FRENCH FASHION DESIGNERS

Fashion houses are famous for their haute couture clothes. These clothes are very expensive because the fashion house makes them by hand for a very small number of customers. Often the fashion house makes only about six of each drew or skirt. It makes them the right size for each customer. Each drew costs maybe $30000-$45000. Only about two or three thousand people in the world buy these clothes.
Ready-to-wear clothes from designer's are in their stores.they have the designer's name on them. They are expensive:jeans from chlorine cost about $375. Some designers also make clothes for the woman-or man-in the street. These clothes are much cheaper.
Designers show their haute couture clothes in January and July. They show clothes in January for the spring/summer, and they show clothes in July for the fall/winter. Ready-to-wear shows are january/March for the fall/winter, and in September /October for the spring/summer. Fashion house can pay $750000 or more for a ready-to-wear show. Ready-to-wear are important because they are in newspapers around the world.
CHANEL
Chanel is an old and famous French fashion house. "Coco" chanel opened it in 1915.
Gabrielle ("coco") chanel was born in 1883 in French town of samurai. Her life was difficult. Her parents did not have much money for their five children. When her mother died, her father sent sent Gabrielle and her sisters to a school girls. She never saw her father again.
When she left school,Gabrielle sang in bars. Here she go her name "coco" and met Estinne Balsan, a rich young man. He took her to his large house in the country and Chanel began to make simple hats for his friends. In 1909 she moved to Paris and started to sell hats. A year later she opened a hat store with help from her new rich England lover, Arthur ("baby") Capel. In 1913 she opened a clothes store, again with the help of Boy Capel. The store was in the famous vacating town of Deauville. In it Chanel sold women's clothes for sport and beach. She made a lot of them from Jersey. (Before this,jersey , as a material for men's sports clothes and underclothes.) Women could move easily in these jersey clothes and they did not have to wear corsets with them. They enjoyed this.
In 1915 (in the First World War) Chanel opened a store and a fashion house in Biarritz. She sold a lot of clothes and she was famous in Europe and United States. She opened more workrooms in Paris after the war.
In 1921 she began to sell her perfume,Chanel No.5. Its simple name and bottle were very different from other perfumes. It was the first perfume with a designer's name.
Chanel liked using men's clothes for women. she put men's sweaters with skirts,and made wide pants for women.
She dressed women in Jersey suits, raincoats, shirts, cardigan, and big jackets. In 1926 she started to design her famous "little black dresses". They were simple and very beautiful. With them women wore Chanel jewelry.
Chanel loved jewelry, and her lover gave her a lot of it. She did not wear it often because she did not want to look very rich. In the 1920s she began the fashion for artificial jewelry. She designed and sold large, colorful jewelry. It went well with her simple clothes.
In 1936 nearly 4000 people worked for Chanel and she sold nearly 28000 design each year. But when the second World War (1939-45) started, Chanel stopped making clothes. She had a Nazi lover and in 1944 she had to leave France. She went to Switzerland and did not go back to France for ten years.
When she opened her fashion house in Paris again, she showed jersey suits and dresses. The French did not like them because they were not fashionable. But Americans bought them, and after three years Chanel was an important designer again. Everybody wanted a Chanel suit.
In the 1950s and 1960s many things were "Chanel": her suits, her jewelry, her white blouse, her bags, her light brown-and-black shoes. This was Chanel "look".Chanel died in 1971 and another person took on.!Coco Chanel in a jersey suits.