Fashion, Finance And Coco Chanel

It would be easy to think that with all the crises in the world today – economic stagnation, wars with ISIS, refugees from Syria to name three – that there’d be some diminished enthusiasm over the just-ended Fashion Week in Paris. But you’d be wrong on two counts.

First, there’s the French attitude towards fashion and beauty, succinctly put by Gertrude Stein in her seminal work, Paris France, published on the eve of World War 2, when she resided here with such other artistic ex-pats as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Note: the punctuation below is famously Stein’s)…

Leading Export

And so it is interesting to note that the person whose shows are the most coveted, whose fashion leadership is alive and well today is someone who has been dead since January 10, 1971: Coco Chanel. Not to disparage 77-year-old Karl Lagerfeld whose helmsmanship rescued the line from becoming moribund when he took over the reins in 1983; but it was Chanel who led the revolution and set the groundwork for the modern woman. She did it by creating the “look” for her own life…and it is a life worth examining.