Welcome to the GuiltTrips podcast. I'm your host, Kendra Lockhart. As a goldsmith and
gemologist, I'll be speaking 24 carat on all things jewelry, metals, and gems. Join
me plus a few friends to demystify both materials and designs as your private jeweler. Let's
tune in on these topics and get golden. The legacy of Chanel is widely recognized, but
seldomly well known. The reason I am choosing her is to support my argument that I recently
made with a colleague in branding where I said that women are rarely great business
people but almost always excellent branding agents. While that comment could seem inflammatory,
there's a reason why this seems to fall naturally into each gender's latent expertise. It is
nature and nurture. However, Madame Coco happened to have the rare gift of mastering the expertise
of both business and branding. A girl born in a poor house who lost her mother by age
11, raised in a religious order, and began her education at age 12 would become the icon
of fashion design and the perfect case study of congruent product sweets. Let's begin
dissecting her legacy within the formula of quote, what problem did she solve? It originated
in recognizing that the role for women was changing at the turn of the century. Restrictive
garments, things like corsets and bustles, the hoop skirt, elaborate lace-up dresses,
these were not going to enable the demands of life in the industrial era. Given that
Coco grew up having learned how to sew, she was able to find employment as a seamstress.
Extra money was made singing at a cabaret. Why is this important? Because it was a formative
moment as far as exposure. Sometimes a vision is a sum total of the elements that we participate
with. So while she's singing in a cabaret, she's interacting with ladies' costuming
and the patrons, the male cavalry. The former was sporting a visual, a story, a look, and
a ladder was wearing a workable uniform. Pursuing stage work took her to a resort town for a
season. And here she would not only accept that she wasn't cut out for stage stardom,
but it was also to be around the lifestyle of spa and relaxation and leisure. Another
critical moment in her arc into design domination was that as she returned home, she would be
exposed to equestrian and hunting lifestyles through a romance that she had. That romance
would gift her three key items, dresses, diamonds, and pearls. Her next affair brought her into
contact with the English upper class taste, and she would become financed by this lover.
Having obtained her millinery license, which means she's allowed to design and create
hats, her small shop would gain growth after being featured on stage and offstage by the
same actress in fashion magazines. Chanel decided to expand into fashion because she
had a vision for female leisure in sport, and soon she was following the wealthy that
were exiled post World War One. Far away from home, still having means, yet missing indigenous
affluence and aesthetic, she rose to the occasion for the expatriates. Now so it goes, part of
her winning formula would be expand into trends and follow the money. The pillars that she
would establish early for both herself and her brand would be design, reinventing materials,
function, and fashion, the last part meaning or being synonymous with elegance. This would
anchor strong identity, which would allow her to be so very fluid through different elements,
collections, and expressions of her ideas. As far as her being an icon unto herself,
her free spiritedness, her disruption of tradition, and her answering a call made by an entire
generation and gender unbeknownst to them were the key ingredients of innovation. She really
had a vision. Knowing her audience, she had a sympathy and a sensitivity towards women
outgrowing the role of the generation before them. And lastly, strategic networking. She
knew how to have professional alliances and do adjacent business. Something that's very
near and dear to my heart is she knew how to recycle a chapter even if it was a failure
for her. As much as she wowed in auditions when she went on stage, she had very mediocre
singing abilities. She would go back to the stage world and eventually the film world,
reintroduce herself as somebody of equal importance, one who could style the star power. She
brilliantly found influencers in high society and became very adept at getting into the
orbits of both wealth and circulation. She was shrewd when it came to adaptability.
