Chanel: A life cut on the bias

THE chain-handle handbag. The little black dress. Trousers for women. The suntan. Nearly 100 years after she first set up shop in the rue Cambon, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's legacy remains as strong as ever. Even that iconic fitted tweed suit – which she was inspired to design following a visit to Scotland with her lover the Duke of Westminster – has been copied so many times on the high street it is a full-on design classic.

Next month will see the release of the hotly anticipated film Coco Before Chanel, based on a book by the designer's official biographer Edmonde Charles-Roux, focusing on her turbulent life before she became famous for fashion and starring Audrey Tautou in the title role. Meanwhile, another film, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky was chosen to close the Cannes festival this year, telling the story of Gabrielle's alleged love affair with the Russian composer and featuring the French actress Anna Mouglalis. There is at least one other biopic in the works, with Demi Moore rumoured to be pencilled in to play Coco.

So why this continued fascination with a woman who died nearly 40 years ago? And why now?

In the early days of the 20th century, a time when women were constrained by corsets, encumbered by long skirts and teetering around helplessly on their high heels and tight shoes, Chanel's revolutionary designs focused on simplicity, movement and comfort. She even once dictated that women should only ever wear artificial jewels.

Here, then, was a feisty, independent woman; a woman way ahead of her time, yet for whom the one thing she desperately wanted was kept tantalisingly out of reach.

Born in 1883 in Saumur, in rural France, Gabrielle was abandoned at the age of 11 by her philandering father just a week after the premature death of her mother. Brought up in an orphanage, the fiercely ambitious Chanel continued to deny the truth of her humble beginnings throughout her life. She claimed her mother had tuberculosis; in fact she was plagued by something much less poetic – asthma. She conjured up a father who owned vineyards and was fluent in English; an irresistible seducer and a charmer. In fact, Albert had first abandoned Gabrielle's mother when she discovered she was pregnant and had to be hunted down and persuaded to make an honest woman of her. He then spent the rest of their time together trying to escape the tedious constraints of family life.

"My parents couldn't bear mess and untidiness," the designer once told Louise de Vilmorin, whom she was trying to persuade to write her memoirs. "They had a natural penchant for everything clean, fresh, of good quality; that is why people commented upon the note of elegance about our horse and buggy that was so uncommon in the countryside."

In her book Chanel, Her Life, Her World, The Woman Behind the Legend, Charles-Roux muses: "All of this, which brings both a smile and a sigh of pity to the lips, would not be worth a pause, and no one would care in the slightest ... were it not that in these slivers of truth we have Albert Chanel's final appearance in the role of father – free at last, widower at last, driving his shabby little cart with two of his daughters in it to the orphanage."

Even the word orphanage never passed Gabrielle's lips; she claimed to have been brought up by two aunts instead, and in the end de Vilmorin abandoned hope of obtaining any semblance of the truth from her subject and gave up on the memoirs altogether.

In her teens, Gabrielle worked as a shop girl but entertained fantasies of becoming a singer. She performed for groups of rowdy infantrymen stationed near her home of Moulins, and it was here that she gained the nickname of Coco, after the only two songs in her limited repertoire: one called Ko Ko Ri Ko and the other, Qui Au'a Vu Coco Dans L'Trocadero?

"After finishing her song," writes Charles-Roux, "the debutante named Coco – not by her father, as she tried her whole life long to make people believe, but by an audience of soldiers on the town – curtsied gracefully and returned to her seat."

In reality, however, she lacked singing talent – "you don't have a voice," she was told in no uncertain terms, "and you sing like a trombone" – and a career on the stage would always elude her. But her fiercest critic was also the man who was to change the course of her life. Etienne Balsan was a well-to-do racehorse breeder who proposed to Gabrielle, not marriage, but a life of relative luxury as his mistress. He set her up in his chateau, introduced her to the good life and convinced her she wanted more.

It was Balsan who, in the early part of the 20th century, established his lover in his Paris bachelor pad, where she managed to build up a successful millinery trade. But she was already setting her sights on bigger and better things.

One of Balsan's friends also appeared on the scene around this time – an Englishman named Arthur "Boy" Capel. He encouraged Gabrielle, persuaded his acquaintances to do business with her ... and was soon sleeping with her. "Being a decent chap," writes Charles-Roux, "Etienne continued to lend her his bachelor flat, although he knew perfectly well she was sleeping elsewhere. The change of regime took place without tears or scenes. It was a switchabout in the best tradition of French philandering. When Arthur Capel replaced Balsan, as a matter of course it was he who advanced the money to buy the shop."

And so Chanel moved to an address that was to become inextricably linked with her own name – rue Cambon – and a pattern was established. As with Balsan, Capel never proposed. "That she ardently longed to marry him is beyond all doubt," writes Charles-Roux, "but it was never remotely on the cards."

Other lovers followed over the years, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, the poet Pierre Reverdy, the Duke of Westminster, and friendships with some of the most influential artists of the day – Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Stravinsky – all the while Chanel becoming ever more successful in her own right. "In her own way, Chanel derived real benefits from these liaisons," says Charles-Roux. "With the Russian she developed a taste for warm, fur-lined coats and for fabrics of almost Byzantine opulence, while through the Englishman she fell in love with British tweeds, which she had women wear with jersey blouses and ropes of pearls, a revolutionary combination at the time."

Effortlessly stylish, independently wealthy, courted by millionaires – it's an image we buy into today, albeit unconsciously, when we pick up a pair of entwined double-C sunglasses or that classic, cubist bottle of No 5.

But as business boomed and the money poured in – she is said to have made 15 million on the No 5 scent alone – the one thing she aspired to remained as elusive as ever. Marriage. "Gabrielle professed to have only modest aspirations," says Charles-Roux, "wanting true love, to be chosen, preferred, and that the choice be for always. But destiny decreed that such happiness would never be hers."

At the age of 56, she embarked on an affair with a German spy known only as Spatz (the Sparrow). She had already incurred the wrath of her contemporaries by shutting up shop following the occupation of Paris by the Germans, a desertion that became known in fashion circles as Chanel's treason, and this affair, if she had not managed to keep it secret for so long, could have ruined her.

But, as with all Gabrielle's men, he proved wanting and, at the end of the war, she moved to Switzerland and might have spent her remaining years in exile. But she was tempted back in 1954 – not by a renewed passion for fashion by a desire to destroy her great rival, Christian Dior. She failed in her mission but, by this time approaching her seventies, she relaunched the house of Chanel to a new generation.

"Chanel lived at the very centre of an extraordinary professional success," says Charles-Roux, "yet she suffered extreme loneliness, having failed in what meant the most to her – the life of a woman. What she had, however, was more independence, more freedom than most could ever imagine."

Chanel, Her Life, Her World, The Woman Behind The Legend, by Edmonde Charles-Roux (Maclehose Press, £14.99), is published on Thursday. Coco Before Chanel is released on 31 July. There is no official UK release date yet for Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky