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Inside CHANEL: Gabrielle, the pursuit of passion

“Gabrielle: A Story of Passion”, the 21st episode of the Inside CHANEL saga, will be officially revealed on the Inside Chanel website starting August 19, 2017, in honor of Gabrielle Chanel’s birthday. You can view it already below:

A rebel at heart, free, stylish and passionate: these are without a doubt the four most defining characteristics of Gabrielle Chanel’s personality. Traits that guided the destiny she had chosen for herself, her whole life through. Still today, these four values remain an inspiration for all women and serve as the synopses of four films to discover on the Inside CHANEL website. After the first film devoted to Gabrielle the rebel at heart and her quest for freedom, comes “Gabrielle, the pursuit of passion”.

In both her life and her creative endeavors, Gabrielle was driven by a passion that consumed her and kept pace with her beating heart. “I am the only volcano in the Auvergne that is not extinct*” she joked candidly. An exuberant, passionate temperament that can be summarized in three verbs: seize, dare and create.

Seize the spirit of the times, or even keep one step ahead of them, and create the times to come. Gabrielle Chanel was a visionary who, more than anyone, understood women’s desire to break free from the fashion and social constraints of the day. Seizing this spirit of freedom, she dared to do away with their corsets and dress them in simple, flowing garments, outfits made of jersey, little black dresses, sweaters and tweed jackets. Drawing inspiration from her love affairs with Boy Capel, and then the Duke of Westminster, she combined her passion for creation with the ardent temperament of a woman in love. Her thirst for the arts also influenced her world: her unwavering devotion to Venice, her penchant for the Baroque and Byzantine art, could be seen throughout her collections.

Dare to break the rules, dare to break with convention and move away from diktats. One bold stroke after the next, Gabrielle Chanel conquered Paris, the fashion world and earned global recognition: costume jewelry mixed with diamonds, reinterpreted at her whim into head jewelry, real and faux pearls, a debut fragrance that revolutionized perfumery, “a women’s fragrance with the scent of a woman” that she named with a simple number, N°5, and the ever-present shades of black, white, navy and beige, the pillars of her colour palette…

This passionate flame, this constant drive, burned brightly in her endless and constant need to create, instilled with a love of work well done and a demand for perfection. A friend of Cocteau, Diaghilev, Dali and Picasso, she was wont to say “Artists are the ones who taught me rigor**“. So that everything was equally beautiful inside and outside, so that each fabric fell perfectly, each cut was flawless, each fragrance was a meticulously composed signature. A passion for skilled craftsmanship, a passion for creation, the arts, fashion, women and life. Absolute passion.

An open book on the history of the House and the personality of its founder, Inside CHANEL is an illustrated heritage to be discovered again and again. The short films can be viewed in any order, each an invitation to read a story in total freedom, with no constraints. Just as Gabrielle would have done…