Coco Chanel, the freedom-loving woman who defied the tyrants of her day
© Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet
Coco Chanel contributed to the Society’s definition of “French elegance”. This definition made its entrance into the Dictionary of Words, Ideas and People, an impressive record of learned debate dating back to the foundation of the Baudelaire Society in the late 19th century.
In the aftermath of Coco Chanel’s contribution to the definition of “French elegance”, the idea of a collection hinging around eight Flowers of Evil poems matured in the fashion designer’s mind. Accordingly, she submitted her project to the Baudelaire Society.
The novel idea of a collection themed on the Flowers of Evil had dawned on Coco Chanel back in 1937. The fashion designer now extended this idea to a collection of fifty-six models interpreting nineteen of Baudelaire’s poems. Lending substance to her project for a retrospective collection, she submitted to the Baudelaire Society photographs and drawings that had appeared in various fashion journals. The collection would be reconstituted in 1985 by the former Harper’s Bazaar photographer, Jerry Plucer-Sarna.
An unconvinced response to Isée St. John Knowles’s last-ditch attempt to revive Coco Chanel’s Baudelairean project.
As Coco Chanel was intensifying offensive actions in the defiant aim of holding her own values aloft in wartime, she was guided by the counsels of the Baudelairean artist Limouse (1894-1989), who was to become the president of the Baudelaire Society.
The fiftieth anniversary of Coco Chanel’s death is the appropriate occasion for publishing this volume which cannot simply be glossed over as yet another publication about the fashion designer. Unprecedentedly, it retraces Coco Chanel’s personal account of “her war” during the Occupation. Entitled Coco Chanel, the freedom-loving woman who defied the tyrants of her day, the book was hailed as an “unparalleled, ground-breaking work” by Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie, Chanel’s great-niece.
To be published shortly under the imprint of Cohen & Cohen
Coco Chanel, the freedom-loving woman who defied the tyrants of her day sheds new light on a famous, controverted personality, elusive and solitary who, in wartime, conscionably withstood the onslaughts against her freedom of thought, flouted all curtailment of her autonomy, and stubbornly upheld her sovereign uniqueness.
Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie, Coco Chanel’s great-niece, with the author, Isée St. John Knowles.
