What Chanel was selling was not clothes, but "women's freedom."

I don't think there is anyone who doesn't know
the name Coco Chanel.
Her real name was Gabrielle Chanel.

She is the designer who built the Chanel empire
in a single generation.

However, she never attended a fashion school.
All she had was
the sewing skills she learned at the orphanage.

Born into a poor family,
she lost her mother at age 11 and was placed in a convent by her father.
That is where she learned needlework.

After leaving the convent, she worked repairing clothes by day,
and sang at a cabaret by night, aiming to be a singer.
And her nickname at that time was "Coco."

But she didn't find success in singing.
Later, she became the mistress of a wealthy man
and went to live in his mansion.

Among the upper class at the time,
heavy hats excessively decorated with
bird feathers, fruit, and artificial flowers
were the mainstream.

But to Chanel, that was
tasteless and unbearable.

So she bought a simple, commercially available
straw hat
and used it as a base.

Without adding any unnecessary decorations,
she tailored a hat for herself
that was extremely simple,
wrapped with only a single thin ribbon.

At first, because of its extreme simplicity,
the women around hermocked it as a "poverty-stricken hat."
But the sight of Chanel

wearing that hat while riding a horse and dashingly
cutting through the wind

looked modern and cool,and the women who had mocked her at first

began to beg her,
"Please make one for me too."

As a result of that hat becoming a topic of conversation among the upper class,
with the support of her lover, Chanel opened a small hat shop
in Paris in 1910.

And because famous actresses of the time
wore Chanel's hats
on stage,

noblewomen and millionaires all over Paris
rushed to buy them,
and the business was immediately on the right track.

Chanel, who made a fortune with hats,
also with the support of her lover,
opened a second store in a luxury resort area.

Here, she sold not only hats, but also
"casual wear"
made of jersey materialfor the first time.

To explain how groundbreaking this was,
it would be like Hermes making a bag out of workwear fabric
and celebrities competing to buy it.

And these rule-breaking
jersey material clothes
sold explosively to the wealthy.

However, it was an elegant skirt style
close to modern knit sets,

and among celebrities at the time,
the perception that "trousers are for men and laborers (the poor)"
was still strong.

The tide turned
with the prolongation of World War I.

Male labor was in short supply,
and women who had previously worn corsets and long skirts
began working in munitions factories and the like in place of men.

But, naturally, factory work was impossible
in skirts and corsets.

So they took off their corsets
and began wearing men's overalls (salopettes)
to work.

However, even after the war ended, women had
realized something.
'A style that is easy to move in and free of constriction'was
overwhelmingly comfortable.

Furthermore, after the war, social norms changed completely.
'Women's independence'This new set of values, which sought
spread in the blink of an eye
even among women of the conservative upper class.

It was not that Chanel adapted to the times,
but that the times caught up with Chanel.

Chanel did not succeed
because she was beautiful,
nor because she was lucky.

Everything she created
'Liberation from women's lack of freedom'had a consistent theme of
running through it.

Because she hated the norm of
corsets and dresses being the standard,
she used materials like those
used for undergarments to propose
trouser styles.

Because handbags were inconvenient
as they kept both hands occupied,
she created the 2.55, a bag with a chain.

She overturned the common sense that black was a color worn by widows mourning their husbands,
and created a simple black dress
known as the LBD.

She was not selling clothes.
'This is how women should dress'She was trying to liberate women
from these invisible
constraints.