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Hold on,
not so fast. You know my motto:
"I have nothing to say; I am just answering questions."
Of course that was what I was looking for: it was my goal
to create a style; a style that no longer existed.
If I had to define Chanel, I would say that she was the first stylist
to give women a modern attitude that didn't exist before.
She wasn't just a shopkeeper.
She had her own look, her own style
and she was probably more entertaining than the others.
Coco was someone who understood nothing, yet everything;
that is to say that she understood herself.
She saw herself as being perfect,
in tune with her times.
Chanel brought us...herself
and that was already something.
Chanel left us her style,
instantly identifiable.
It is timeless, but it is also in style.
Her style belongs to another period
but it has survived, and adapted itself
to the modern world and all the following decades.
Fashion is... Advancing!
It cannot go back. There is no going back.
Chanel elegance
is an attitude, a spirit, a certain abnegation
of feminine frilliness.
I am the first to admit
that she invented something tremendous: the Chanel suit,
the feminine version of the two-button suit;
and this started a
"fashion avalanche" - there is no other word for it -
that everyone copied, and that people
continue to copy in an incredible way.
The hallmarks of Chanel, it's funny,
because, in fact,
if you look at the 50's collections, the end of the 50's,
there are very few chains,
there is no "CC"
and there are no camellias,
but in the 80's we had to pull out all the stops
because otherwise
it would just have been a posh, unassuming tweed suit with a little bow.
These are things that I drew out,
exaggerated,
and which I made people believe
had always existed. But that's my job.
I don't sit down and say, "we're going to do some Chanel."
Honestly, I now do it unconsciously.
I cannot give you the formula, because there is no formula.
When you buy Chanel, you are buying an idea
that is more or less unconscious,
depending on your knowledge of this history.
The Chanel style is an idea,
but this idea is now in a kind of collective memory
and that is very rare indeed.
It is a legend that can be viewed.
It is a cosmopolitan legend.
It is globalization before globalization ever existed.
And that is genius.