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"There is time for work. And time for love," said Coco Chanel. "That leaves no other time." In the '20s, Chanel filled her off-hours with Arthur ("Boy") Capel, a wealthy English polo player whose lavish gifts of jewels served as the keystones of Coco's astonishing collection, and whose blazer —lent to the designer on a chilly day at the polo grounds—became the source of her famous box jacket. From the Duke of Westminster. Chanel's most renowned amour, came more jewels; these she had copied, setting off the costume-jewelry vogue. With a personal fortune rumored by then to be close to $15 million—most of it the result of the pungent success of Chanel No. 5 —the designer calculated that she had little to gain, and quite a name to lose, from marriage to the Duke. So she finally turned him down, explaining with characteristic bluntness, "There are a lot of duchesses, but only one Coco Chanel."
Cool Reception. In 1938, with the war coming on and the Italian designer Schiaparelli moving in on the fashion front. Chanel retired. For the next 15 years, she shuttled between Vichy and Switzerland, returning to reopen her Paris salon in 1954 only to boost lagging perfume sales. Her jersey-and-tweed suits won a cool reception from the press, but soon nearly every knockoff house was competing to turn out the closest replica. Chanel had long since refused to join the cabal of Paris designers who tried to prevent style piracy. "I am not an artist," she insisted. "I want my dresses to go out on the street." Out they went by the thousands, easy to copy, because of the straightforward design, and cheap to produce, because the fabric was standard. Even a copy of a Chanel could claim its cachet. Private customers paid $700 for the original; buyers, intent on knockoffs, paid close to $1,500.
In the '60s. Coco sprang no surprises, only refinements on what was her classic look: the short, straight, collarless jacket, the slightly flaring skirt, and hems that never budged from mid-knee length. Wearing the broad-brimmed Breton hat that was her hallmark, her scissors hanging from a ribbon around her neck, and her four fingers held firmly together in spite of severe arthritis, she would feel for defects. Working directly on the model, she often picked a dress apart with the point of her scissors, complaining that it was unwearable. Her fashion empire, at her death, brought in over $160 million a year.
Her clients constituted a litany of the best-dressed women, not of the year but of the century: Princess Grace Queen Fabiola, Marlene Dietrich Ingrid Bergman, all the Rothschilds' and most of the Rockefellers. A musical version of her life, enhanced by Katharine Hepburn but stripped of most of the real drama, put Coco on Broadway. She was on a first-name basis with people too famous to need first names: Cocteau, Colette, Diaghilev, Dali, Picasso. Yet at the time of her death, the woman Picasso termed "the most sensible m the world" had a Paris wardrobe consisting of only three outfits.