Introducing The Chanel Première Extrait de Camélia

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Before there was J12, there was Première, Chanel’s first watch collection, launched in 1987. After more than 30 years, it has to be challenging to keep Première au courant and irresistible, but Chanel’s designers still manage to find a way – from the minimalist LBD black-dial model to a sexy, revealing skeleton to a series of red-carpet-ready, high-jewelry flying tourbillons lavishly set with baguette-cut diamonds, sapphires, or emeralds (the horological equivalent of an haute couture ballgown).

Coco Chanel, le sue regole di bellezza valide per sempre

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Tutte dobbiamo davvero molto a Coco Chanel. Cosa sarebbe la moda, a che punto saremmo noi donne, infatti, se non fosse mai nata? Personalità gigantesca, in pochi decenni ha impresso il suo stile sul mondo, vestendolo di visioni rivoluzionare, all’avanguardia, ultra contemporanee. È lei che ha regalato a tutte noi l’insostituibile nero, liberando il colore/non colore dai segni del lutto, dandogli luminosità ed eleganza suprema e rendendolo assolutamente perfetto per ogni situazione. Ci ha dato i pantaloni (come poter immaginare un guardaroba senza), ci ha liberato da tonnellate di tessuti e corsetti.

Nessuna mai, prima di allora, ci aveva voluto bene come lei.

LA BELLEZZA SECONDO COCO

Mademoiselle non è “solo” moda, stile, tendenza immortale. Coco Chanel è attitude con una singolare considerazione della bellezza. «Se sei triste, se sei deluso per amore, truccati, concediti un po’ di cure di bellezza, metti il rossetto e attacca», è senza dubbio una delle sue citazioni più celebri, diventata nel tempo beauty must. Pertanto, non è un caso che molti dei suoi primi lanci cosmetici degli anni ’20 siano duraturi quanto le iconiche giacche in tweed o la leggendaria borsa trapuntata 2.55, e hanno contribuito a plasmare l’industria della bellezza.

Come la storica fragranza simbolo della maison. «Con cosa vado a letto? Con qualche goccia di Chanel N°5», diceva Marilyn Monroe contribuendo alla fortuna di Coco. Dal 1922, dopo quasi un secolo, è ancora questo l’impareggiabile profumo femminile, commissionato dalla designer all’ex profumiere dell’aristocrazia russa Ernest Beaux con la seguente indicazioni: «Voglio un profumo da donna con il profumo di una donna». Chanel credeva fermamente nell’importanza di dare un’impressione duratura e di trovare, quindi, un profumo caratteristico che definisse l’anima. «Una donna che non indossa il profumo non ha futuro», ça va sans dire.

DAL BOB AL ROSSETTO ROSSO

Rendiamo poi grazie a Coco non solo per l‘eau de parfum più amato al mondo (una bottiglia è venduta ogni 30 secondi), ma anche per aver sdoganato, sul finire della Prima Guerra Mondiale, il bob come pettinatura-à-porter della nuova donna dall’immagine forte, attiva, indipendente e contemporanea. Il suo caschetto ondulato è diventato nel tempo, tra l’altro, marchio di stile.

Trendsetter nel Dna, Chanel nel 1923 è stata, inoltre, la prima donna a pensare all’abbronzatura come elemento di bellezza. Prima di allora le contadine, nei campi sotto il sole, acquisivano un colore ambrato che, per questo, veniva associato al ceto povero. Al contrario il pallore era sinonimo di nobiltà e benessere economico, tanto che le signore dell’epoca si facevano notare per le città munite di ombrellini, velette e prendisole piuttosto ingombranti. Al ritorno da una vacanza in Costa d’Avorio, dove la stilista si era lasciata baciare dal sole, fu ammirata per la sua tintarella e immediatamente copiata.

E che dire del rossetto rosso di cui è stata sempre sostenitrice? La bocca rossa di Chanel era ed è un talismano che funziona come un’armatura di bellezza, il classico red lipstick il simbolo della vera femme fatale, da applicare disegnando perfettamente il contorno della bocca il più possibile a forma di cuore.

