#badsinger

Why do you never let the singer drive the gig van?

Coco Chanel was born in Saumur, France in 1883, with the name Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. Although her later life was very luxurious, the beginning of her life included a series of very unfortunate events. She grew up impoverished in France, and at the tender age of twelve, she was faced with the death of her mother, Jeanne Devolle, in 1895. The responsibility of Chanel and her four siblings fell to her father, Albert Chanel, who soon “abandoned her and her two sisters to an orphanage and her two brothers to a local family,” according to Britannica. She was sent to a convent and that is where she, with the help of the nuns, grew up. Even with all of these terrible things that happened to her, even with no money, a dead mother, and probably all of the other odds stacked against her, she did not stop trying, she worked and worked until she was satisfied, that is what sets her apart from other designers, her drive.

When she was older and of age, the nuns from her convent landed her a job. Chanel became a “shopgirl” or a sales associate, in modern terms where she was a seamstress and did the clerking for the store. This did not last very long, but I suspect that this is where she was introduced to the clothing industry and where she essentially found her passion for fashion.

She may have been interested in fashion but before she pursued her career in the industry, she thought she was born to be a famous singer. Her next career move was to become a singer in a Parisian café. This is where she acquired her infamous nickname, “Coco” after her popular cover of the song “Qui qu'a vu Coco,”  which she had told everyone was her birth name.

Working at the café, turned out to be very lucrative for Chanel, she was introduced to a lot of people and she even befriended some very wealthy men, including an Arthur Edward "Boy" Cape, who ended up helping her, financially, to open up her second shop in Beauville in 1913. As her first was in Paris, opened in 1910, where she sold the hats that she made, which she called “Chanel Modes.” The second store focused more on clothing.