Coco Chanel

Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel (19 August 1883 – 10 January 1971) was a French fashion designer and businesswoman who built the House of Chanel and, in the years after the First World War, made a sporty, pared-back ease into the reigning standard of feminine style. She wrote very little for publication, which is part of why a signed Chanel text like the 1938 “Maximes et Sentences” matters: most of the lines the internet hangs on her come secondhand, from biographers and interviewers. Her couture house closed in 1939 at the outbreak of war and she did not reopen it until 1954, after years in Switzerland and an unresolved wartime record of collaboration.