Product Description

Chanel is credited not simply with giving us the little black dress and boxy jackets, but popularising pants for women and easy, practical clothes that allowed women a chic freedom they'd never known before. In her strong-headed, elegant, opinionated, passionate, entirely French way, Coco Chanel helped bring women into the modern era, and because of this she was the only person in fashion to be named "Time" magazine's 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century. Karen Karbo weaves Chanel's life story into chapter themes that subtly convey life lessons and leave the reader utterly entranced with Chanel's amazing individuality, confidence, and determination. The story of the designer's extraordinary life and rise to unprecedented success is both compelling and admirable. And while the great Coco may have launched her singular empire a hundred years ago, her methods, attitude, and elan are as relevant and modern as ever, and perhaps more appealing. Chanel was a self-made girl who knew how to make do with less until she had more, discover and stay true to her own style, problem-solve using the tools at hand, and do it all with seemingly effortless flair. This book is charming, captivating, and ultimately inspiring.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #993 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 225 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781599215235
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Un Bijou for You
I read this book the way I read Ms. Karbo's book on Katharine Hepburn: greedily, with an eye to what was in it for me. I plundered every chapter heading: On Style, On Self-Invention, On Fearlessness... does this fit me? Could I/should I adopt this for my own? With some, like On Embracing the Moment, I thought, Oh sure, I've already got that; with others, like On Living Life on Your Own Terms, I was stopped short, and I thought Yeah! I've gotta cultivate that!

The other compelling thing about this book is that once you get past self-interest, you discover that Coco Chanel was an amazing woman. She invented modern fashion, and to do so had to rise above poverty and an actual orphanage. This was great material to draw on and reshape, which she did: Ms. Karbo says Chanel "lied about or embellished everything in her childhood...she had no respect for anything she didn't create, and that included her own history." Her trajectory included being a shopgirl, seamstress, cafe singer, and kept woman before she got to couturiere extraordinaire, and she owed nothing to anyone but herself. She was self-made and a revolutionary.

Karen Karbo tells Coco Chanel's story in a lively way and mines it for usable wisdom. I recommend this book for any fashionista, for sure, and for any francophile, and for any woman who loves the struggle. I especially like it for women who make things or strive to make things, like books or sculpture or businesses or anything else. The Gospel According to Coco Chanel is heartening and a lot of fun.

Mais oui...
I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this book... I loved Ms. Karbo's previous book about Katherine Hepburn, but as a longtime -- and unabashed -- fan of Chanel, I was really looking forward to this book when I read about it a few months ago in Bazaar.

Like Chanel herself, Ms. Karbo does not disappoint. Her writing style is tremendous -- witty and fun, moving and historically insightful, she is like a terrific dinner party guest you want to stay for the weekend (and tell nonstop Coco Chanel stories, of course).

I picked this book up as an impulse on one of the front tables of B+N, and read it over the course of two days.

As a modern woman who loves Chanel, I am suggesting it to all my stylish girlfriends, it would make a perfect hostess gift.

And by the way, I HOPE that Karbo gets that real Chanel jacket she is dreaming of.

a mini-biography, with great dish and helpful wisdom
Coco Chanel couldn't be making a star turn in media at a better time.

Start with Anne Fontaine's film "Coco Before Chanel", coming to American theaters this fall after dazzling audiences in Europe. It's the right film about Chanel: the early years. And though the facts are as murky about pre-Chanel Chanel as about the fashion icon, the theme --- a woman born without advantages, making her way in the world --- is more universal.

But the better reason for women --- and the men who love them --- to pay attention to Chanel is because she was a cheerleader for self-sufficiency, in good times and bad. So skip over the fashion. Consider only the politics. I mean: ours.

Is this a great time to be a woman in America? I'm not so sure. More American women may now be going to college than men, but when they graduate, they're still looking at salaries as much as 30% lower than men get for the same work. The anti-choice movement, always noisy, has upped the volume --- and the violence. And it seems that a sizable number of American men won't be happy until all women are homebound mothers, wearing the equivalent of the burqa.

No writer has a better understanding of what it means to be Chanel and what it means to be a woman who admires Chanel than Karen Karbo, author of the short (240 pages) and addictive The Gospel According to Coco Chanel. Karbo is the granddaughter of Emilia Karbowski, known as "Luma of California" for the clothes she designed for the wives of movie moguls in the 1950s. Which is to say: Karen Karbo is real and unashamed of it: "I am the average consumer." She looks for Chanel jackets on eBay. And she writes as if she's having a conversation with a close friend over double-shot lattes.

Who is Chanel to Karbo?

Chain-smoker. Workaholic, though she could stay in bed all morning with a newspaper. Leo, with a Pisces moon. Born nobody. Fell in love once, but not again. Her bigger love: money. "Money was more than her security blanket. It was her ongoing victory lap." And restrained: "Even though Chanel insisted on having the best of everything, she didn't insist on having everything."

Are you hearing "Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves" in the background? You should be.

Karbo delivers a mini-biography, with perceptive and amusing commentary:

"She looked like the girl at school who conned you into breaking the rules with her, then let you take all the blame."

"Her childhood was the Belle Époque version of a country-and-western song. The only thing she lacked was a dead dog and a wasting disease."

"She compulsively lied about her past, and then lied about having lied, and then disavowed the lie about the lie."

Along the way, great trivia abounds. Yes, French women wore hats adorned with feathers --- but did you know that, in 1911, in France, 300 million birds were killed to provide those feathers?

And, because Karbo really is your new best friend, she even labels the punch line: "Cut to the chase, don't waste time doing stuff that seems essential to your life and business, just because other people do it."

Just so. The fashion is merely fascinating, a means to an end. The life lessons? For a woman trying to find a safe haven in America, this book delivers more wisdom --- and wit --- per page than Dr. Phil will dispense in a lifetime.