Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky by Chris Greenhalgh

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky by Chris Greenhalgh

New books channel Coco Chanel's 'fantasy of a life'

By Maria Puente, USA TODAY

Dead 38 years, Coco Chanel may be more influential in contemporary popular culture than rival designers still very much alive, at least judging from bookshelves and movie screens.

How else to explain the flurry of Chanel-related books already out or soon to be released?

"Some mystical thing in the zeitgeist?" half-jokes Karen Karbo, author of The Gospel According to Coco Chanel (Globe Pequot Press, $19.95), a sort-of self-help book for those seeking advice on how to live life on one's own terms — as Chanel did.

"It was a fantasy of a life where you live out your dreams as you dictate them," Karbo says. "I think that speaks to what we find appealing in her."

In fact, there's plenty in Chanel's long, tumultuous life (1883-1971) that either appeals or repels, sometimes both, as writers and filmmakers have discovered.

•In addition to Karbo's book, released Sept. 25, there's a full-length biography, Coco Chanel: A Life, by Justine Picardie, due in April from Harper Collins. It's the latest attempt to tease out the truth from the mess of Chanel myths and lies, many invented by Chanel herself.

•Antigone in Vogue: Coco Chanel and the Myths of Fashion, coming from Rhonda Garelick, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will explore Chanel's influence in literary and artistic circles in 1920s Paris. "It is said the three most important names in France are Picasso, de Gaulle and Chanel," she says. "Chanel thought of herself as heroic and monumental — and she was."

•Chanel's life also has inspired a new novel, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky by Chris Greenhalgh (Riverhead Trade, $15), due Dec. 1, about the brief, little-known affair between Chanel and the Russian composer.

Greenhalgh's screen adaption of the novel, also called Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, starring Mads Mikkelsen as Stravinsky and Anna Mouglalis as Chanel, closed the Cannes Film Festival this year and will open in the USA in January.

It follows Coco Before Chanel, the new French biopic starring Audrey Tautou, which chronicles how Chanel became the Chanel, in theaters now.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2009-10-21-coco-chanel_N.htm?csp=books