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Founders: #199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life

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What I learned from reading Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life by Justine Picardie. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- 'When my customers come to me, they like to cross the threshold of some magic place; they feel a satisfaction that is perhaps a trace vulgar but that delights them: they are privileged characters who are incorporated into our legend. For them this is a far greater pleasure than ordering another suit. Legend is the consecration of fame.” —Coco Chanel, 1935 Her father soon left them, discontented with marriage and fatherhood. The dead are not dead as long as we think of them. I like talking to myself and I don't listen to what I'm told. Gabrielle spent seven years in the orphanage, until she was 18. Her father never returned to see her or her siblings. I was thoroughly unhappy. I fed on sorrow and horror. I wanted to kill myself I don't know how many times. And having to hear people call me an orphan! They felt sorry for me. All this was humiliating. She was one of the charity pu

[00:00:00] Those on whom legends are built are their legends, declared Coco Chanel not long before her death, when her face had already become a fixed mass to the world, and her myth apparently impenetrable. She was speaking to Claude Delay. Delay was a young woman at the time, the daughter of a well-known French psychiatrist, but is herself now an eminent psychoanalyst and an expert guide to the labyrinth of secrets and lies that Chanel constructed to conceal the truth of her past. Not that there is ever a single truth in a life, especially for a woman who built a career on refashioning…

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