coco chanel an intimate life

The unauthorized biography of the world’s most famous, seductive, and successful perfume

With its rich golden hue, art decoâ??inspired bottle, and timeless, musky scent, Chanel No. 5 is the world’s bestselling perfume. Reverently known among industry insiders as le monstreâ??the monsterâ??it is arguably the most coveted consumer luxury product of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet how did this pioneering celebrity fragrance, introduced in the early 1920s, eventually take on a life of its own, becoming a cultural monument celebrated by millions of devoted consumers?

The Secret of Chanel No. 5 is Tilar J. Mazzeo’s far-ranging and fascinating search beyond the stuff of legend to uncover the full story of No. 5′s creation, iconic status, and extraordinary success. Mazzeo goes back through time and deep into the life of Coco Chanel, the brilliant, controversial, and steel-willed businesswoman at the heart of the fragrance. She takes readers to the rose plantations and celebrated jasmine fields where the perfume begins and then to the laboratories and boardrooms where scent and sex are forever intertwined. And she travels to the heart of the Chanel empire: 31 Rue Cambon, Coco Chanel’s flagship boutique, where six decades ago American GIs stormed the counters to possess the magical elixir that captured the luxury and romance of Paris for their girls back home.

A blend of evocative history and thoughtful research, here is a glittering account of where art and sensuality mingle with dazzling entrepreneurship and desire: Chanel No. 5.

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Best review for The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World’s Most Famous Perfume

â??From this century, in France, three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel.â? â??André Malraux

Coco Chanel created the look of the modern woman and was the high priestess of couture.
She believed in simplicity, and elegance, and freed women from the tyranny of fashion. She inspired women to take off their bone corsets and cut their hair. She used ordinary jersey as couture fabric, elevated the waistline, and created bell-bottom trousers, trench coats, and turtleneck sweaters.
In the 1920s, when Chanel employed more than two thousand people in her workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million and went on to create an empire.
Jean Cocteau once said of Chanel that she had the head of â??a little black swan.â? And, added Colette, â??the heart of a little black bull.â?
At the start of World War II, Chanel closed down her couture house and went across the street to live at the Hôtel Ritz. Picasso, her friend, called her â??one of the most sensible women in Europe.â? She remained at the Ritz for the duration of the war, and after, went on to Switzerland.
For more than half a century, Chanelâ??s life from 1941 to 1954 has been shrouded in vagueness and rumor, mystery and myth. Neither Chanel nor her many biographers have ever told the full story of these years.
Now Hal Vaughan, in this explosive narrativeâ??part suspense thriller, part wartime portraitâ??fully pieces together the hidden years of Gabrielle â??Cocoâ? Chanelâ??s life, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of World War II.
Vaughan reveals the truth of Chanelâ??s long-whispered collaboration with Hitlerâ??s high-ranking officials in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1944. He writes in detail of her decades-long affair with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, â??Spatzâ? (â??sparrowâ? in English), described in most Chanel biographies as being an innocuous, English-speaking tennis player, playboy, and harmless dupeâ??a loyal German soldier and diplomat serving his mother country and not a member of the Nazi party.
In Vaughanâ??s absorbing, meticulously researched book, Dincklage is revealed to have been a Nazi master spy and German military intelligence agent who ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, right hand to Hitler.
The book pieces together how Coco Chanel became a German intelligence operative; how and why she was enlisted in a number of spy missions; how she escaped arrest in France after the war, despite her activities being known to the Gaullist intelligence network; how she fled to Switzerland for a nine-year exile with her lover Dincklage. And how, despite the French courtâ??s opening a case concerning Chanelâ??s espionage activities during the war, she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and triumphantly resurrect and reinvent herselfâ??and rebuild what has become the iconic House of Chanel.
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Best review for Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War

The most personal account of the life and work of legendary designer Coco Chanel ever told. Coco Chanelâ??s life and work have been recounted often in print and film-everything except the details of her most private self: her fondness for symbolism and poetry, the men she loved, her family, and in particular her nephew Andre Palasse, whom she raised like a son. His daughter Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie–goddaughter to both Chanel and the Duke of Westminster and Chanelâ??s only direct descendant–enjoyed a close-knit relationship with the designer for more than forty years. In this biography, she opens her doors and shares personal memories of her great-aunt.
This work–divided into five chronological parts, including Chanelâ??s dark periods–plunges the reader into the private world of Chanel, offering intimate insight. Photographs of Chanelâ??s personal effects, many of which have never before been seen or published, include presents from her great love Boy Capel, furniture, favorite jewelry, talismans, clothes, family photographs, rare documents, correspondence, and books with personal inscriptions.
In Intimate Chanel, Palasse-Labrunie discloses all that was â??importantâ? to her great-aunt and recounts their private conversations, unveiling who her â??Auntie Cocoâ? really was: a Chanel who was very different from her public persona.
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Best review for Intimate Chanel

The controversial story of Chanel, the twentieth century’s foremost fashion icon.

Revolutionizing women’s dress, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was the twentieth century’s most influential designer. Her extraordinary and unconventional journey-from abject poverty to a new kind of glamour- helped forge the idea of modern woman.

Unearthing an astonishing life, this remarkable biography shows how, more than any previous designer, Chanel became synonymous with a rebellious and progressive style. Her numerous liaisons, whose poignant and tragic details have eluded all previous biographers, were the very stuff of legend. Witty and mesmerizing, she became muse, patron, or mistress to the century’s most celebrated artists, including Picasso, Dalí, and Stravinsky.

Drawing on newly discovered love letters and other records, Chaney’s controversial book reveals the truth about Chanel’s drug habit and lesbian affairs. And the question about Chanel’s German lover during World War II (was he a spy for the Nazis?) is definitively answered.

While uniquely highlighting the designer’s far-reaching influence on the modern arts, Chaney’s fascinating biography paints a deeper and darker picture of Coco Chanel than any so far. Movingly, it explores the origins, the creative power, and the secret suffering of this exceptional and often misread woman.

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Best review for Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life