Like the house’s famous two-tone slingback, Chanel in Vogue (Thames Hudson)—a new two-volume. slipcased tome—is color-blocked. The first volume, by fashion historian Rebecca C. Tuite, covers the period from 1910-1982. Susanna Brown, a specialist in photography, covers 1983-2025. The endeavor is dual-focused; essentially it’s a joint history of Vogue and Chanel. As Tuite writes: the book chronicles “two interwoven stories—across the fabric of twentieth-century fashion.” And, I would add, fashion illustration and photography.
Gabriel “Coco” Chanel was first mentioned in the January 15, 1913 issue of Vogue. She was known as a milliner and it was an aigrette-trimmed hat worn by the actress Gabrielle Dorziat on stage that the magazine called attention to. Right from the start the name Chanel was associated with the wider world of culture as well as fashion, which reflects the trajectory of the designer’s own life. Chanel was nicknamed Coco after a song she sang when performing as a cabaret singer. She would continue to support artists by designing costumes, for example in 1923, for Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of Antigone; for the 1924 Ballets Russes production of Le Train Bleu; and, with Salvador Dalí, for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in 1939. At the same time, Vogue, developed an ever growing stable of contributors.
The authors point out some striking synergies between Chanel and Vogue. Chanel opened her first boutique, for hats, on 21 rue Cambon in 1910 at about the same time that Condé Nast, who acquired Vogue in 1909, started putting his own stamp on it. Diana Vreeland left Vogue in 1971, the year Chanel died. And Karl Lagerfeld was appointed creative director of the house in 1983, 100 years after the founder’s birth. Both Chanel and Vogue became ingrained in the fabric of popular culture, and both, Tuite writes, “understood self-promotion, protecting their image, building their prestige and recognition, and bolstering their own storylines to assure their legends preceded them.”
Excellence was the value assigned to the magazine, but there wasn’t a single person associated with the title. In contrast, Chanel the woman was as much as source of fascination as Chanel the brand. In the first chapters of Chanel’s career—the designer closed her atelier and moved to Switzerland during World War II—Chanel was associated with modernity in her person; the second time around with her spirited design.
Just as Paul Poiret’s corset-less, straight-lined pre-World War I silhouettes superseded Charles Frederick Worth’s controlled and curvy 19th-century look, so Chanel would take the place of Poiret after the War. Tuite writes: “Of the pre-1914 wardrobe, Chanel would later recall, ‘Woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for lace, or sable, for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious.” That’s Poiret all the way: he put women on pedestals. Chanel was designing for herself and she eschewed decoration in favor of function (utilitarian pockets, for example) and movement. She made faux jewelry acceptable and used humble fabrics to make luxury garments. In 1957 Time declared that Chanel “invented the genre pauvre, or poor look. [She] put women into men’s jersey sweaters, created a simple dress based on a sailor tricot.” (In his debut collection, Matthieu Blazy made reference to Chanel’s preference for jersey by having knit underwear peeking out of waistlines.)
Chanel was associated with movement and youth, with sport clothes and the outdoors. “Women’s lives were changing in real time” Tuite writes. Chanel was adapting to those developments in cloth while Vogue was putting them down on paper. Horst P. Horst once said that Nast’s support of artists led to the creation of fashion photography as its own genre. “‘Make Vogue a Louvre,’” Edward Steichen, who was on contract to the magazine, once wrote to editor in chief Edna Woolman Chase. Chanel, too, contained multitudes. Not only was she her own best model, she had a head for business. In photographing Chanel at home, Vogue demonstrated how her style was absolute.
During the Second World War Chanel lived in Switzerland. Her comeback collection, presented in February 1954, was ill received by the French, but ecstatically by the Americans. Five years later Vogue reported that 1959 “Chanel Power” had conquered Paris and the States. The basis of that strength as reported by the magazine was vision, hard work. Tuite writes that there were other less definable elements having to do with creative sorcery or mystique. Vogue declared Chanel to be “the greatest individualist to work with a bolt of cloth.” What she did with that material was create a uniform that any woman could adapt to her own active life.
The renown of Chanel was such that in 1969 Katharine Hepburn played the designer in a Broadway musical, Coco, costumed by Cecil Beaton. In 1983, when Karl Lagerfeld was hired to direct the house, fashion was obsessed with supermodels and starting to flirt with Hollywood. By the time of his death, in 2019, he was world famous. As Brown writes, in a time of “celebrity-led culture, Lagerfeld himself became an icon.”
“A sleeping beauty,” is how the German designer described Chanel when he first arrived. In awakening the brand he normalized what Vogue at the time called a “renegade mixing of high and low.” Brown describes the juxtaposition in the magazine of Chanel clothes by different photographers allowing for the coexistence of “historical elegance and youthful rebellion,” which also defined Lagerfeld’s approach.
More elaborate runway shows and celebrity-filled front rows coincided with the expansion of media outlets. American Vogue was founded in 1892. The magazine started to go global in 1916 when a British version was launched, followed by a French one in 1920. From 1999 to 2020, 15 editions of Vogue were launched, extending the reach of the magazine and of Chanel.
Reflected in the glossy pages were not only ever changing trends, but an evolving roster of contributors (Annie Leibovitz joined in 1998) whose work reflected changes in visual culture. These artists had access to technology Steichen could never have imagined. The portrait of Karl Lagerfeld in Vogue’s famous 2003 Alice in Wonderland portfolio, for example, was facilitated, Brown notes, by Photoshop. The designer was photographed alone at 5 a.m. (Stylist Grace Coddington, who had a cat named Coco, stayed up all night in anticipation.) A shot of Natalia Vodianova (Alice) holding a pig was added.
Style.com launched in 2000. The Costume Institute had a Chanel exhibition in 2005. Instagram was introduced in 2010. It’s on that platform that Tyler Mitchell built his portfolio; in 2018 he became the first Black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover. With the appointment of Virginie Viard as creative director in 2019, the Chanel label was once again designed by a woman for women. In 2024, a year after Lagerfeld was the subject of a show at The Met, Matthieu Blazy was given the keys to the house. He’s currently writing what may become a third volume of Chanel in Vogue.
