Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman

Wasn't what was described

In 225 pages, Karen Karbo manages to give one a real sense of who Coco Chanel was as well as her acerbic sense of humor, her passionate sense of style, and a sense of what made this enigmatic woman tick! Chanel permanently changed fashion through a driving vision of what she wanted. You'll find nuggets of her off beat wisdom scattered among the various chapters on style, self-invention, fearlessness, surviving passion, on success, money and more! Throughout the book Karbo interweaves her quest to acquire (fair means or foul) a genuine Chanel jacket! There are other biographies of Chanel that are more indepth, but Karbo's wit and humor gives you a picture of Chanel that somehow makes you think of her as if she is sitting beside you advising you on life. As Chanel once said, "A style does not go out of style as long as it adapts itself to its period. When there is an incompatibility between the style and a certain state of mind, it is never the style that triumphs." Somehow, Chanel has managed to transcend decades and adapts to each generation as the yard stick for class, style, and relevance.

Coco Chanel couldn't be making a star turn in media at a better time. Start with Anne Fontaine's film "Coco Before Chanel", coming to American theaters this fall after dazzling audiences in Europe. It's the right film about Chanel: the early years. And though the facts are as murky about pre-Chanel Chanel as about the fashion icon, the theme --- a woman born without advantages, making her way in the world --- is more universal. But the better reason for women --- and the men who love them --- to pay attention to Chanel is because she was a cheerleader for self-sufficiency, in good times and bad. So skip over the fashion. Consider only the politics. I mean: ours. Is this a great time to be a woman in America? I'm not so sure. More American women may now be going to college than men, but when they graduate, they're still looking at salaries as much as 30% lower than men get for the same work. The anti-choice movement, always noisy, has upped the volume --- and the violence. And it seems that a sizable number of American men won't be happy until all women are homebound mothers, wearing the equivalent of the burqa. No writer has a better understanding of what it means to be Chanel and what it means to be a woman who admires Chanel than Karen Karbo, author of the short (240 pages) and addictive The Gospel According to Coco Chanel. Karbo is the granddaughter of Emilia Karbowski, known as "Luma of California" for the clothes she designed for the wives of movie moguls in the 1950s. Which is to say: Karen Karbo is real and unashamed of it: "I am the average consumer." She looks for Chanel jackets on eBay. And she writes as if she's having a conversation with a close friend over double-shot lattes. Who is Chanel to Karbo? Chain-smoker. Workaholic, though she could stay in bed all morning with a newspaper. Leo, with a Pisces moon. Born nobody. Fell in love once, but not again. Her bigger love: money. "Money was more than her security blanket. It was her ongoing victory lap." And restrained: "Even though Chanel insisted on having the best of everything, she didn't insist on having everything." Are you hearing "Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves" in the background? You should be. Karbo delivers a mini-biography, with perceptive and amusing commentary: "She looked like the girl at school who conned you into breaking the rules with her, then let you take all the blame." "Her childhood was the Belle Époque version of a country-and-western song. The only thing she lacked was a dead dog and a wasting disease." "She compulsively lied about her past, and then lied about having lied, and then disavowed the lie about the lie." Along the way, great trivia abounds. Yes, French women wore hats adorned with feathers --- but did you know that, in 1911, in France, 300 million birds were killed to provide those feathers? And, because Karbo really is your new best friend, she even labels the punch line: "Cut to the chase, don't waste time doing stuff

I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this book... I loved Ms. Karbo's previous book about Katherine Hepburn, but as a longtime -- and unabashed -- fan of Chanel, I was really looking forward to this book when I read about it a few months ago in Bazaar. Like Chanel herself, Ms. Karbo does not disappoint. Her writing style is tremendous -- witty and fun, moving and historically insightful, she is like a terrific dinner party guest you want to stay for the weekend (and tell nonstop Coco Chanel stories, of course). I picked this book up as an impulse on one of the front tables of B+N, and read it over the course of two days. As a modern woman who loves Chanel, I am suggesting it to all my stylish girlfriends, it would make a perfect hostess gift. And by the way, I HOPE that Karbo gets that real Chanel jacket she is dreaming of.