modern and simple, but that also allow women to feel beautiful
and to enjoy themselves.'
Boy Capel put his fingers to his big black moustache and
thought for a moment.
'And,' added Coco, 'I think women will also pay a very good
price for these clothes, if we can sell them in the right way.'
'What do you mean?' asked Boy.
'Well,' said Coco, 'these clothes need to have a new look. The
Chanel clothes in Biarritz will not just be clothes for rich
women who work. These clothes will make women feel good
when they wear them.'
Boy wasn't sure about the idea. 'But where will you get the
cloth for these clothes?' he asked. 'No other designer can get
cloth at the moment. We are in the middle of a war, you know.'
'Don't worry about that,' said Coco, 'I'll find the cloth. I just
need the money.'
'Money?' said Boy Capel. 'Oh, no problem. I've got plenty
of money.'
Boy Capel sounded confident, but as he lent more money to
Coco, he never really expected to see it again.
But Coco's idea was quite right. She found that she could still
buy cloth across the border in Spain, which wasn't fighting in the
•war. Then she rented an expensive house in the middle of the town
and hired sixty women to make her new dresses. She sold the dresses
for very high prices, but women were happy to pay for them. They
were so popular that people even came from Madrid to buy them.
For the next three years, Coco travelled between her three
businesses in Paris, Deauville and Biarritz, while the First World
War continued in the north and east of France. By 1916, over
three hundred people were working for her. She soon made so
much money that she could pay back Boy Capel all that she had
borrowed. Coco had been lucky because the war had given her a
chance to make her new designs popular. But she had also shown
6
that she could recognize business opportunities and that she
could change her style to suit her customers.
When the war finished, in November 1918, Coco was ready
to start the next and most successful part of her business life.
•
The First World War completely changed European society.
Millions of young men had been killed, and women now had a
much more important position in society. Women had shown
that they could work in offices and factories while men were
fighting in the war. In many countries, women were now allowed
to vote for their government for the first time. By the start of the
1920s, women had realized that they could be different from
their mothers. They could lead a very different kind of life from
the one they had known before the war.
After the bad times of the war, rich young people just wanted
to spend money and to have fun. They drove their shiny new cars
to the beach, where they played games and swam in the sea. Both
men and women went to parties, where they smoked cigarettes
and drank alcohol. They danced to the music of Louis Armstrong
and Jelly Roll Morton. They went to the cinema to watch the
films of Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo. And they also wore
the clothes of Coco Chanel.
Women didn't want to return to the long, tight dresses and
silly hats of the years before the war. They wanted clothes that
allowed them to move around freely. Chanel's style was just right
for the time. But now her clothes were not just for the women of
Paris, Deauville and Biarritz. The end of the war meant that she
could sell her clothes around the world. For women in the big
cities of Europe, she made smart suits of jackets and skirts, and for
women on holiday she designed special beach clothes. In the US
her dresses were so successful that a magazine even compared
them to the Ford motor car. Coco's business grew and grew.
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But Coco didn't just think about clothes. She realized that
women couldn't always wear diamonds and other expensive
jewellery when they went out. So she started making jewellery
that looked real, but was made from cheap materials. She also
introduced the idea of short hair for women, and for the first
time she made it popular for women to go out in the sun so their
skin went brown.
But Coco's best decision was to go into the cosmetics
business. She knew that the cosmetics business and the fashion
industry were similar in many ways, and she was sure that her
ideas could help her to be successful in this area. She also believed
that cosmetics were very important. She once said, 'If a woman
doesn't wear perfume, she has no future.'
So in the early 1920s, she went to see a man called Pierre
Wertheimer to discuss her plan. Wertheimer owned the biggest
perfume factory in France and he was very happy to work with
such a famous designer. At that time women wore perfumes
which always smelled of flowers, but Coco wanted her perfume
to have a completely different smell. Together Wertheimer and
Chanel invented a new kind of perfume, and they decided to sell
it in a simple, square bottle. They agreed to give it Coco's name,
and she added her lucky number. The result was Chanel No. 5,
the most successful perfume of the past hundred years.
As Coco grew richer and more successful, she mixed with the
most famous people of the time. She loved to be with artists and
she made clothes for shows at theatres in Paris, where she worked
with Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Sergei Diaghilev. These
people all admired Coco's work and understood what she was
trying to do.
'Coco worked in fashion according to rules that seem to have
value only for painters, musicians and writers,' said Jean Cocteau.
*No.: a short form of 'number'.
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Chanel No. 5, the most successful perfume
of the past hundred years.
But Coco didn't just mix with artists. She often went to
parties where she met important people like the future King of
England — the Prince of Wales — and Britain's future war leader,
Winston Churchill. And after her boyfriend of the war years, Boy
Capel, was killed in a car crash, she was often seen on the arm of
rich Russian and English lords.
For Coco and her friends, the 1920s were the happiest ten
years of the twentieth century. But the good times suddenly
ended in October 1929, when the stock exchange in Wall Street,
New York, crashed. Share prices fell and fell and fell. The world
economy was badly damaged. Thousands of businesses closed and
millions of people lost their jobs.
For most people, the Wall Street crash was a disaster, but not
for Coco Chanel. While ordinary people suffered, the richest
people in the world still had money and they still wanted
expensive, fashionable clothes. Instead of making cheaper, simpler
clothes, she started to design even more expensive clothes and to
use real diamonds in her jewellery. Coco had remembered the
lesson of Biarritz: in times of trouble, the secret of success is to
help people to forget their problems.
In these bad times for the world economy, other successful
people remembered the same secret. One of these people was the
great Hollywood film producer, Sam Goldwyn. As ordinary
people in America got poorer and poorer, he realized that they
wanted to see films about a different kind of world. They wanted
films that showed the wonderful lives of rich, beautiful people.
They wanted to go to the cinema and get away from their
problems. Goldwyn decided that people in his films should wear
the best and the most expensive clothes in the world, and so he
went to the top fashion designer in the world: Coco Chanel.
Coco understood his idea immediately and she was interested.
'How much will you pay me?' she asked.
'One million dollars,' said Goldwyn.
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