I’ve always been fascinated by Coco Chanel. She’s one of the most original, complicated personalities of the modern era, one of those people who emerge in every age who in their accomplishments (and flaws) seem to embody the very spirit of their time. I’ve never understood why she hasn’t shown up in more novels over the years. I can only conclude that most people who write novels consider fashion an ephemeral and frivolous art, and, therefore, an unsuitable subject for fiction. But I’ve always felt that clothes are much more than clothes – they’re clues to cultural currents, and they have great symbolic power. We all have clothes we can’t bear to part with because of their special meaning: that 20-year-old dress you’ll never give away because you were wearing it the night you met your husband; that moth eaten sweater you won’t throw out because your mother made it for you; the box of baby clothes you can’t part with because they remind you of your children’s childhoods. After my last novel, I Am Madame X, was published, I was thinking that I might like to write another book set in Paris, because I know it pretty well now after spending so much time there and setting two books in the city. Also, it’s such a wonderful place to be, even if just in your head! I was thinking it would be interesting to write about Chanel, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. I didn’t want to do another faux memoir like I Am Madame X, and, anyway, Chanel’s life had been well documented in several biographies. Around this time, my elderly aunt, Filomena Farley, was cleaning out her house in Louisville, Kentucky, and she came across a scrapbook containing my grandmother’s student sewing samples. My grandmother had been a seamstress in New York in the 1920s, and when I saw this little scrapbook – my grandmother must have been 16 when she made it – with these charming little fabric squares so meticulously sewn into the pages with her initials stitched underneath, it just hit me. I’d write about a seamstress who works for Chanel. I decided to set my story in 1919, during preparations for Chanel’s fall 1919 collection, because Chanel always said that 1919 was the year she woke up famous. It was her first big collection, the one that anointed her the Queen of Chic. And it was a pivotal year in fashion history. The cataclysm of World War I had just ended, and the world was being remade in every way. The revolution in fashion was tied to the revolution at the core of society, in science, politics, and the arts. When most of us think of Coco Chanel we think of boxy tweed suits with collarless jackets, black toe-capped pumps, No. 5 perfume, and sunglasses and costume jewelry emblazoned with interlocking "C"s. Except for the perfume, which Chanel introduced in 1921, those other items appeared only in her second incarnation in the 1950s, after she closed her couture house in 1938 for 15 years. |
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