(Click on a photo for a large view. Then click on "Right direction button" to scroll thru).
North Melbourne YHA rooftop
Church across the street from the YHA
My two girlfriends on the posters for "Honey Birdette". LOL
At the "Chanel" Perfume Shop. A Picture of Coco Chanel, French lady entrepreneur of great renown.
Coco Channel:
A good example of a successful woman 100 years ago...
Not at all thanks to so-called "feminism" ...
But to her determination and luck.
1883 to 1971.... 2 world wars + cold war...
extract from an article below
https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/education/gabrielle-coco-chanel-1883-1971
Born in Saumur in a poor house hospice in 1883, Chanel was illegitimate. Her mother died when her daughter was 12, and any fortune teller would have predicted a dark and dreary life of sadness for her from that point. But anyone who could read character and willpower would have known the possibility of a different life path. Even as a young girl, she had beauty, which developed into a coquettish style that entranced men throughout her entire life, thereby enabling her to get whatever she wanted from them.
Everything changed when she met a handsome and wealthy Englishman who shared her equine passions. They fell in love, probably the only time Chanel ever did. He took her to Paris and, within a year, she opened her first establishment in a narrow backstreet called rue Cambon, on January 1 1910.
Her lover, Boy Capel, took her with him everywhere and she soon learned how aristocrats and the beau monde lived, talked and dressed. Chanel was not happy with the fussy, encumbering pre-world War I high fashion look and when Capel gave her a boutique in Deauville in 1913, she began an insidious private war to try to make women as modern and comfortable in their clothing as men were — especially active, outdoor types like Capel. In Deauville, she introduced casual knits and dresses shockingly simple compared to what was coming out of the salons of the couturiers in Paris.
She never trusted men. She would take the money in exchange for her body and use it to preserve her independence. She chose lovers for their power and how it could help her. After Capel, there was the Grand Duke Dimitri of Russia and the Duke of Westminster and, during World War II, Haus Gunther von Dincklage, despite the fact that it was treason to consort with members of the occupying German force in Paris.
I believe her “little black dress” of the ‘20s was inspired by three things. Firstly Chanel recognised the need for post-war mourning — even for young women — but thought that it could be more chic than the traditional women's needs. Secondly, she wanted women to stop looking down–trodden and destroyed with grief. So she turned to formal menswear; the stiff white collar and starched cuffs made a chic declaration of masculine conformity and superiority. Add to this her grim memory of the nuns, whom she never ceased to hate in their black habits and white coifs, and the fact that spicing the black of a dress with white collar and cuffs perversely made an aristocrat into a indoor servant who served the tea and ran the bath water, and you have the sort of complex Rubik cube that so much of Chanel's fashion had.
Chanel spent World War II holed up in the Ritz with her German officer, von Dincklage, having closed down her business in 1939. With the cessation of war, France was out to punish those who had collaborated with the German occupation force. It was considered expedient for Chanel to leave France and she was spirited away to Switzerland, with the agreement of Winston Churchill it has always been rumoured.
she decided to make a comeback — a risky decision for an old woman no longer in sympathy with the current fashions. Known as one of the leading modernises and directional creators of fashion in the 20th century,
She had also, in Chanel No. 5, given the world its best known and most popular fragrance. Gossip at the time said that it was No. 5 that forced her decision, as it was losing its pole position without the glamour of clothes and fashion shows to bolster sales.
Others claimed that it was Chanel's personal hatred of homosexual designers who, in the ‘50s, dominated Paris couture. Although she admired and accepted Balenciaga as a great craftsman as well as creator, she saw Dior, Balmain and others as undoing all the work she had done to simplify and modernise women's dress. She was determined to stop their chauvinistic romanticism (as it seemed to her) making overdressed masculine trophies of the modern woman whom she had worked so hard to create as a powerful being, largely dependant of men.
Chanel presented her new collection on February 5 1954. The French press, still unforgiving of her behaviour during the war, were lukewarm but the American and British press saw her soft, little suits as a breakthrough uniting chic and youth in a fresh accessible way. Chanel had pulled off a coup and a miracle. The Chanel suit is a standard garment in modern fashion, worn by teenagers as well as their grandmothers. And the miracle? She was 71 when she made her comeback. She died, alone, in 1971, aged 88, after a hard day’s work. Since that time more words have been written about her than any other fashion designer of the 20th century.
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