Coco Chanel didn't just design clothes. She rebuilt what a woman was allowed to look like, and in doing so, she gave generations of women who came after her something most of us take for granted now: the right to dress for how we want to live, not how we're expected to look.
That's the idea this piece was originally written to celebrate, and it still holds. Women have always used fashion as a form of power, a way to say something before a word is spoken, to claim space that wasn't always offered freely. Chanel is one of the clearest examples of what happens when a woman decides her own terms are worth building a life around.
Who Was Coco Chanel?
Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was born in 1883 in Saumur, France, into a life with none of the glamour her name later came to represent. Her mother died when she was young, and her father placed her in an orphanage, where nuns taught her to sew. The skill that would eventually dismantle the rules of Western fashion was learned in a convent, not a couture house.
She worked briefly as a seamstress and a café singer before opening a small millinery shop in Paris around 1910, with financial backing from Arthur "Boy" Capel. By 1913, she had her own fashion house. The House of Chanel still trades from that lineage. Within a few years, she was dressing some of the most influential women in Europe in clothing built for movement, not display.
How She Rewrote the Rules of Fashion
Chanel's first real breakthrough came from a fabric nobody considered fashionable: jersey, a soft, stretchy knit that had, until then, been used almost exclusively for men's undergarments. She used it to make simple, fluid sweaters and dresses, borrowing shapes from menswear, at a time when women's clothing was built around corsetry, petticoats and restriction rather than movement.
She didn't stop there. Chanel introduced trousers for women. She popularised costume jewellery, making style a matter of taste rather than wealth. In 1926, she introduced what became known as the "little black dress," a colour and a silhouette that had never before been positioned as elegant, versatile daywear. She built one of the first fashion-driven perfume houses with Chanel No. 5. Across almost six decades, she kept doing the same thing in different forms: taking a fabric or a shape nobody had approved yet, and turning it into something women actually wanted to wear.
The Power of Women and Fashion
Chanel had no formal power, no institutional backing, and no obvious path into an industry built for a different kind of woman. What she had was a clear sense of how she wanted to move through the world, and she used fashion, deliberately, to build the path she needed.
That's the thread connecting Chanel to every woman since who has used personal style to claim ground she wasn't handed, in a boardroom, on a stage, or simply in a life that looked nothing like what was expected of her.
History remembers Chanel first for the brand and the influence she built. Her personal life, including her choices during the Second World War, has left historians with plenty to debate, but that's not the focus of this piece.
The House still funds Fondation CHANEL, set up in 2011 to support the autonomy of women and girls. Independent ratings of the commercial brand are less flattering: Good On You currently scores Chanel 2 out of 5 ("Not good enough"), last updated February 2025. Influence and a clean scorecard are not the same thing. That gap is part of why sustainable luxury sits at the centre of how I work now.
What Coco Chanel Taught Me
I didn't come into styling through fashion school. My path went through performing arts, then years in corporate communications, then a long process of working out my own relationship with what I owned and why. Chanel's story is one of the things that made sense of what I now believe about clothing: it's a psychological tool, not decoration. It shapes how we move, how present we feel, and how we're perceived before we've said a word.
What she did with jersey and trousers, I now do with the women I work with as a sustainable luxury personal stylist, just in a different form. Most of my clients aren't short of clothes. They're short of permission, to stop dressing for a version of themselves that no longer fits, and start dressing for the one that's already emerging.
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Bringing That Thinking Into How I Work Today
Identity isn't fixed, it moves through chapters, shaped by career changes, new levels of visibility, and the version of ourselves we're becoming rather than the one we've already been. Chanel kept reinterpreting what her clothes needed to do for her as her own life changed. That's the same principle behind how I work with clients now: not telling women what to wear, but helping them notice where their wardrobe is still speaking for a chapter they've already left behind.
If you recognise that gap between how you're dressing and who you've actually become, that's usually the first sign a new chapter is already underway. A Style Discovery session is where most women start.
Style isn't about clothes. It's about who you become in them.
Roberta
This article was first published in 2015, written to honour Coco Chanel's work in fashion and the belief that when women use style as a tool, they can change more than what's hanging in a wardrobe. It has since been updated and expanded.
