Chanel: couture and industry

This book examines, contextualizes and privileges the couturière’s creative output, over the course of a career that spanned some sixty years. The narrative is sequenced chronologically to document the evolution and meteoric rise of Chanel’s international fashion empire and the products that bear her exclusive label: haute couture and ready-to-wear fashion clothing accessories, jewellery and perfume. Her performative designs for avant-garde dance and theatre, and for the stars of 1920s and 1930s Hollywood, which so clearly bore her signature, are also considered.

Chapter one identifies and evaluates the resources available to research this enigmatic woman in the context of the fashions she created. Whilst surviving garments, researched within international museum collections, and contemporaneous press accounts provide substantive evidence, investigations into Chanel’s personal and business biographies often prove elusive or contradictory. And, this is precisely as she intended.

Following Chanel’s death in 1971 other designers interpreted her fashion signatures for modern consumers with various degrees of success. However, it was not until 1983, when Karl Lagerfeld took the design helm, that the House of Chanel resumed its place in fashion’s forefront. The final chapter examines Chanel’s extraordinary and inspirational legacy.

Publisher's Abstract of the Book:

For almost a century, the name of Chanel has been inextricably linked to elegance, modernity and fashion innovation. It was Chanel who single-handedly made striped jerseys and loose trousers chic, costume jewellery desirable, the little black dress the height of sophistication, and tweed suits a staple of every stylish womans wardrobe.

In this beautifully illustrated book, dress historian Amy de la Haye celebrates Gabrielle Coco Chanel as the couturire who changed the way stylish women everywhere dress, then and now. She examines the creative output of this most famous of fashion houses, from its infancy in the 1920s to the present day as it continues to prosper under the direction of Karl Lagerfeld.

Amy de la Haye

Research Interests

Fashion in the context of the museum
Fashion and dress history 1850 onwards
Material culture/object-based analysis
Women's Land Army