Chanel the bricoleur: Steal all the ideas you can

Abstract

Abstract Although she is arguably regarded as France’s most celebrated designer, Chanel did not train within the classical Parisian haute couture system. This article examines the onetime milliner and couture interloper as a bricoleur, a female ‘handyman’ who made do with materials at hand to create something new (Claude Levi-Strauss 1966). In the earliest years of her career, Chanel’s transformative ‘making do’ centred on her appropriations of garments and styles that were coded masculine, and these masculine borrowings were foundational in the development of an easily copied Chanel feminine aesthetic – most notably apparent in the little black dress – that was suitable for women’s entrée into modernity’s heretofore male-identified public sphere. The discussion highlights the role of fashion appropriation in negotiating the gender tensions and ambiguities associated with women’s emergence into early twentieth-century life, considering the special case of fashion diffusion that occurs when members of a less-powerful group emulate and appropriate styles from those who are more privileged.