FEW contemporary celebrities possess Coco Chanel’s powers of spin. She mythologised her own past relentlessly, expunging its poverty, ignorance and illegitimacy and emerged as a very modern kind of woman — self-supporting and self-invented. Arguably, she was also the greatest designer of the last century.

She could also be cruel, self-obsessed and utterly ruthless. Her affair with a Nazi officer, followed by eight years of self-imposed exile in Switzerland, was not her finest hour (how apt that her house, name and legacy is now owned by the Jewish Wertheimer family). In short she is the perfect, imperfect contemporary anti-heroine. No wonder Hilary Swank, who has played a girl pretending to be a boy, and a girl struggling to make it in boxing, recently said she’d like to take on the role of Coco.

Last month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened a show dedicated to the iconic designer, Chanel: The Exhibition. These Met extravaganzas, which occur every two years, are comprehensive, no-expense-spared blockbusters. Everyone from Nicole Kidman to Richard Gere put in an appearance at the inaugural galas, dressed in clothes that make the Oscars look like a Bhs sale, and pushing food around their plates at tables that cost $150,000 (£82,000) apiece. Welcome to the New York season.

Inevitably these fashion exhibitions (the last one was curated by Tom Ford) attract their share of controversy. The New York Times accuses this one of pandering to Chanel’s commercial demands (the house substantially financed the exhibition) at the expense of objectivity, but it’s still a tour de force; a treat for anyone interested in fashion who finds themselves in New York before the end of August. The catalogue (a beautifully illustrated hardback, glossy, coffeetable book), with various forewords — including a fascinating one by Karl Lagerfeld — is destined be a collector’s item.

Undoubtedly it’s her personal story that makes Chanel the woman so compelling: the escape from hidebound, 19th-century provincialism, the drive, talent and glamorous lovers, among them Boy Capel and the Duke of Westminster. (Can’t you see Jude Law being lined up to play someone called Boy?) But it’s the continuing relevance of her style that gives the exhibition its greatest resonance. Surveying the ranks of Coco’s little black dresses, her bouclé suits and her organza evening dresses — so many of which could be worn today with little or no adaptation — is remarkable. She was fortunate to be succeeded, after a dispiriting 12-year hiatus in which her house languished in the doldrums, by Lagerfeld, whose wit, intelligence and irreverence give hers a run for her money. Critics charge him with pastiche, but if that’s all it were, we wouldn’t all still want to wear Chanel. And want to, we do.

France could not forgive her for her wartime record; her comeback collection in 1954, so antithetical to everything Dior’s swooningly romantic New Look represented, was slammed. She hastily reinvented herself, while somehow convincing the world that she was adhering to the continuum she had laid down before the war. It was a breathtaking sleight of hand. “Everyone,” notes Lagerfeld in the catalogue, “except the experts, thinks that her famous suit invented between 1955 and 1957 was a new embodiment of her unchanging concept of women. Happily this was not the case. The Chanel ‘women’ of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s had nothing to do with her woman of the 1950s.”

All the same, when she bobbed her hair, acquired a tan and guarded her weight as if she were superintending a racehorse, millions of other women did the same. On such myths are empires founded.

REASONS TO LOVE COCO

1. For popularising, if not inventing, the little black dress.

2. For her espousal of small-breasted women.

3. For making jersey chic and favouring materials with natural elasticity.

4. For simplifying women’s wardrobes and as a consequence their lives.

5. For proving that in the end, chic can triumph over beauty.

6. For believing that comfort is crucial — and for making it elegant.

7. For making fake jewellery stylish.

8. For coming back in her seventies.

Perkins up a bit

IF YOU’RE looking for instant cheap hits on the high street and find the idea of retail assault more stimulating than retail therapy, head to Dorothy Perkins. Everything about the experience, from the store layouts to the displays, might be gruesome, but there are some great bargains in there.

Here are the top five best buys in store now:
Charcoal sequin dress, £40
Gold Moroccan sandals, £15
Pink-and-white paisley tunic with beaded hem, £25
Blue floral, empire-line dress £30
Orange skirt with fuchsia embellished trim, £28
Dorothy Perkins (0870 122 8801)

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