Portrait of A LADY

As a new exhibition featuring the work of Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel comes to a close this 25 February at the V&A, Justine Picardie re-examines the life of the bold, brave, beguiling figure who captured the hearts of princes and dukes, helped the French Resistance during World War II and reshaped the fashion world to liberate women from the restrictions of early-20thcentury living.

The much-anticipated exhibition that is about to open at the Victoria & Albert Museum, ‘Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto’, is the first show in the UK dedicated to Chanel’s work, and testament to her artistic genius. Spanning the entirety of her career, there will be 200 outfits on display, including her famous little black dresses, soft tweed jackets, and a sailor-collar silk-jersey blouse from 1916 that remains notable for its insouciant simplicity. The V&A retrospective was in part the catalyst for my returning to Chanel with a new edition of my biography of this legendary designer who transformed herself into her own most powerful creation. Certainly, my illuminating conversations with the show’s curator Oriole Cullen have been crucial; but so, too, were my years as an editor of Harper’s Bazaar. For if one is to truly understand the ways in which Chanel came to define sartorial liberty and independence, the archives of Bazaar form a significant guide, as do her connections with previous editors of the magazine. It is through these affiliations that Chanel emerges as a rare exemplar of the female gaze: an exceptional status that continues to make her relevant today, more than a century after she achieved her place at the vanguard of modernist design.

It is now 25 years since I first started researching Chanel, but she still has the ability to surprise me. In the course of her long life—which began in poverty and obscurity in 1883, when she was born the illegitimate daughter of an itinerant peddler, and ended in 1971, by which time she had become a fabled fashion icon – Chanel recreated her story many times over. She made herself almost impossible to pin down, yet her elusiveness and infinite capacity to astonish remain part of her continuing mystique.