Chanel began as a hat shop and freed women from the corset
In 1909 Gabrielle Chanel began selling hats from a friend's Paris flat. Within a decade her loose jersey garments, borrowed partly from wartime uniforms, were on every European buyer's list, and a perfume named after a sample number would make her house one of the most famous in fashion.
Chanel's first premises were the ground floor of the Paris flat of Étienne Balsan, a textile businessman whose salon drew the hunting and sporting elite and their fashionable mistresses. Selling them hats gave her an income of her own. In 1910 the English polo player Arthur Capel paid for her first independent shop, Chanel Modes, on Rue Cambon, and by the First World War she ran a large dress shop there near the Ritz, selling flannel blazers, linen skirts, sailor blouses and long jersey sweaters.
Jersey appealed to her for the way it draped and suited simple cuts, and some designs echoed military uniforms. By 1915 her clothes were known throughout France, and Harper's Bazaar reported that year and in 1917 that every buyer wanted them. Her straight, flat-chested lines were the opposite of the hourglass shapes of the Belle Époque, and she used grey and navy, colours long linked with menswear. Simplicity, she told the magazine in 1923, is the basis of all real elegance.
In 1921 she asked perfumer Ernest Beaux to create a scent; she picked the fifth sample, and No. 5 went on sale in 1922 after first being given to clients. To expand it she partnered with investor Pierre Wertheimer, who took most of the new Parfums Chanel. The Second World War darkened her story. She closed the house, lived at the Ritz with a Nazi intelligence officer, and was arrested after the liberation, then released for lack of evidence. The Jewish Wertheimer family had fled to the United States, and in 1947 she renegotiated their contract, receiving 400,000 dollars and a running royalty on No. 5.
Returning to Paris in 1953, she found Christian Dior's full-skirted New Look dominant. With Wertheimer's capital, in exchange for rights to all Chanel products, she rebuilt the house, adding pearl necklaces by jeweller Robert Goossens to soften the knitted Chanel Suit. The brothers Alain and Gérard Wertheimer own the company privately today, through a London holding company set up in 2018.
Source: Chanel
