Spring 2008 >Style >
Coco Chanel
Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel is a petite fashion icon not only known for revolutionizing woman’s casual and evening apparel but also for her role in contemporary ideals that stay true in fashion today. She created a fashion empire that continues to inspire women 37 years after her death.
She may have had a ‘small boyish figure,’ but her stature in fashion history is colossal. Feminist, trendsetter, leader, and intellectual she paved the way for women’s fashion and changed an ideal the world’s designers would never revisit in women’s clothing.
There are numerous books dedicated to her oeuvre of work. But through all her designs, one detail in particular stands out to me: the little black dress.
Chanel’s quest to reduce and refine women's clothing to its simplest and most elegant is captured in the little black dress. Denouncing the corsets and long cumbersome skirts and dresses of the early 1900s, she created a dress using jersey, then considered a lesser-valued material, and designed simple, comfortable, and chic dresses that women clamored over. Among her most well known, the little black dress.
Chanel believed that fashion should be accessible and modern and available to every woman. She believed fashion should be functional as well as chic. Radically simple, her little black dress was designed to fit every woman. It was the fashion ideal: a perfectly simple, yet sexy, object.
The concept of the dress, introduced in 1926, made it suitable for day and evening and became a staple for Chanel throughout subsequent seasons and, ultimately, a classic piece of 20th-century women's wear. Truly, the definition of timeless fashion.
Whether you realize it or not, Chanel’s legacy lives on in every wardrobe. The jersey you wear daily, the pants and buttoned-down shirts, the short skirts. Every comfortable piece of clothing you enjoy, as well as that ever-trusty little black dress, is inspired by the petite and extraordinary Coco Chanel.