A Cup Of Coco

Image by hto2008 via Flickr

I have no fashion sense, no style, no elegance.  Having no elegance, I had to opt for funny.  It is impossible to be funny and elegant.

I have nothing in common with Coco Chanel.  I have never been independent, or set up a business, or associated with disreputable types.  I don’t like her perfume: I think No.5 smells like cheap market stall concoctions (I’ve known a few), and it smells even worse on me.  It is as if my body is anti-style: quite apart from expensive perfume being allergic to me, I am too short for clothes to look good; my feet are too big for my height; my chest is neither one thing nor the other.  It’s why I never really fought the fat; there didn’t seem much point.

I will never pay obscene prices for clothes and handbags and perfume and accessories and jewellery and a room to store them all in.  The only connection I will ever have with Miss Chanel is this post.  I thought, if Radio 4 can do it, why can’t I?

Today is Coco’s 128th birthday.  She died in 1971 so she probably won’t be at the party.  Justine Picardie has written a new biography of Chanel and the Today programme invited her to appear, along with a previous biographer who claimed Chanel was more Nazi than she let on.  His rage at Picardie’s claims (she wasn’t more Nazi than she let on) made him appear venomous and unrestrained; quite the contrast to Picardie’s cool rebuttal.  She was so cool and rebutting, I could see why Chanel might be an attractive choice of subject.

I am never cool and hardly ever rebut.  Just this week, I had a slight issue (so slight, it could have been me at British size 6; I was once, you know.  Sigh.) with one of Nancy’s excellent posts.  I made my point in the comments; she countered; I thought, fair point, and didn’t reply because I had no comeback and don’t stick to an argument for the sake of it.

I suspect Coco did.  Consider some of her famous quotes:

• A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.  Ah well.  I’m not even a girl these days.
• Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions.  By that reasoning, I am an abandoned bunker.
• I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one the things that women have is men.  Ouch!
• It is always better to be slightly underdressed.  Tell that to the Inuit.
• ‘Where should one use perfume?’ a young woman asked. ‘Wherever one wants to be kissed,’ I said.  She really didn’t like men, did she?  How horrible she must have tasted.
• Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.  Can’t believe I did anything bad enough to deserve this face.

I can’t write about Coco Chanel without mentioning that famous Monroe quote: asked what she wore in bed, Marilyn replied, ‘Chanel No. 5.’  Now that’s style.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I wear fleecy pyjamas and most of the duvet.  I may not have style, but I’m always warm.

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• Get the Look: Coco Avant Chanel (casasugar.com)
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