Thursday, October 31, 2013
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Coco Chanel :D
Coco Chanel (Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel)
We all have heard the name. Chanel. The brand is still influential in the world today, despite
it’s founder having died in 1971. However, she left it with a legacy and
direction.
Chanel was a French fashion designer who accomplished many
amazing things. She is the only fashion designer to ever have appeared in Time magazine’s 100 most influential
people issue, and is known particularly for redefining women’s standards of
dress in the time after World War II.
The essentials of Chanel’s origin are that she was born into
a family of seven (two boys, three girls, a mother, and father). Her mother
died when she was 12 and her father sent her off with her sisters into a
convent that took in orphaned and abandoned girls. However, when she was older,
she made wild exaggerations about her young life to accompany the image she had
created for herself.
She acquired the name Coco when she was a cabaret singer in
her teens, and it is derived from the word cocotte, meaning a “kept
woman”. Here, she met Etienne Balsan,
and became his mistress. She lived with him and his life of luxury and
indulgence for the next three years until she started an affair with his
friend, Captain Arthur Edward Capel. It is he who gave her an apartment in
Paris and financed her first shops. He also influenced the look of the brand itself.
The iconic bottle for Chanel’s perfume was designed after a whiskey decanter
Capel carried with him. Their affair continued on for 9 years, even after Capel
married, but he suddenly died in a car accident in 1919. She commissioned a
memorial for him at the crash sight, and visited often in remembrance. Needless
to say, Chanel was devastated by his death.
However, during those 9 years he had been with her, Chanel
had become her own person. She started designing hats at the beginning as a
diversion, but soon became a licensed milliner and started her stores. In 1913,
she opened her first store to offer casual clothing in Deauville; hats,
jackets, sweaters, and sailor blouses. Her sister, Antoinette, and aunt,
Adrienne Chanel, modeled her clothing and supported her throughout this time. She
opened a second store in Biarritz and, in a year, made enough to reimburse
Capel his full investment.
She opened a large store in Paris next and made many
important connections there. 1922 is the year Chanel No. 5 began being carried
in department stores and began gaining popularity among the fashionable masses.
However, at the start she only got 10% of anything it made, and worked for
years to try and obtain 100% of the rights to it. Eventually, she ended up with
a new deal—2% of the profits of Chanel No. 5 (some 25 million dollars a year)
and that the owners paid all of her living expenses for the rest of her life.
Samuel Goldwyn, in 1931, offered Chanel a million dollars in
exchange for her coming to America twice a year to design costumes in
Hollywood. She gained many clients here, but didn’t appreciate the Hollywood
scene—she returned to Europe.
By 1935, Chanel employed four thousand people, but in 1939,
at the start of World War II, Chanel closed her shops. She said it was not a
time for fashion, and during this time behaved rather questionably. She was
affiliated with Nazis and was strongly anti-semitic.
In 1945, Chanel moved to Switzerland, but moved back to
Paris in 1954. This is when she reinstated her couture house after 15 years out
of the fashion world. On January 10th, 1971, Chanel died at the
Hotel Ritz in her sleep. She was 87 years old.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Hallmark Symposium Lecture: Public Library
Public Library presented to us last Thursday, and I was quite impressed with them. Originally thinking they were actually the public library, I didn't particularly want to attend, but I figured it was an opportunity, so I reluctantly went. They were the shortest presentation to date (45 minutes including questions!) and were the most impressive and relative to me at this point in my industrial design career. These two students started their own design firm that does practically everything, despite the fact that they lived in New York and Los Angeles. They build brands particularly well, but have also designed t shirts, flags, magazine spreads, anything you can think of really. They have specifics about career choices they made and how long it took them to get a good footing in the design world, etc.
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to them and have followed them on twitter at this point (that's pretty big for me).
I hope everyone who went liked them as much as I did and the people who didn't go look them up at some point
-RM
Union station architecture
Recently, a friend and I attended a show at Union Station, and when I walked in the doors, I had a new view of the place. Design has taught me so much already about being practical and appeasing to the eye, and Union Station is so well crafted, I got goosebumps when I walked its halls.
Friday, October 25, 2013
Monday, October 21, 2013
And My Word Shall Be....
The definition of connect in accordance to google is as follows:
And thus, you now know my word. :)
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