Chanel - by Axel Madsen (Paperback)

About the Book

Chanel. The name means fashion and perfume, emancipation and casual feminine allure. Gabrielle Chanel began as a kept woman making hats for her lover's other mistresses and went on to become fashion's greatest career woman. She never married or had children, but men like Igor Stravinsky and the Duke of Westminster abandoned their families for her. Now Axel Madsen tells Chanel's story. Scheduled to become a TV miniseries starring Jane Seymour. 32 illustrations.

Book Synopsis

Journalist Axel Madsen, the biographer of such icons as John Jacob Astor, Jacques Cousteau, and John Huston, presents the life and legend of French fashion designer Coco Chanel.

Chanel. The name alone evokes fashion and perfume, emancipation and allure. In this revealing, intimate biography, Axel Madsen brings to life Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, who was born an illegitimate pauper and rose to become the reigning queen of fashion who revolutionized women's styles forever.

Madsen traces Chanel's extrordinary life, from her beginnings as an orphan, to the first small boutique she opened in 1910, using her lover's financial backing, to the founding of the House of Chanel where she altered the look of fashion entirely, inventing sportswear, the "little black dress," costume jewelry, and the perfume that Marilyn Monroe said was all she wore to bed. Although loved by many men, Coco remained wed only to her business, and when she died in 1971, at the age of eighty-eight, she was wealthy, an international celebrity, and utterly alone.

Lavishly illustrated with photographs of Coco Chanel and her celebrated circle of friends and lovers, Chanel: A Woman of Her Own is the story of the magnificent woman whose legend lives on.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Axel Madsen was a biographer and journalist. Born in Denmark and raised in Paris, he first began writing for the Paris edition of The New York Herald Tribune. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, where he wrote biographies of Coco Chanel, Billy Wilder, John Jacob Astor, and Jacques Cousteau among others. He died in 2007.