Bridgewater Review Volume 34 | Issue 1 Article 12 May-2015 Book Review: Fashioning Coco Chanel Sarah Wiggins Bridgewater State College,
[email protected] Recommended Citation Wiggins, Sarah (2015). Book Review: Fashioning Coco Chanel. Bridgewater Review, 34(1), 35-36. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol34/iss1/12 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. suits, or schoolboy sports clothes and BOOK REVIEWS blazers, the ‘Chanel woman’ conjured the silhouette of the war’s millions of Fashioning Coco Chanel soldiers – the young men dying just out Sarah Wiggins of sight of the general population” (87). Unfortunately, as the book contin- Rhonda K. Garelick, Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and ues, the figure of Chanel is lost to the the Pulse of History (New York: Random House, reader. Garelick structures individual chapters on Chanel’s romantic inter- 2014). ests, including the exiled Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov, poet pectators are drawn to the grandeur of a Chanel Pierre Reverdy, the wealthy Duke of runway performance, captivated by the clothing Westminster, and French illustrator design, models, and theatrical staging. Embedded and nationalist, Paul Iribe. There is one S chapter dedicated to her female friend- in the drama of a Chanel show is the vision of its ships, in particular with society force, original founder, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883- Misia Sert, but the majority of writing focuses on her male companions. In her 1971). When we hear the term “Chanel,” we think of quest to discover what these relation- the Chanel suit, strings of pearls, the little black dress, ships “might offer beyond their anec- and basic, classic style.