switzerland, and how—despite suspicions about her past—she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and rebuild the iconic House of Chanel.

The first visually led exploration of androgyny—from representations in antiquity to its current prevalence in the fashion world and beyond In January 2011, Jean Paul Gaultier’s haute couture runway show ended with the image of a willowy blonde bride in a diaphanous gown. The bride was a man, and one of the first models to walk for both men’s and women’s collections. The event marked the start of a trend. “This ad is gender neutral,” proclaimed a 2016 poster for the fashion brand Diesel; “I resist definitions,” announced a Calvin Klein ad in the same year, while a Louis Vuitton shoot featured Jaden Smith wearing a skirt. The art of Edward Burne-Jones and Gustave Moreau, the writings of Oscar Wilde, and the mystic Joséphin Péladan prove that the turn of the previous century was as compelled by androgyny as this one. From the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, the genders have blended: from Berlin in the 1920s to Hollywood of the 1930s with Garbo and Dietrich; from the 1940s Bright Young Things to the androgynous pop stars of the 1970s, and beyond. Patrick Mauries presents a cultural history of androgyny—accompanied by a striking selection of more than 120 images, from nineteenth-century painting to contemporary fashion photography—drawing on the worlds of art and literature to give us a deeper understanding of the strange but timeless human drive to escape from defined categories.

Filled with fresh new research and never-before-seen photos, this updated edition of the definitive biography of Coco Chanel deepens our understanding of the history and legacy of the incredible woman who shaped modern fashion and created an empire of haute couture. Coco Chanel was an extraordinary inventor, conjuring up the little black dress, bobbed hair, trousers for women, contemporary chic, bestselling perfumes, and the most successful fashion brand of all time. But she also invented herself, fashioning the myth of her own life with the same dexterity as her couture; and what lies beneath her own glossy surface is darker, more mysterious, and far more intriguing. Uncovering remarkable new details about Gabrielle Chanel’s humble early years, Justine Picardie picks up the legend Chanel where it began—in orphanhood and poverty. Throwing new light on her passionate and, at times, dark relationships and providing profound insights into her connections with Cocteau, Diaghilev, Picasso, and Dali, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at what made Coco Chanel the strong-spirited and powerful presence she became. An authoritative account, based on personal observations and interviews with Chanel’s last surviving friends, employees, and relatives, the book also unravels her coded language and symbols and tracks the influence of her formative years on her legendary style. Feared and revered by the rest of the fashion industry, Coco Chanel died in 1971 at the age of 87, but her legacy lives on. This special new edition has been extensively revised and updated and offers a uniquely authoritative account of the world’s greatest designer. Adding fresh new insights and discoveries, it comes complete with a compelling array of previously unseen images from the Chanel archives.

After being sent to Paris on assignment for Look magazine, Douglas Kirkland lived with Coco Chanel for three weeks and captured both the public and the intimate moments of her daily life.

With a foreword by Karl Lagerfeld, “this enchanting, tiny book”—a series of transcriptions from interviews with the fashion icon—is the closest anyone can get to a face-to-face with Coco [Chanel]” (The Spectator) Coco Chanel invited Paul Morand to visit her in St. Moritz at the end of the Second World War when he was given the opportunity to write her memoirs; his notes of their conversations were put away in a drawer and only came to light one year after Chanel’s death. Now, he presents them here in The Allure of Chanel. Through Morand’s transcription of their conversations, Chanel tells us about her friendship with Misia Sert, the men in her life—Boy Capel, the Duke of Westminster, artists such as Diaghilev, her philosophy of fashion and the story behind the legendary Number 5 perfume. The memories of Chanel told in her own words provide vivid sketches and portray the strength of Coco’s character, leaving us with an extraordinary insight into Chanel the woman and the woman who created Chanel.