“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different." - Coco Chanel

This woman knew her shiz. I’m really into biopics, autobiographies and the general idea of leading a compelling life. Coco Chanel did just that. Last fall Audrey Tatau nabbed the lead role of Miss Chanel in the biopic Coco Before Chanel. From seamstress by day to cabaret singer at night, to sought after call-girl to hat maker, and eventually the voice of female fashion and the first ever power suit, Chanel stands on her own.

The funny thing about this mademoiselle is that she used one of the most effeminate things: fashion, as her vehicle for embracing womanhood. Empowering through pants.

It's almost as if Chanel took a lesson from her French contemporary Simone de Beauvoir's All Men are Mortal, and somehow figured a way to crossover into immortality. In the name of pink tweed suiting and puffed stitching on purses, Chanel certainly made her mark as a woman who dressed for herself and not her men, which she had many. To be honest, Chanel was kind of a ho, and that she had to have learned from de Beauvoir (who also wrote The Second Sex, major feminist literature). I mean, a nazi officer, Chan, really? Really. It happened.

But for all her faults, I still want a $2,000 purse, and let's be honest, so do you.







"Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, 'I don't want to be just another blade of grass.'" - Simone de Beauvoir, "All Men are Mortal"