It’s been more than a decade since Justine Picardie released her book “Coco Chanel,” during which time interest in the late designer’s life and work has only seemed to expand.
The legacy of Chanel, carried on by Karl Lagerfeld, was explored in this year’s Costume Institute exhibit at the Met Museum in New York, a documentary called “Coco Chanel Unbuttoned” is out from the BBC and this fall the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is showing “Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto.” In the time since the 2010 release of “Coco Chanel,” Picardie’s access to Chanel’s life has expanded with new access to the Royal Archives, among others, which called for an updated new edition of her book, out now from HarperCollins.
Picardie, who was formerly the editor in chief of the U.K. editions of Harper’s Bazaar and Town and Country, has long been fascinated by the life of Gabrielle Chanel, and found herself thinking more about the Chanel founder while working on her most recent book, “Miss Dior.”
“You can’t really understand Chanel without understanding Dior, and you can’t really understand Dior without understanding Chanel, in terms of French history,” Picardie says. “I’ve never stopped being interested in the life and work of Gabrielle Chanel. She’s endlessly fascinating, but because there were so many mysteries surrounding her that I’d never stopped looking into.”
Her original research, which she began in the late ’90s, included full access to the Chanel archives, as well as the Winston Churchill archives (he and Chanel were friends), but for her new edition she was granted access to the Royal Archives for the first time.
“They had some really interesting material about royals wearing Chanel and her time in London in the 1920s and ’30s, when she started dressing British royalty as well as the British aristocracy,” she says. She also is close friends with the V&A exhibit’s curator Oriole Cullen, and they have long had a relationship of comparing notes.
“There just seemed to be so much new material. I could have almost written an entirely new book,” Picardie says. “Well, I effectively did.”
The Royal Archives led her to learn more about Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s history of wearing Chanel as a young woman, before becoming Queen.
“What really surprised me was that she was this fashionable young woman in the 1920s, and even before her marriage to Prince Albert, who would become George VI, she was wearing Chanel, and then there were other members of the royal family that were wearing Chanel. Even Queen Mary,” Picardie says. “We think of Chanel as being so associated wholly with Paris and that idea of Parisian chic. But [Chanel] was so famous by the 1920s, and obviously she had become famous in America too. But the fact that she was dressing members of the British royal family and the British aristocracy is very interesting and is completely new.”
Between Picardie’s books, Karl Lagerfeld, who Picardie first interviewed in the late ’90s, died.
“He gave me a lot of encouragement,” she recalls of that early meeting. “And it was thanks to him that I first was given access to seeing the Chanel archives, going to Gabrielle Chanel’s private apartment. And Karl was really always very interested in the life of Chanel, but this was really before there’d been an English language biography. And certainly nobody, until I came along, had done any research into the British archives. And then her friendship with Winston Churchill, all of that emerged in my research in the British archives. And Karl was fascinated by that and really encouraged me to think that it would be worth me writing a biography of Chanel in the English language.”
With several decades of work devoted to Chanel’s life, Picardie is clearly personally interested in her —but she remains constantly surprised by how much broad intrigue there is into Chanel’s life.
“Every generation continues to be fascinated by Gabrielle Chanel. If I do a talk about her, there’ll be 18 year olds in the audience. And I’ve always been struck by that,” she said. “Chanel means different things to different people, but she herself kind of embodied the spirit of independence, of choosing her own destiny, the taking away corsets, cutting her hair, all those things,” Picardie says. “But there was something more profound than that too, where one of her sayings, which always resonates for me, is ‘elegance is refusal.’ And she refused to conform to anybody’s idea of what a woman should be, apart from her own. So she was always so entirely herself. And that is something that I think continues to resonate, which is why we are seeing this return of so much interest in the story of Gabrielle Chanel.”