The definitive portrait of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, the original influencer whose iconic designs – the little black dress, the jersey separates, the costume pearls, the tweed suit and Chanel No 5 perfume – remain symbols of luxury, style, sexuality and power in the 21st century.
Coco was the designer who started a revolution inspired by her own trailblazing and radical appetite for independence. She liberated women from heavy, corseted clothes, giving them freedom to work, move and celebrate themselves. In a male-dominated world, she was rewarded with unrivalled wealth, recognition and celebrity, counting everyone from Winston Churchill to Cecil Beaton as friends.
But despite her triumph, Coco remained an enigma. Until her death in 1971 at the age of 87, she veiled the truth of her poor childhood growing up in an orphanage, her early years as a kept mistress and her sense of being a perpetual outsider.
She indulged in complex affairs with men, including - allegedly - the married composer Stravinsky, a grand duke who had fled revolutionary Russia and the wealthy Duke of Westminster, who left her for a younger woman. A wartime romance with a German agent led to accusations of Nazi collaboration and Coco’s exile from France for nearly a decade.
A fascinating documentary about a phenomenally successful woman - orphaned by her washerwoman mother, abandoned by her itinerant salesman father, bereft of her two sisters and brought up in the loft space of a nunnery, she nevertheless rose from simple seamstress to the richest woman in the world (allegedly) … and that wasn’t by luck. Chanel was driven by ferocious ambition and an equally fierce intelligence … which did not make her a particularly “likeable” person.