Chanel: Her Style and Her Life

Slacks for women, the little black dress, the knit suit: Coco Chanel’s chicly functional, revolutionary designs literally brought 20th-century women out of corsets and into the modern era. Unfortunately, this coffee-table bio feels like the equivalent of a fashion sketch: Janet Wallach describes Chanel’s extraordinary self-inventions — from impoverished country bumpkin to Parisian courtesan to visionary entrepreneur to incorrigible playgirl — in maddeningly broad, synoptic strokes. For style and substance, peruse Chanel: Her Style and Her Life‘s more than 150 photos and illustrations, in which petite Chanel proves to be her own best model. B-