Born in Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, fashion designer Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel (1883–1971) created classic designs that offered women both sophistication and comfort. With her clear eye and fearless taste, she helped women step out of stiff corsets and into clothes they could move in — clothes they could laugh in and live in. She ruled Parisian fashion for nearly sixty years.

“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty,” she said. “It is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” For Chanel, style was not just fabric and cut, but character, discipline, and the way a person carried their own story.

Her revolutionary ideas included turtleneck sweaters, pea jackets, costume jewelry, and graceful jersey suits. Thanks to Chanel, women bobbed their hair, shed their corsets, and discovered the power and simplicity of the little black dress, a quiet revolution waiting in every wardrobe.

“Elegance does not consist in putting on a new dress,” said the outspoken trendsetter, whose design signature became the interlocking “C”s. Real elegance, in her eyes, was a way of being: clean lines, clear choices, and a life that fit as beautifully as a favorite jacket.

A free spirit who used design as her pulpit, Chanel introduced her legendary fragrance in the 1920s, naming it No. 5 after her lucky number. An unconventional scent, created with the help of a chemist on the Riviera, it quickly became one of the most sought-after fragrances in the world.

“Women are not flowers,” Chanel explained about the unorthodox blend. “Why should they want to smell like flowers?” She believed women deserved a fragrance as modern, complex, and unapologetically themselves as they were.

Chanel loved working with her hands and rarely relied on a sketch or linen prototype. Even in later years, when arthritis made movement difficult, she preferred to drape and pin directly on the body, listening to the fabric as if it could speak. “Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger,” she once remarked — yet she continued to create anyway, one jacket, one seam, one bold choice at a time.

In her world, there was no room for cut-and-dried monotony, only time for work and for love — and for the courage to dress as if your life truly mattered.