By RUTH LA FERLA

If, apart from her work, Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel possessed an overarching talent, it was her gift for self-invention. The scrappy peasant girl form the Auvergne transformed herself in the public eye from the child of an itinerant peddler to a daughter of privilege brought up by genteel maiden aunts; from a fiercely ambitious courtesan to the social equal of the Duke of Westminster; from a moderately gifted seamstress to a celebrated couturier.

“She is the ultimate Gatsby character,” said Rhonda Garelick, a professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and the author of a forthcoming Chanel biography, “Antigone in Vogue.”

“She is a successful poseur who came from nothing and blasted her way into society and celebrity,” Professor Garelick writes. Chanel improvised as she went, “tapping into desires that are far more than sartorial.”

Today many of those desires are mirrored in a spate of films, books and fashions that explore the designer who has been called the first modern woman - if not the first modern celebrity.

Interest in the couturier has never really waned, but 2009 has taken shape as a banner year for all things Chanel. In a recession, the perpetual reinvention of her life - not to mention the still-influential designs that in their day elevated humble materials into high style - strikes a chord, making Chanel an inspiring figure for lean times.

In “Coco Before Chanel,” a film biography that opened around most of the world this summer and was in American theaters on September 25, the director Anne Fontaine reconstructs Chanel’s early years. The film follows the onetime music-hall singer as she turns the attentions of well-born lovers like Etienne Balsan and Boy Capel to her advantage, wooing them into financing her career as a designer.

“When you know her better at the beginning of her life, you understand her fragility, her stress,” Ms. Fontaine said. “She never knows what is going to happen next and she has no protection, so she must fight against her destiny and create a new way not just to dress but to be.”

Darker aspects of the designer’s history are explored in “Coco Chanel,” a biography by Justine Picardie to be published later this fall. Ms. Picardie discusses Chanel’s affair with a Nazi officer during the occupation of Paris, one in a series of morally compromising choices she made to ensure that even in wartime, her business would continue to thrive.

Even people who know little about the proud, brittle couturier seem intuitively to grasp the power of the double-C logo, Professor Garelick pointed out. “They know there is some talismanic power in those C’s.” Now, as decades ago, “They confer a sense of limitless possibilities.”


In new movies and books, the designer Coco Chanel (1883- 1971) emerges as a post-feminist.