Coco Chanel

French fashion designer who started her career with a hat shop and reached a peak by 1938 with 4,000 employees turning out 28,000 dresses a year. Chanel changed the way that women dressed, creating a fashion empire of timeless simplicity that ruled the field for 40 years.

She was left in a convent orphanage at 12, abandoned by her itinerant peddler dad whom she never saw again. Later she did meet her siblings and their kids. At 20 she took to the stage briefly where she met a rich patron who put her into an apartment. When she met Boy Combon, he encouraged her dreams by setting up her hat boutique.

The radical simplicity of her designs was widely imitated; the Chanel suit was classic for the 20th century. She set the stage for bobbed hair and shortened skirts and remarked that "style and fashion are not the same thing."

Her lovers included a Russian Grand Duke who gave her a gift of perfume, a scent which she manufactured as her Chanel N.5; it alone made her a millionaire.

During the Nazi occupation she closed her business doors, but she did have a German lover. After the war, women who had collaborated with the enemy were dealt with harshly, run through the streets with shaven heads. Not Chanel, she quietly left France in exile for nine years.

She made a comeback in 1954 at age 71 with a new collection. It was not a great success in France but the American buyers were wild for her style; they had adopted her. This show held the last personally designed Chanel suit.

Afraid of the night, Chanel took morphine to help herself sleep.

She died on the night of 10 January 1971, Paris. The Empire of the House of Chanel continued.