A little black number and a lot more besides
Coco Chanel said that “you can be gorgeous at 30, charming at 40, and irresistible for the rest of your life.” She was applying this to women. I wouldn’t restrict it. Coco lived a remarkable, and sometimes controversial life into her eighties. She became one of the richest women who ever lived, having started out life in poverty. She made the money herself. She never married, but had numerous affairs. Another memorable observation was to “jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes. Boredom remains.”
We have Coco to thank for making sunbathing and suntans fashionable. And for her many pithy observations including the view that “as long as you know men are like children you know everything.” Again, she never married. I also like her comment that “in order to be irreplaceable, you must always be different.”
Coco blazed her trail long before women worried about having it all. She opened her first shop in Paris a little over a hundred years ago. Typically, women married a decade or more younger than today and had their children when they were very young compared to now. The vast majority did not work outside the home, but that was changing. Chanel designs reflected liberation, abandoning uncomfortable complicated clothes and introducing women to trousers. She influenced how women should look, but also how they should act. She seems to have assumed equality long before people were even thinking about it. She lived it. “The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud,” according to Coco. It still sounds appropriate.
Today I meet many women trying to juggle career and family. Biologically, the best time for a woman to have a child is late teens or early twenties. But the chances of meeting a partner by then are about zero. Or having enough money. Or having achieved career ambitions. Or even completed education. With modern technology it is becoming commonplace for a woman in her twenties not ready to have children to freeze her eggs. She may not even have met the man she will eventually have children with. The days when the ticking of the biological clock became deafening are going. This strikes me as wonderfully liberating. Homo sapiens has been around about 100,000 years and one hell of a lot has changed in the last hundred. I suspect that, were she beginning to build her empire today, Coco might have frozen a few eggs. Which brings me to my favourite Coco quote: “I am not young but I feel young. The day I feel old I will go to bed and stay there. J’aime la vie.”