Early life
Chanel was born on August 19, 1883 in Saumur, Loire Valley, France. She was the second child of Albert Chanel, a traveling salesman and Jeanne Devolle. They had 5 children altogether, three girls and two boys. She was born in a poorhouse.
Her mother died in 1895, when she was 12, from tuberculosis and her father left the family in order to find workabandoned the family to relatives. For seven years Chanel grew up in the orphanage of the Roman Catholic monastery of Aubazine. It is here that she was first introduced to the craft of a seamstress. During the school vacation, which she spent with female relatives in the provincial capital, she was taught by them how to saw more extravagantly than the nuns could teach her. When she was 18 she left the orphanage and started working for a local tailor.
Later in life, in order to diminish the stigma of poverty, orphanhood, and illegitimacy that was the attitude of 19th century France, Chanel fabricated a false story for her humble early life. She insisted that when her mother died her father sailed to America and she lived with two spinster aunts. And also claimed that she was born in 1893 and not in 1883.
She took up the name “Coco” during a brief career as a cafe and concert singer from 1905 to 1908. She claimed that she was called nothing but “Coco”, meaning “little pet” as a child but some sources state that the origin of the name is in a song she sang when she appeared on stage, in a musical called ‘Qui qu'a vu Coco'.