#64 Coco Chanel: Her Life and Secrets

What I learned from reading Coco Chanel: Her Life, Her Secrets. ---- It is my work I am congratulated on, and to me, that's the only thing that counts (0:01) I've been miserable in a life that from the outside seemed magnificent (4:15) The maxims of Coco Chanel (6:43) Coco on marketing (13:22) Coco's early life (15:15) My need for independence began to develop when I was very young. (18:53) Coco Chanel at 20 (28:15) the beginning of her empire (34:00) I have nothing and I know I can do anything. (37:00) relentlessly resourceful / a metaphor on how to create opportunity (41:04) Coco goes to war for her profits - and wins (48:45) ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  She smiled and kept hold of my hand. "I'm very pleased, as you see, there was no big audience, but the people who did come really understand work done well. No one pays me compliments anymore simply to please me. It's my work that I'm congratulated on. And to me, that's the only thing that counts." So that's a quote from Coco Chanel when she was 71 years old. And I found it in the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Coco Chanel, Her Life and Her Secrets. So let's start at the very beginning, where the author is talking about how he came to know Coco Chanel. And he says, "I first met Coco Chanel in 1958.

• 0:42David Senra?

  She was 75 years old, a prodigy, beautified, and triumphant. She had imposed her style on the whole world. Because she had succeeded in everything in her life, I urged her to describe her victories into the tape recorder. She murmured into the microphone. "I don't even know whether I've been happy." So I'm going to continue in the introduction, I just want to pause here though, because this is one of the strangest books that I've read so far for the podcast. First of all, it's very, very old. It was first published in 1971. And basically, it's a series of interviews that takes over a few years.

• 1:20David Senra?

  And it's mostly like a transcription with just random stories intertwined, but it was translated from French. So it's kind of, you'll see some of the language here is a little funny. But I think I did a fairly decent job of pulling out interesting parts, so we can understand like, how does a poor, penniless orphan transform herself into one of the most successful and richest people in the world? So that's really where I'm going to focus on today, more of her personality, the traits, how she thought about business, all that kind of stuff. So let me just continue right back where I left off.

• 2:04David Senra?

  So she's saying, "I don't even know whether I've been happy." She said, "She would say, 'Every day I simplify something, because every day I learn something. When I can no longer create anything, I'll be done for.'"

• 2:18David Senra?

  Only truth has no frontiers. There's only one thing about which I'm still curious. Death. So the author talks about like when you interact with Kokos now, or when you, you were, um, when he interacted with her. It's almost like stepping into a monologue. And you'll see that she kind of speaks in these maxims, like, only truth has no frontiers. Um, things like that. Um, okay, so it says, "From the flood of her talk, I sifted the nuggets." So he's talking about setting up the book, like what he's, uh, you know, he's got tons and tons of tape recordings. And this book is basically a distillation of, of what he thought was important. "She spoke rapidly. She intimidated me. I opened my ears.

• 3:01David Senra?

  To enter her presence was to step into a monologue."

• 3:08David Senra?

  So I'm going to skip ahead a little bit, um, but right there, uh, the first few minutes, you can kind of see how the, the book is written. It's very bizarre, the, the writing, and she's very bizarre person, obviously. Um, and I, I mean that, you know, in the most positive way possible. I like the bizarre people. Okay, so this is a little bit more into her personality. You're going to see a lot of the themes that she repeats over and over again. Um, this idea that she doesn't know if she's ever been happy, the, the fact that work is, uh, the most important thing to her, that if she's not creating, she's bored to death and she feels empty. And this is something that, um, she, she says over and over again, she has this phrase, she says, she says, "I've had no time for living." So it says, "This preemptory empress, who acted so very sure of herself, was the embodiment of anxiety.

• 3:52David Senra?

