The Cut Of Coco Chanel
“I…am an odious person,†Coco Chanel (pictured) declared. ‘Not many would have begged to differ,’ writes Anka Muhlstein in a sparking review/essay in the New York Review. ‘Chanel’s tongue was quite as sharp as her shears and she treated everyone who worked for her harshly, playing one against the other. No one escaped her malice, not even a trusted friend like the poet Jean Cocteau, whom she described to one interviewer as nothing but a “snobbish little pederast who did nothing all his life but steal from people.†She held her own customers in contempt and said, “A woman equals envy plus vanity plus chatter plus a confused mind.†But no one ever built an empire by being nice, and Chanel, by simplifying, lightening, and eliminating the corset, invented a new way of dressing women.’
