Who was the New Man who emerged after the Great War? He was young, untouched by fear, unwounded by trauma; he cast a wary eye towards authority and he disdained the mores and styles of his elders. And, it must be said, he invented his style, apparently putting himself...
After the Great War, the returning soldiers and that generation that had lived through and understood the war encountered what was termed “a crisis in masculinity.” This crisis was the result of a War that weakened the dominance of the male, and war-weary men were...
Coco Chanel, like her customers, invented herself, remade herself on her own terms and used striking fashion designs to bring about this transformation. A chic outfit can disguise many character flaws and one of the remarkable aspects of Chanel was what she had to...
It was in the 1920s that Coco Chanel perfected her distinctive line for her timeless and simple clothes for women—long and lean, like Paul Poiret’s silhouettes to be sure, but her outlines were scrupulously hard-edged, offset with ropes of peals and studded with...
How does Fashion become modern, take that step away from the past and stride confidently into the future? As theorist and philosopher, Roland Barthes noted, fashion changes when events shift so decisively in the present that there is no going back to the past. The...
“My time was ready for me, waiting, all I had to do was come on the scene,” said Coco Chanel. As her biographer, Linda Simon pointed out in 1913, changes in women’s fashions had progressed from the avant-garde world of the Wiener Werkstätte and its artists and...
