Reviews

Madsen takes the reader on a fantastic journey through the incredible and bittersweet life of Gabrielle Bonheur ``Coco'' Chanel, the woman who forever changed the world of modern fashion with the creation of the simple, elegant black dress, costume jewelry, and her own special perfume. Intertwining Chanel's business ventures, wealth, glamour, and influences, the biography is filled with fascinating and emotional stories of personal triumph, success and tragedy, social intrigue, and sexual escapades with nobility, artists, and politicians. The text, broken down into four parts, focuses on her life from her birth and childhood years to her early business success, her decline following the demoralizing events of World War II, and her amazing comeback at the age of 70 to the haute couture world she helped create. Recommended.-- Stephen Allan Patrick, East Tennessee State Univ., Johnson City

When it was suggested to the elderly Gabrielle Chanel (1883-1971) that she see a psychiatrist, she replied, ``I, who never told the truth to my priest?'' In this full-length, very readable biography of Coco, as the legendary French designer was called, Madsen does a commendable job of ferreting out the seeming truth of a woman apparently as deft at fabricating her life as she was with a needle and thread. The biographer of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir is at his best here when synthesizing his subject from known facts and suppositions, beginning with Chanel's penniless start as an orphan to her death at age 88 in a hotel room, alone--except for a maid--a millionaire designer of inventive clothing for women, from the famed ``little black dress'' to sportswear. With great stamina, Madsen chronicles Chanel's meteoric rise and the succession of celebrated friends and lovers she met along the way: Winston Churchill and Igor Stravinsky, to name two, fell under her spell. And if the designer's life was extravagant, the genius of her style lay, as Madsen tells it, in simplicity and a regard for function. Photos not seen by PW. (May)

"Madsen ferrets out the seeming truth of a women appartently as deft at fabricating her life as she was with aneedle and thread." -- "Publishers Weekly"