MESSAGGIO D’INCLUSIVITÀ

Last but not least, Chanel ha fornito un’importante lezione di bellezza ad alto tasso inclusivo: «per essere insostituibile, devi essere diverso», ha detto. Perché, che si tratti o meno dell’aver liberato le donne da capi restrittivi, ciò che rende felice è sentirsi a proprio agio con se stessa. Insomma, un messaggio 2021 arrivato dal secolo precedente, grazie a Coco.

Dopo aver dato un ripasso alle immortali beauty lesson della celebre stilista francese, nella gallery trovate i 10 bestsellers, tra grandi classici e ultima generazione, della maison più charmant.

From the Scottish Highlands to the French Riviera, the places most loved by fashion legend Coco Chanel

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From the Scottish Highlands to the French Riviera, the places most loved by fashion legend Coco Chanel

From her Scottish tweed jackets and Breton striped tops, to the austere colour palette inspired by her childhood spent in a remote convent, Coco Chanel was shaped by the places she visited.

By Caroline Young Sunday, 24th January 2021, 7:00 am

La Pausa, Chanel’s French Riviera villa in Roquebrune Cap-Martin, where she spent her summers from 1929 to 1953.

It’s 50 years since her death at the age of 87, on 10 January 1971, at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, but her simple, elegant style continues to make an impact. I followed in the footsteps of the pioneering, and at-times controversial, designer to some of the key locations that sparked her creative mind.

When I was researching my book Living with Coco Chanel, which explores the homes and landscapes that shaped the Coco Chanel look, I travelled to the influential places in Chanel’s life. Paris may have captured her modernism and bohemian spirit, but Chanel was also influenced by her time in the remote Auvergne region of France, her home on the French Riviera and in the Scottish Highlands with the Duke of Westminster.

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Born in the Loire valley town of Saumur on 19 August 1883, Gabrielle Chanel kept many facts about her childhood secret, but the most significant location in Chanel’s life, the one that holds the key to the codes in her designs, is the convent of Aubazine Abbey. The village, which was built around the abbey, is in an incredibly remote, peaceful location, where the mist rolls in over the hills in the morning, and where the abbey’s bell tower is the prominent landmark.

It was here, in 1895, that 12 year-old Gabrielle Chanel and her two sisters were abandoned by their peddler father after their mother died of tuberculosis in the nearby town of Brive-la-Gaillarde. She only offered hints about the poverty and the abandonment she had suffered, of the cloisters and pine and chestnut trees of the Auvergne landscape that formed a backdrop to her early life.

Many of her signature pieces, such as the little black dress, the double C logo and the black, white and beige colour scheme all stem from her time in the convent. The nuns walked the white corridors in their black and white habits, pristine white sheets and petticoats were hung out to dry in the courtyard, and beige was the colour of the sandstone walls. There is also a medieval mosaic on the floor of the convent’s corridor which depicts moons, stars and Maltese crosses; symbols later used in Chanel’s jewellery collections. The windows in the abbey, with their colourless glass set into leaded geometric patterns like Celtic knots, may also have been the inspiration for the double C Chanel logo.

When Chanel turned 18, she left Aubazine to work as a seamstress in the military town of Moulins. The shop she worked in, House of Grampayre, on cobbled rue de l’Horloge, close to the Jacquemart clocktower, is now a phone shop, but if you look closely you can still see the ghost sign on the wall. An officer from the barracks, wealthy socialite Étienne Balsan, came into the shop for alterations to uniforms, and encouraged Chanel to sing at the town’s café-concert venues including The Grand Cafe, with its plush Art Nouveau interiors still perfectly preserved. Her repertoire each evening included ‘Qui qu’a vu’ Coco’ and ‘Ko Ko Ri Ko’, which earned her the nickname Coco.

Balsan invited Chanel to his estate, Royallieu, in the forest of Compiègne, northeast of Paris, where he immersed himself in his passion for horseracing. On arrival, Coco discovered that Étienne’s primary mistress was Émilienne d’Alençon, a renowned Parisian courtesan. Impressed by Chanel’s unique tomboy style of little boater hats and tweed jackets worn with shirt and tie, Émilienne chose to sport one of Chanel’s hats to the races. The simplicity of the hat, so different from the over-the-top Belle Époque fashions, immediately created a buzz. It was also at Royallieu that Coco met English playboy Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, who was her first love. When he was killed in a car crash in 1919, Chanel never fully recovered.

