COCOPOD: November 2007

Saturday, 10 November 2007

Monday, 5 November 2007

Coco Chanel

She was born the second illegitimate daughter of traveling salesman Albert Chanel and Jeanne Devolle in the small city of Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, France. There was a mis-spelling on her birth certificate that was recorded her surname as 'Chasnel', making the tracing of her roots almost impossible for biographers when Chanel later rose to prominence. Coco was born in a poorhouse. Her birth was recorded the following day. Two employees of the hospice went to city hall and declared the child of feminine gender. The hospice employees were illiterate so when the mayor Francois Poitu wrote down the birth, no one knew how to spell Chanel so the mayor improvised and recorded it with an "s", making it Chasnel. Her parents married in 1883. She had five siblings: two sisters, Julie (1882-1913) and Antoinette (born 1887) and three brothers, Alphonse (born 1885), Lucien (born 1889) and Augustin (born and died 1891). In 1895, when she was 12 years old, Chanel's mother died; her father left the family a short time later. The young Chanel spent seven years in the orphanage of the Catholic monastery of Aubazine, where she learned the trade of a seamstress. School vacations were spent with relatives in the provincial capital of Moulins, where female relatives taught Coco to sew with more flourish than the nuns at the monastery were able to demonstrate. When Coco turned eighteen, she left the orphanage and briefly enrolled at the Notre Dame boarding school as a charity case before leaving the school to take up work for a local tailor.
It was at the tailor shop where she met and soon began an affair with the English playboy Etienne Balsan. While living with Balsan, Coco began designing hats as a hobby. The hats immediately caught the attention of the female Parisian elite, and provided Coco with a path toward earning financial independence for herself. With the aid of Balsan and, Arthur "Boy" Capel, Coco was able to acquire the property and financial backing to open her own millinery shop.
Later in life, Coco Chanel concocted an elaborate false history for her humble beginnings. She would steadfastly claim that when her mother died, her father sailed for America and she was sent to live with two cold-hearted spinster aunts. She even claimed to have been born in 1893 as opposed to 1883, and that her mother had died when Coco was 6, instead of twelve. She never married. All this was done in order to diminish the stigma that poverty and orphanhood bestowed upon unfortunates in nineteenth century Fra

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky enjoyed an unusually open affair with his mistress, Vera Sudeikina (also married at the time), while wedded to his cousin, Katerina Nossenko, and their four children. This shuttle diplomacy between two homes lasted for 18 years until his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1939. This ordinary looking bespectacled man of 5 foot 4, born with what can only be described as a God-given configuration to be an extraordinary ‘nez’ for a first class perfume maker, also found his way into the boudoir of fashion designer Coco Chanel!