Chanel

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel told the story of her own life so many times,
in so many versions, that even her biographers couldn't always tell
where the woman ended and the myth began. This book doesn't try to
choose between them. It follows the documented record wherever it
leads - through poverty and abandonment, convent walls and cafe
stages, a fashion revolution built on fabric no one else wanted, and
a wartime chapter she spent the rest of her life trying to make
disappear.

Chanel: A Life in Black and White traces her from a Saumur poorhouse
to the top of the Rue Cambon staircase where she watched her own
empire from above, unseen. It follows the men who financed her rise,
the business partnership she signed away in a decade's worst mistake,
and the war years - a German lover, an Abwehr file, a failed attempt
to seize a rival's company under Nazi law - that historians only fully
documented decades after her death.

This is not a fashion book. It is the life beneath the legend:
meticulously sourced, clear about what is proven and what is only her
own claim, and honest about a woman whose creative genius and moral
failures never cancelled each other out.

For readers of biographies that don't flinch - the kind that sit
alongside Hal Vaughan's wartime research and Edmonde Charles-Roux's
definitive life, but ask a simpler question than either: not who was
Coco Chanel, but what can actually be proven about her, and what was
she still inventing right up to the end.

A life in black and white. Not because it's simple - because, for
Chanel, it never was.