A lavish visual treatment of the life and times of Gabrielle Chanel, one of the great stories of the modern age.

Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel is an icon of fashion, and can lay claim to having invented the look of the 20th century. At the height of the Belle Époque, she stripped women of their corsets and feathers, put them in bathing suits and sent them out to get tanned in the sun. She introduced the little black dress; trousers for women; costume jewelry; the first ever couture perfume, N° 5; and the exquisitely comfortable suit that became her trademark.

Chanel went everywhere and knew everyone - Picasso, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Jean Renoir, Visconti - and, as this sumptuously illustrated volume clearly shows, her accomplishments constitute one of the great stories of the modern age. Her extraordinary life is eminently suited to the lavish visual treatment of this beautiful book, which features some 600 illustrations from an extraordinary collection amassed over the years by Edmonde Charles-Roux, Chanel's official biographer and close friend. An authoritative and practised writer, Charles-Roux used painstaking research and vivid eyewitness accounts to set the pictures in their context of time and place. She makes Chanel live again!