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Coco Chanel

lines on the record: 20
first: 2021-08-20
most recent: 2021-08-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Fast and sleek and discreet and so Chanel talks about why she chose black. She did not approve of what she saw before her, those reds, those greens, those electric blues she's talking about what other designers, other male designers are dressing women as. She's like, no. She says, listen to this. This is a crazy sentence. Those colors made me feel ill. Coco made a vow to herself. Those colors are impossible. These women, I'm bloody well going to dress them in black. And then she says that famous quote I just said, I impose black. It's still going strong today for black wipes out everything else around it.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so this is where she designs one of her most famous products. Product is still in demand today. You see pictures in this book of the little black dress from like 1926, and it looks exactly like somebody would still wear it today. And I'm sure they do. So it says black, the color of morning, and turned it into celebration of chic. The little black dress wasn't formally identified as the shape of the future until 1926 when American Vogue magazine published a drawing of a Chanel design and announced, Here is a Ford signed Chanel. Listen to this metaphor, this Henry Ford-esque metaphor about the black dress. Remember at this time, he's producing the Model T and you can only get it in black. Here's a Ford sign Chanel. It was a simple yet elegant sheath in black with long nail sleeves worn with a string of white pearls. In vogue proved to be correct in the prediction that it would become a uniform, as widely recognized as a Ford automobile.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Over embellishment had stifled the body's architecture just as parasites smother trees in a tropical forest. Complicated patterns, an excess of lace, of embroidery, of gauze Cocoa is going to change all that. Chanel was going to impose black. And so at the beginning, there's this giant quote that Coco is famous for. It says, I imposed black. It's still going strong today. For black wipes out everything else around.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She would do colors too, but she just talked about you don't need, again, her desire for simplicity shines through over and over again in this book. So the not showy monochrome in keeping with the mood of the times. Fashion should express the place in the moment Chanel would later observe. I was witnessing the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century, the end of an era. She watched its surmise without sympathy knowing that her time was comish. She's talking about the change in fashion, how everybody's going to eventually copy and try to simplify just like she's doing her product line right now, that the grandeur that she had witnessed would soon crumble, choking on its own excess, and listen to how she describes her distaste for the designs that were popular before her established Chanel was like the leader in the fashion world. In her words, the last reflections of a Baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I wore myself by the end of the first summer of the war, I had earned 200,000 gold francs. So she's making, again, just doing as much as she can with the limited materials she has. And the only way to do that is to be resourceful. She's using her sense of creativity to figure out, okay, how can I produce and sell clothing when I'm severely limited on supplies? And again, they're extremely popular. She's made 200,000 gold francs in the first summer. Despite the horrors of the front line, her sales continued to increase. Her clothes were chic, but not showy. They were monochrome. She talks about, she's famous, obviously, for the little black dress.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From other constrictions. She says, I was my own master and I depended on myself alone. We see she's even able to expand her business even in wartime. So she's going to close her shop in Paris because Germany is going to invade Paris. So in 1939, I think she closes her store. And then she takes like a 15-year almost like a hiatus. She's still working but not doing any new collections. But anyways, we're not there yet. We're still in the early days of her business. We're in World War I. We see the relentless resourcefulness of an early Coco Chanel Chanel's business flourished even in the shadow of the First World War. She soon had to adapt to wartime restrictions. So she's got all kinds of materials that she either can't get anymore. She gets unlimited supplies. So it forces that resourcefulness. There's a shortage of material. I cut jerseys. So she's saying she makes multiple new pieces from anything she had. I cut jerseys from them, from the sweaters, the stable lads wore. And then I would knitted training garments.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She lives till I think she's 8 She works to the day she dies, so when she worked, she said her health recovered. The house of Chanel seemed to give her stability. And so listen to what she says to one of her seamstresses at one of her very first stores. I am not here to have fun or to spend money like water. I'm here to make a fortune. A year later Chanel was earning sufficient money to have no more need of Capel's financial support, and she rejoiced in her independence. Her clothes look, and she's, I forgot to mention, I fast forward in the story, she goes from making hats to clothes, and again, the same approach she has for the hats, where she's removing all the hacking away at the unessential, making something that she herself would want to wear because she knows if she would want to wear it, other women would want to wear it as well. She has that same approach to her clothing. A year later Chanel, I already read that point. She rejoiced in her independence. Her clothes look simple, sleek, and fluid, designed to be worn without corsets and with casual indifference. They had to be comfortable. The rewards were considerable. Her work liberated this is so important. Liberated shit.