Chanel and Vogue on film

I saw Coco Avant Chanel last night and I was intrigued by the story of Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel's personal life before she made it to the heights of fashion design. Do not read on if you haven't seen it as there are many spoilers!

The movie profiled her early days before she made it big, from singing cheesy songs in cafes, her affairs with wealthy men and the beginnings of her business. Despite her impoverished background - having being raised in an orphanage, she appeared to have a sense of entitlement and snobbery about her, and seemed frustrated that she had not been born into privilege, lying about her true beginnings.

She is portrayed as a multi-faceted woman who was unique from other women of the early 20th Century. She wanted to have a career but she did not realise where her talent lay- an attempt to be an actress revealed how self unaware she was. Her desire for a career was really driven by her poverty, like so many successful, famous people.

She was also a contradiction in her dealings with men, cynical about the role of men and love after being abandoned by her own father, all the while engaging in affairs with very wealthy men whom it seemed she used for money. She did fall in love with a man who she later found out to be married and he was instrumental in encouraging her and funding her business (with his wife's money). Later in life she was involved with a nazi soldier which caused her to fall out of favour with the French. I was dissapointed that she was not purely independent and seemed to use her body to get ahead however it was a very different era and I should not criticise with my post-feminist movement eyes.

I was inspired by her role in revolutionising women's fashion, freeing them from corsets and frills and using men's clothes as her muse to create her signature style that is still timeless today.

Audrey Tatou does a brilliant job in portraying the subtle nuances of Chanel.

The catch cry from friends who have seen this was that we wanted to see more of her journey from when she first started designing hats to her rise to the top of the fashion world. There are also darker aspects to her later life - stories of her attempts to wrest control of Chanel Parfums from her partners, the Wertheimer family, by exploiting the Nazi race laws, and of her startling offer to Hitler’s secret-police chief to broker a negotiated peace with her old friend Winston Churchill—a farcical operation code-named Modellhut (fashion hat) by Chanel’s S.S. handlers. Perhaps there will be a second biopic in the works that covers this.

There is another Chanel movie that debuted at Cannes this year, called Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. It profiles her affair with the impoverished composer Igor, where she invites him and his family to move into her villa, allegedly enaging in a passionate affair. Keep an eye out for that one!

In other fashion film news, The September Issue is coming up at the Brisbane International Film Festival on August 4. It debuted at Sundance and is a fascinating behind the scenes look at the 9 month process of Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington and Andre-Leon Talley creating the september issue of Vogue with Sienna Miller as covergirl. Can't wait!