Coco Chanel’s Roaring Twenties

Tracing the origins and influences of the iconic French fashion house in the 1920s, from the Riviera to Paris

The beginnings of Chanel’s fashion brand lie in the French seaside resorts. In 1913, Coco--then still Gabrielle--Chanel opened her first boutique in Deauville, an upscale seaside resort just a few hours west of Paris. Soon after, she opened shops in Biarritz, Monte Carlo and Cannes. It was in these ritzy beach destinations that her simple, sporty designs first flourished. Here they were met with a cosmopolitan clientele who carried her fashion back to the capital city of Paris. In the 1920s, the Chanel brand thus experienced its first heyday, driven by the artistic and social upheaval of those years, now known as the Roaring Twenties.
This lavishly illustrated catalog chronicles this early era of the iconic French fashion house, documenting in drawings and photographs the extraordinary productivity of the designer herself, who maintained friendships with artists such as Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and others. It also traces Chanel’s early influences such as Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, who were performing on the Riviera in the 1920s just as Chanel began to gain a foothold in the region. The book reveals the Slavic influence on Chanel’s creations, highlighting a network of correspondences with female artists close to Diaghilev’s--including a chapter on the chromatic textile collaborations between Chanel and Russia-born French artist Sonia Delaunay. Finally, it also features images of La Pausa, Gabrielle Chanel’s dream villa built near Monaco in 1929.