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Channell's approach is remove, it reminds me of Bruce Lee, hack away at the unessential. And this is something she talks about later on, where she has competition from people like Christian Dior, Yves St. Laurent, Valenciaga. And she even says in this book, she goes, the boys don't understand. My edge is that I'm a woman. I know what women want. And she said, the boys are trying to dress us up as if we're some kind of, like, we're in a play. Putting us in costumes and these elaborate things. He's like, that's not what women want. We want to be comfortable. We want time. We want style. We want understated luxury that's timeless, which again, I think Chanel is dead on. The fact that you look at it, there's a lot of pictures in this book, and you look at something she made in 1935, 1929, 1950s, and you could still wear it to this day. So let's go back to the idea of the simplicity of our first products. Her hats were not entirely original. At first, she purchased simple.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, think maybe she took that too far because at the end of life, she's like, I shouldn't have lived my life alone. I should have let more people in. But I could understand not wanting to feel vulnerable given her first 20 years of life. The uncertainty was her decisive approach to fashion. Cocoa dressed like a young convent girl or a schoolboy and made hats that were stripped of embellishments and of the frills that she dismissed.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so Chanel is talking about the difference in her approach to this business as to the two people that these two guys are helping her set this up. She's like, oh, okay, yeah, we'll give you a space and a little bit of money to get some inventory. You know, so you have something to play with during the day. And she's like, I'm not here to play. I'm here to make a fortune. They decided, give me a place where I could make my hats given me a toy, thinking, let's let her amuse herself. And later we'll see. They didn't understand how important this was to me. And that is, I should have underlined that three times because that is really apparent as you move through the story of Coco Chanel. Her business was the single most important thing in her life because it gave her independence and freedom. If her business would succeed, that means no one could ever hurt her again. And that's where we see complete dedication, but also she has this armor she puts up around people. It's like once I am independently wealthy, no one can harm me.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That Balsan keeps at his house and essentially just pays them to just lay about. And I guess when he wants to be with them, that's what they're like. They're on call, essentially. So he says, these women were paid. I knew that. I'd been taught that. I said to myself, are you going to become like them? A kept woman? This is appalling. I don't want this. What she did want was to earn her own living. So she winds up leaving Balsan for his friend. And this guy named Boy Capel. And this is actually going to be the love of her life. And he actually dies tragically. And I say love of her life. A lot of these guys have married. And so usually the mistress is the role she plays. So boy Kapal is going to die and that's going to devastate her for the rest of her life. But they're going to agree to help fund. She's like, I want to make hats. I want to have a hat shop. Like I want to have my own fashion.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then she talks about wanting to kill herself again. At the time, I often used to think about dying. The idea of causing a great fuss, she's talking about her death, what her suicide would have done to other people. The idea of causing a great fuss of upsetting my aunts, of letting everyone know how wicked they were fascinated me. She has this almost like this desire for revenge, it sounds like, right? I dreamt about setting fire to the barn. Coco grew up to discover that suicide was not her way out. Yet in a sense, she did need to kill something of herself in order to make her escape. She felt unloved. By the aunts, quote unquote, by the family who had abandoned her to the care of the”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For out of these loose threads Chanel created an image of herself. And a way to think of that is like, I can't control the bad things. I can't control the fact that my mother died. My father left, that I grew up in an orphanage. But I can control and influence how other people are going to see me moving forward in my life. So as fast forward, she's 18. She's sent to another religious institution. It's called the Notre Dame School. And there's obviously no family money. She's extremely poor. So she wants being a charity case that obviously bothers her as well. She was one of the charity pupils who were provided with a free place and therefore treated differently than those whose family could afford to pay for their education. Here it was that Chanel, who was dismissed as a little peasant, the kind of girl who might be made to feel inferior to those who had piano lessons, a girl who had to wear a plain pauper's uniform with secondhand shoes rather than the more expensive outfits of the fee pangs of the people, the students.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one loved me and I was being kept out of charity. Chanel spent seven years in the orphanage until she was eighteen. Her father never returned to see her or her siblings. And so they're talking about later in life, she really did not like looking back. She hated speaking of this. Sometimes she let things tumble out though. Chanel did allow some stories to slip out. She spoke of being taught to sew. That was extremely important because this is going to be her occupations, also how she starts making money as a young person. Even when she's 18, she starts getting a job as a seamstress. And then she talks about being beaten. She remembered her reddened skin when her aunts beat her. I remember that they used to take my knickers down to spank me. And then she'd say the bottom, like there'd be some blood, and she had this fascination with this color red throughout her entire life. But this is the main point of why I'm telling you all this, because the note of myself is instead of retelling her life story, she did something which I think is actually smart. She created a new one, a story that she could control. And that's a main theme of her life and career as well. If she made up stories from then on, you can understand why.