Costume jewelry is not made to give women an aura of wealth,
but to make them beautiful. Coco Chanel (Cera, pg. 178)

Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel – Coco Chanel – was born in France in 1883. With her enormous talent she created a fashion empire which encompassed clothing, jewelry, and perfumes. Coco Chanel’s fashion legacy managed to free and empower women throughout the world with this unique style.

Luxury is not the opposite of poverty, it is the opposite of vulgarity.

Coco Chanel (Mauries, pg. 48)

Being a great fashion designer she created her chanel jewelry in pure contrast with the simplicity of her designed clothes. Therefore her jewelry is bold an theatrical, embracing the primitive and barbaric in her accessories. With such complex pieces and tidy clothing she created a look so womanly and sophisticated that it has never gone out of fashion since she first imagined it more than 90 years ago.

Her approach to jewelry design was very similar to the clothing creation. She will not sketch nor draw but compose on the model’s body her art pieces. In her studio she kept pieces of flexible modeling plastic which she shaped into jewelry, embedding real and fake gemstones into the plastic as she worked, moving them around to get exactly the color combinations and balance she desired.

Using a lot of custom jewelry, Chanel draped herself and her models in ropes of faux (fake) pearls and gold tone chains. Her early experiences of poverty had made her an expert at making do and using odds and ends creatively. The Paris activity expanded into a house of couture and she was no longer dependent on Boy Capel’s generosity (her lover).

Chanel was the first fashion designer to use costume jewelry to create the finishing touch to her overall look. Although the jewelry trend of Art Deco set by Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpelswas was a hit, Chanel, however, developed her own style. She proposed the use of brightly colored fruit salad glass stones meant to imitate the carved precious and semi-precious gemstones. As always, her approach was innovative and unique.

The 1923 introduction of her trademark perfume, Chanel No. 5, cemented her fortune and her supremacy in the field of fashion. As for her attitude twards jewelry she always said:

A woman should mix fake and real.
To ask a woman to wear real jewelry only
is like asking her to cover herself with real
flowers instead of flowery silk prints.
She’d look faded in a few hours.
I love fakes because I find such jewelry provocative,
and I find it disgraceful to walk around with millions
around your neck just because you’re rich.
The point of jewelry isn’t to make a woman look rich
but to adorn her; not the same thing. 

In 1971, at the age of 88, Chanel died in her beloved Paris. She was still working and designing until the very end. Friends joked that it was no coincidence that she passed away on a Sunday, since that was the only day that the salon was closed, so it was the only day she had time to do it

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