In 1953, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel reopened her couture house after a 14-year hiatus at the age of 70. “Why did I return?” the legendary fashion designer later posited in an interview with Life magazine. “One night at dinner, Christian Dior said a woman could never be a great couturier.”
It’s a quote that perfectly captures everything Chanel represents to this day, more than a century after she opened her first millinery shop in Paris in 1910. It also happens to be nestled in the enormous boarded timeline of the designer’s life that greets visitors to Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto, a major retrospective of the French couturière’s work, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
