Mademoiselle

July 28, 2014
Iconic fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883–1971) wanted to both hide her life story and to share it, a contradiction that confounded previous potential biographers. In this well-researched and buoyant biography, fashion writer Garelick’s stated goal is to analyze the “uncanny historical reach of Coco Chanel” and the ways in which Chanel’s constant reinvention provides a model for modern women. From Chanel’s childhood in the Loire Valley—characterized by illness, poverty and abandonment—to her infirm final years, when her closest companion was her butler, Francois Mironnet, Garelick (Rising Star) reveals the dramatic details that Chanel decided to publicly disclose and those facts she hid or embellished. While the book is even-handed in its critical, probing approach to Chanel’s life, its strongest chapter concerns its very core: the designer’s intimate relationship to fascism and fascists, such as writer, diplomat, and Vichy official Paul Morand, the German intelligence officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Garelick deftly situates Chanel in political and cultural history; in addition, the book’s extensive archival sources and new interviews make it a valuable resource for scholars. Photos. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency.

July 15, 2014
An admiring but evenhanded portrait of Coco Chanel's (1883-1971) life and loves.Cultural biographer Garelick (Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism, 2007, etc.) fully acknowledges the spate of recent research into Chanel's wartime collaboration with the Nazis from her Hotel Ritz perch in occupied Paris-e.g., Hal Vaughan's hard-hitting Sleeping with the Enemy (2011). Though providing no new revelations, Garelick offers a fine psychological portrait of the poor orphaned girl who spent seven years in an abbey, where she learned to sew and feel safety within its reassuring order and cleanliness (traits with which she would later imbue her couture). From working as a seamstress with her aunt Adrienne, then trying her luck as a backing singer in cafes and "water girl" in the Vichy spas, she possessed charm rather than beauty and, more than anything, the drive to attain her freedom the only way she knew how: with lots of money. A companion to rich playboys, she found in Englishman Arthur Capel a like-minded feminist partner; he set her up making hats out of his Paris apartment, then among the fledgling clothing boutiques in Deauville and Biarritz. A natural saleswoman and commander of workers, she succeeded smashingly on her own terms, adopting mannish, comfortable clothing that freed the feminine form from corsets and bindings, elevating cheap jersey and faux pearls as elements of high style, and essentially remaking the female silhouette in her own image: boyish, slim-hipped, flat-chested and athletic. Garelick pursues the catalog of Chanel's subsequent ill-fated lovers, her work with the Ballets Russes, her vast earnings from Chanel No. 5 and her fraught partnership with the Wertheimer brothers while frankly discussing her relentless, social-climbing attraction to right-wing, reactionary and racist elements.Certainly a definitive portrait, especially considering Garelick's intriguing venture into modern "branding."

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September 1, 2014
John Updike once proclaimed, Chanel was, in a way, France itself. Coco Gabrielle Chanel (18831971), the couturier and real woman, was fully transformed by her times into an aesthetic, a symbol, and a way of life. In this captivating biography, Garelick, whose many honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, takes on Chanel's relationship to French nationalism and to the changing currents of European society. While the fashion designer herself remains a somewhat contradictory and elusive figure, she is newly illuminated as a major player on the world stage, a figure who precisely maneuvered within the unstable politics and economy wrought by the two world wars. Chapters focusing on Chanel's many friends and lovers illustrate the complexity of her political circumstances. Garelick argues that it is through the prism of her relationships (which included leftists, royalty, fascists, and spies) that Chanel filtered the rapidly changing times and translated them into her unique design aesthetic. While fashonistas will find much of interest in the book's revelations of Chanel's influences, these tales of couture are deftly woven into a larger narrative of twentieth-century history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2014

Drawing on the Chanel archives, extensive interviews, and her own background as an author with a Yale PhD in French and comparative literature who covers fashion, performance, art, and cultural politics, Garelick shows how Coco Chanel's fashions reflected the historical and cultural crosscurrents around her. The publication date may move up.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2014

Biographies of Coco Chanel (1883-1971) abound, reflecting the embellishments and inconsistencies of the designer's own tales. Beyond those are novels, children's books, films, and the 1970 musical Coco starring Katharine Hepburn. Recent exhibitions revere Chanel and her creations (the little black dress, Chanel No. 5) as sacred objects. In this monumental biography, Garelick, who writes widely on fashion, gender, and performance, anchors Chanel's remarkable story within larger cultural, social, and political forces, including gender norms, French nationalism, and the rise of Nazism. She supports and questions existing narratives of the designer as a self-made social climber with new research into primary sources and the historical milieu. The author focuses particularly on the lives of lovers and friends, drawing out connections between the designer's private life and the aesthetic she created. Above all, Garelick unpacks Chanel's genius at selling her own transformative myth to women everywhere. VERDICT With more rigor and less hyperbole than its predecessors, this exhaustively researched yet highly readable biography secures a prominent place among countless books on Chanel. [See Prepub Alert, 4/21/14.]--Lindsay King, Yale Univ. Libs, New Haven, CT

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2014

Biographies of Coco Chanel (1883-1971) abound, reflecting the embellishments and inconsistencies of the designer's own tales. Beyond those are novels, children's books, films, and the 1970 musical Coco starring Katharine Hepburn. Recent exhibitions revere Chanel and her creations (the little black dress, Chanel No. 5) as sacred objects. In this monumental biography, Garelick, who writes widely on fashion, gender, and performance, anchors Chanel's remarkable story within larger cultural, social, and political forces, including gender norms, French nationalism, and the rise of Nazism. She supports and questions existing narratives of the designer as a self-made social climber with new research into primary sources and the historical milieu. The author focuses particularly on the lives of lovers and friends, drawing out connections between the designer's private life and the aesthetic she created. Above all, Garelick unpacks Chanel's genius at selling her own transformative myth to women everywhere. VERDICT With more rigor and less hyperbole than its predecessors, this exhaustively researched yet highly readable biography secures a prominent place among countless books on Chanel. [See Prepub Alert, 4/21/14.]--Lindsay King, Yale Univ. Libs, New Haven, CT

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.