Gabrielle Chanel, who would die a Mademoiselle and be remembered as a Madame, opened her first millinery shop in Paris in 1910 with money loaned by her lover. By the middle of the decade she had stopped selling hats and started selling a new body. The silhouette she proposed was radical in its quietness: a straight line from shoulder to knee, no waist, no bust, and, scandalously, no corset.

Jersey, the cheap, stretchy wool knit that had been used for men’s undergarments, was her material of choice. It draped, it moved, it survived a journey on the new passenger trains. When she used it to make day dresses in 1916, American Vogue called her garments "deceptively simple," a phrase that has followed her reputation ever since.

The Little Black Dress

In 1926 Vogue published a sketch of a Chanel dress in black crepe de chine and called it "Chanel's Ford," predicting that like Henry Ford's Model T it would become a uniform. It did. Black, before Chanel, was the colour of widows and maids. After Chanel, it became the colour of a woman who did not need to ask.

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Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.

A Complicated Legacy

There is no honest account of Chanel that omits her conduct during the Occupation. She lived at the Ritz with a German officer; she attempted, by invoking Aryanisation laws, to seize sole ownership of Chanel N°5 from the Wertheimer family, who had financed it. The plot failed; the Wertheimers survived; the perfume, like the brand, passed through the war and into a longer afterlife than its founder imagined.

What endures is the line. Look at a contemporary runway—any runway—and find the descendants: the tweed jacket, the two-tone shoe, the sailor pant, the pearls worn with the morning coffee. The twentieth-century silhouette, the one we still wear, was drawn in jersey by a woman who refused, from the age of twelve until the age of eighty-seven, to sit still.