Chanel enjoyed the beauty of Loch Stack while staying at the Duke of Westminster’s Stack Lodge.

In 1910, with the support of Boy Capel, Chanel opened a hat shop on Rue Cambon, a narrow little street directly behind the Ritz hotel on Place Vendôme, and it was from here that her fashion empire was born. Bohemian Paris of the 1920s was the place that came to define Coco Chanel, as she immersed herself in the avant-garde circles of Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau and Serge Diaghilev, founder of the Ballet Russes. She was the fashion vanguard of the time, with her short hair, her simple dresses that didn’t require a corset, and the ropes of artificial pearls contrasting with the Little Black Dress.

The Scottish influence

Chanel took up with the immensely wealthy Duke of Westminster after meeting him in Monte Carlo at Christmas 1923, and he introduced her to his 100,000-acre Reay Forest estate in the rugged northwest of Scotland. They stayed at Lochmore Lodge, a 52-room granite mansion with Victorian Gothic turrets, and Stack Lodge, the Duke’s sport’s house on the River Laxford, which was a base for salmon fishing, a sport which Chanel threw herself into with enthusiasm.

Westminster purchased another property, Rosehall, near Lairg, and he gave it to Chanel to decorate. He sold the house in 1930, and it later fell into severe disrepair, yet Chanel’s touches are evident in the beige painted doors and timber mantelpieces, and the French floral block print wallpaper peeling off the wall. In the bathroom there is even a bidet; likely one of the first in the Highlands.

Rosehall House on the Rosehall Estate near Lairg. Bought by her lover the Duke of Westminster in 1926 and decorated by Chanel, it was their sanctuary in the late 1920s.

Chanel’s luxury sports clothes in the late-twenties reflected her time with Westminster and the tweed jackets she borrowed from him to go fishing. Vogue, in 1926, reported that ‘tweed is an essential of the smart new wardrobe’, and it would remain a signature textile for Chanel, particularly with her little tweed boucle jackets that epitomised Parisian chic.

The French Riviera

Paris may have been Coco Chanel’s creative home, but her sanctuary in the south of France, La Pausa, was the place she found complete peace. Situated high above the rocky coastline of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, between Monte Carlo and the Italian border, Chanel custom-built her villa in 1929 using inspiration from the cloisters of Aubazine Abbey. With her bronzed skin and her striped jersey tops, Chanel helped the French Riviera to become the chic playground of the rich and famous from the 1920s onwards. The villa is still situated in this prime location, and while you can walk up to its gates, and follow a path to the back of the house to view it, it’s not possible to see inside.

Rue Cambon in Paris is the spiritual home of Chanel, where the apartment and salon, with its mirrored staircase, are still perfectly preserved. Yet she chose to permanently live at the Hotel Ritz from the 1930s until her death in 1971. As she gazed out of the windows of the hotel onto Place Vendôme, its octagonal shape may well have inspired her design for the classic number 5 bottle.

French pink and beige floral block print wallpaper in the bedrooms at Rosehall where Chanel used a pastel colour scheme throughout the house. It was in Scotland that she developed her tweed designs, using lighter shades and fabrics than the traditional masculine designs, after borrowing the Duke of Westminster’s coats and jackets.

Caroline Young is a writer from Edinburgh, and the author of Living with Coco Chanel, which explores how the places in Chanel’s life shaped her designs. Her new book, What Coco Chanel Can Teach You About Fashion, by Frances Lincoln, will be released on 3rd August.

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Chanel spent time at the convent in the town of Aubazine, a place chosen by the abbey’s Cistercian founders for its isolation.

For the interiors at Rosehall House, Chanel chose a beige colour scheme, which lingered on in the timberwork of doors and fireplaces after the house became derelict from 1967.

Living with Coco Chanel, Caroline Young’s book on the homes and landscapes that shaped the designer.

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