Things were changing. Signs of the times were both fast and furious. The turn of the century
had led to World War One, had led to the roaring twenties, had led to depression, had led to
World War Two. She was keen to notice and be responsive to social behaviors and movements
through so many quick changes in such a short period of time. As much as it would be easy
to call her an extreme opportunist, she did maintain a certain sense of integrity and
honor. When the Second World War broke out, she said it was not a time for extravagance
and chose to close her shop, which had grown to the woman power of 4,000 employees. It
was here in the midst of the Second World War that she began to renegotiate her presence
in her industry, and it was time to resurrect her branding and marketing intelligence. Chanel
had already become a household name in three different ways in the opinion of the public,
which is how reputation is built. Chanel had strength. Chanel had recognizable. And what
would eventually be most important was Chanel had identity. We see this importance in the
secondary market. The access to luxury in uncertain economics allows the user or wearer
to establish both sense and sensory worthiness, a brand and product that capture those three
elements will always have a timelessness simply by association as well as the experience
when in use by the wearer. Like Elsa Peretti, Coco Chanel elevated quote unquote lesser
materials, whereas Tiffany and company watched sterling silver become a couture component
in the world of jewelry design. Chanel had done something quite similarly with jersey
material, which was incredibly affordable for a beginning designer. And its original
intention was for male undergarments. I find this to be very timely with the boyish trend
that would surge in the boring twenties. And she does have a knack for being just right
ahead of a trend. Now where does this lead her with jewelry and was jewelry just for
the wealthy as times were so volatile? According to her, absolutely not. Chanel may have climbed
the upper crust mountain and brought it down into the middle classes, something that is
so close in nature to what Elsa did when she opened a very similar door. Chanel decided
to combine fine and fashion jewels so that she could expand her design ideas. She admitted
that it was incredibly tasteless to walk around in millions. However, there was a brazenness
as well as a whole lot of look if you could flaunt your fakes. Where she began to both
loop back to her formative influences and also contrast her original experiences is
that her apparel would stay understated in its structure. As far as accessories, Coco
went all in. They were opulent and at worst bold. Unlike her clothing that embraced progressiveness
and forwarded the timeline, in jewelry, she used classic arrows for her adornments. The
Egyptian portfolio, Byzantine design, medieval creation, each of these empires would be reinterpreted
into her own. Chanel's jewelry pieces could transform. She would challenge the status
quo yet again of the male artistry for women that had existed up until her entrance into
that arena. She executed her genius and utilitarianism which was unrivaled by either gender. Her
looks embodied three adjectives. Creative, experimental, and worldly.
While Chanel was nothing less than prolific, the designer who gave us dresses, suits, hats,
handbags, perfumes, perfume containers, and bejeweled embellishments. It's that last
category where there seems to be a method or pattern. There were certain symbols that
she was deeply attached to and created endless versions and iterations as a result of having
a core collection of raw elements that would become refined works. The Maltese cross, the
chameleon flower, a star, often as a comet, the moon, obviously the sun, her initials,
a ribbon, a feather, and a lion to honor her zodiac sign of Leo. Not only would she craft
refined materials, but she would blend in fashion components as well. Gripois, which is a glass,
was an homage to the church and orphanage that she grew up in. To this day, we still
see an endless loop and spiral of this core collection of artistic components that are
found in nature. And to close out my talk on Coco Chanel and finish my argument for her
brilliance as both profound businesswoman and second to none in branding, I will sum
up how easy it is for me to recognize her through the lens of iconography because I grew up
watching Madonna, a fellow Leo, do something so very similarly. The mastery of symbolism
to float through endless iterations and mediums and materials transcends time and also is
the economy of motion for somebody's own creativity and vision when you don't have
to keep reinventing the wheel if what you've decided to assign yourself is limitless permutation
on celestial bodies, a simple flower, a wild animal, the letters of your own name, a religious
glyph, my fascination with her superstardom, her impeccable expression, and the fortune
of the right time at the right place for the right people is beyond fascinating. How does
one dominate the sport of business with the art of branding? For me, Coco solved one quite
impersonally. She was a penultimate entrepreneur and in almost an ambidextrous way, her branding
captured the spirit of the user and gave them a sense of self with such intimacy. It was
an opus of personalization. Will we see somebody this adept at both business and branding again
in this lifetime? Perhaps she really was a shooting star, a Haley's Comet, once and
only once, but the playbook, the pattern, and the purpose lives on. If I'm being honest,
it's her influence that helped me create this podcast and to strike a balance with my love
for media, which is incredibly impersonal, and my obsession with storytelling, which
is designed to touch all of us, mind, heart, and hopefully soul.