Coco Before Chanel

Coco Chanel established a fashion empire through a revolution in style and in substance. Her designs allowed women, shorn of the encumbering accoutrements of 19th-century couture, to move about more freely. Her name became a brand on the strength of accomplishment, not spin. Chanel’s “little black dress,” a groundbreaker in its elegant simplicity, grew from her belief that clothing should flatter the contours of a woman’s body, not contort the body to fit an abstract ideal of femininity.

Coco Before Chanel, starring Audrey Tautou (Amelie) as the designer in her aspiring youth, tells her origin story. A child of misfortune, Coco was reared in a Spartan but well-run Catholic orphanage where she learned to sew. Even then, her eyes seemed caught by the clean, simple lines of the clothing around her, the nuns’ habits and the uniforms of the orphan girls. Perhaps the root of Chanel was planted in that austere environment?

After the orphanage, Coco found herself in a pre-World War I demimonde whose slender prospects for a woman of modest origins only encouraged her to seize each moment. She worked by day as a seamstress and by night in the bars, roaming between tables, singing risqué songs and collecting a few centimes in her straw hat. Her audience included well-lubricated officers and aristocrats, taking their pleasure under the dim gaslight with the women of the evening. Coco was relatively lucky with men, playing the courtesan and stepping gingerly up the social ladder. Marriage interested her less than autonomy. Rather than marry into wealth, she wanted the opportunity to earn her own.

This was not easy in a society where men held most of the cards and courtesans were often reminded of their inferior status. As Coco, Tautou’s big, dark eyes hungrily drink up the world around her, showing curiosity and wariness at the traps and hypocrisy of her society, and maintaining a reserve of sadness. She both endured and enjoyed the sexual favors of the men who helped her up the ladder.

One brief, wordless scene in the chateau of a benefactor speaks to her desire as she runs her fingers across the marble sink of her own bathroom, tries out the bathtub for size and eyes the rows of leather-bound books lining the shelves in the study like a full-dress army on parade. She wanted the wealth to live in the comfort that had been denied her and to pursue knowledge and ideas beyond the elementary education she had received. Along the way, she would liberate women from the confinement of the corset and from dresses that resembled wedding cakes on display.