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Family. They were foundings used as unpaid labor. And then the three girls were handed over to the nuns who ran an orphanage. The children's father promptly disappeared. Now she describes, and this is where a lot of, and this is the same thing in the first book I read on her, but a lot of, you have to like kind of uncover the truth of what she says. So she doesn't call them nuns. She calls them her aunts. She was not related to them. My aunts were good people, but absolutely without tenderless. I was not loved. I got no affection. Children suffer from such things. Still a 11-year-old girl when this is happening. I was thoroughly unhappy. I fed on sorrow and horror. I wanted to kill myself. And she's also deeply ashamed of the fact that she's an orphan. They might be going to church or other places and they describe her as this orphan. And having to hear people call me an orphan, they felt sorry for me. All of this was humiliating. I realized.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That fierce independence that she maintains her entire life. She does talk about having regret, not having a family. I think it has to do with the fact that her early life was so terrible. Her mom is going to die when Coco is 11, but she was sick for many, many years. So says Chanel was to claim that her mother died of tuberculosis, which was not necessarily an accurate diagnosis of what killed her. Poverty, pregnancy, and pneumonia were likely to blame. And so it's at this point that she's taken to the orphidage. And we're going to see her conditions why if you went through this yourself, you'd probably be wary of other humans and saying, hey, it's very clear that I have to rely on myself, everybody that I've been around has either died or not loved me. You know, she has a lot of armor up throughout her life. So says, and what's crazy is they had like five or six kids and they're all dispersed. So says the boys were left elsewhere. They were deposited, and this is why her father's such a scumbag. The boys were left elsewhere, deposited with a peasant.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Determined to make it successful. It's what gave her freedom. She says, I wanted to be sure that I was loved, but I live with people who showed no pity. I like talking to myself and I don't listen to what I'm told. This is probably due to the fact that the first people to whom I opened my heart were the dead. So let me contrast that with, this is on one of the last pages of the book. This is her main regret right before she dies. This is a few months before she dies. One shouldn't live alone, she'd say, or she said. It's a mistake. I used to think I had to make my life on my own, but I was wrong.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To play inside of graveyards and cemeteries. So it says by the age of six she was spending as much time as possible in a graveyard. Every child has a special place where he or she likes to hide, play, and dream, she said. I was the queen of this secret garden. I loved its subterranean dwellers. The dead are not dead as long as we think of them, I would tell myself. I wanted to be sure that I was loved, but I lived with people who showed no pity, so this is an indication of why you would escape to a graveyard at an extremely unhappy childhood. And actually, after I finished reading this paragraph here, I'm going to skip all the way to the end of the book because I got to tell you right before her she died what her greatest regret was. But this is like a fundamental understanding, it's like this unhappy childhood. Her mother's going to die. Her father dips out. She's raised in an orphanage. She's essentially, and I think this ties into now that I've read two biographies on her, why she was so focused on her business and so...”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I was talking when I referenced hey, there's some details that she could not keep hidden. We do know when she was born, although she was lie about her age and all kinds of things throughout her entire life. But this is the facts of what's known about her birth, her mother gave birth to Gabrielle on August 1983. It was in a poorhouse in France. Her mother is 20, her father is 28. They were not married, but had already had one other daughter named Julia, who was about a year older than Chanel. She was born in a hospice of the poor, which was run by an order of nuns. Her parents were essentially nomads. They called them interinters. Think of them, the traveling peddlers. They would sell buttons and bonnets and aprils and overalls and things like that from town to town. And she had one habit as a young girl, I want to bring to your attention that seems rather bizarre.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't like the family, she told Delay. You're born in it, not of it. I don't know anything more terrifying than the family, and so she circled, around and about it, telling and retelling the narrative of her youth, remaking history just as she remade the sleeves of a jacket, unfastening it seams and cutting its threads, and then sewing it back together again. Childhood You speak of it when you're very tired, because it's a time when you had hopes, expectations. I remember my childhood by heart. If Chanel's memory did survive intact, she nevertheless obscured her past from others, reshaping its heartaches, smoothing away the rough edges, but she couldn't keep all the details hidden.”
2021-08-20 · Founders · #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source