Who Was Coco Chanel, and How a Childhood in an Orphanage Changed Fashion

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was born in 1883 in Saumur, France, in a poorhouse for the destitute. When she was eleven, her mother died of tuberculosis, and her father, a travelling salesman who had always had little time for his children, placed her and her sisters in an orphanage run by nuns, at the abbey of Aubazine. He never came back for them.

Aubazine is a severe place, made of rigid rules and days marked by silence, but it is there that Gabrielle learns to sew: the nuns teach her a trade that, in time, will become her entire life. At eighteen she leaves the orphanage and moves to Moulins, where she works as a seamstress and sings in the local cabarets. It is in one of these venues that she receives the nickname she will carry for the rest of her life: Coco.

And the story of the seamstress from Moulins begins to weave together with that of the woman who will revolutionise fashion. In 1910, with financial help first from Étienne Balsan and then from Arthur Capel, she opens a small hat shop in rue Cambon, in Paris. Three years later, in Deauville, she starts designing comfortable clothes using jersey, a fabric until then reserved for men's underwear: the women of the time are used to tight corsets and heavy skirts, and Gabrielle's clothes seem to belong to another world.

In 1921 she opens the boutique at number 31 rue Cambon, the one that will become the heart of her maison, and that same year she launches a perfume created together with the chemist Ernest Beaux: she chooses it from a series of numbered samples and decides to call it simply Chanel N°5, after the number of the bottle she preferred. A few years later, in 1925, she presents the tailleur, the straight jacket and fitted skirt that will become the symbol of her style, made of clean lines and soft fabrics, without unnecessary frills.

With these two gestures, a style and a perfume, Gabrielle Chanel changes the way women dress and present themselves to the world. She does not just design clothes: she does away with corsets and lets women's bodies move naturally. Comfort becomes elegance, and simplicity becomes a mark of strength.

This is a story worth telling a child for this reason: because it shows how something entirely new can be born out of a difficult childhood, made of loss and rigid rules. Gabrielle had no money and no family behind her, but she had learned a trade, and she devoted all her stubbornness to it.

The book by Gipi Visconti dedicated to Coco Chanel, part of the Little Great Heroes series, tells this journey with words and images designed for children who are starting to read: the story of a woman who learned to sew in an orphanage and ended up changing the way the entire world dresses.