  She must have spent her life trembling on her tightrope, across a void that she herself had created. She seemed poisoned by a secret that she no longer remembered. 'I've had no time for living,' she said. 'No one's ever understood this. I don't even know whether I've been very happy.'" See that she repeats herself a lot, too. "I wept, I've wept a great deal, more than most people do. I've been very unhappy in the middle of great love affairs. I remember only that I've been miserable in a life that from the outside seemed magnificent."

• 4:29David Senra?

  I've always been under pressure. The good thing about the book is you're gonna just get a bunch of direct quotes from her. All those are direct quotes. I've always been under pressure. First of all, because I've never wanted to give up the House of Chanel, which is the only thing that's mine, in which no one else had any part. The only place where I've ever felt truly happy. There, no one could even get under my skin. So, not only do you see it in this book, but I had to do like secondary research because so much of like, this book is so bizarre, like it would talk about something, but I couldn't even understand. Like, for example, there's a, she has like this dispute later on in life with a venture

• 5:11David Senra?

  capitalist that helps her spin off a new company, which sells like, she has world famous perfumes. So you might've heard like Chanel number five. And the book talks about it in like this narrative form, skips over it to the point where I had to find out like what the actual results were through other sources. But the reason I bring that up is because she, all the other sources I saw, and including this book, and something to keep in mind as we go through like her life, she was a compulsive liar. I mean, there's no other way for me to put that. She was, she had a very unhappy childhood, which I'm gonna get into, but she was obsessed with these like, these fantasies, like these novels she would read. And then she would take bits of those stories and in conversation with people, act as if that happened to her.

• 5:56David Senra?

  So it's gonna, like, this podcast is gonna be a little different from the other ones that I normally do because it's, she's just a very bizarre person. And I've read, in some cases, like I'll read the same story at three different places, and every single place is different. So, take, what I, the reason I bring that up is like, don't worry about it being factually accurate, let's just point to like the attributes that might be useful for us to like adapt in our own lives. Obviously, being a compulsive liar is not one of them, although I do have a theory that it may have helped her very much in her business, especially the business of high fashion. Okay, and I'll get there in a minute. Okay, so in the middle, she's like giving this interview, and we're still at the beginning of the book. And then she just pulls out this, this...

• 6:40David Senra?

  She pulls out this notebook, and then she's like, "I speak in maxims. I've written hundreds." And she's sitting there with the author and then another American publisher. Because she tried to, like, document her life story, like, four or five different times, a bunch of different authors, and it never stuck, except for this, the person she befriended towards the end of her life, the author of this book. But they're just sitting there. She pulls out this book of maxims. So I'm just gonna read some of them to you. "Here are some of the maxims of Mademoiselle Chanel as she read them that night. Happiness consists in bringing one's thoughts to realization. One can pursue thought after life in order to realize it in death." I have no idea what that means.

• 7:24David Senra?

  "Material things aside, we do not, we need not advice but approval. For those who understand nothing about art, beauty's name is poetry." She went on faster and faster, not looking at us, and then she just continued. "One must be alert against those who have wit but little judgment. We are surrounded by them." And then the, um, the author asks himself, he's like, "Was it, was this for our benefit that she was turning skeptic?" "The next maxim was an observation about herself." And here's Coco Chanel. "Undoubtedly, I have faults and weaknesses, but it is what is best in me, my desire for justice and truth, that has vexed my friends and aroused their anger."

• 8:09David Senra?

  And then another one about herself. "Of necessity, superiority isolates one. It compels one to choose one's friendships and one's relationships." That's interesting, because she's widely known as like a recluse. Not a recluse, that's not the right word. She was very, uh, she lived a life of solitude in her last, maybe, decade and a half of life. Even though she worked up until the day she died, and she worked at something she loved and was passionate about, so that's obviously something that we could take away as a positive to her. But there are stories that were kind of sad, where she didn't have any companionship. She lived in the hotel where it's in Paris the last 30 years of her life.

• 8:49David Senra?

  And she had staff to the point where she got so lonely, she would make her butler take off his jacket and gloves and sit across the table from her while they had dinner. And it basically made him act like he was there, like visiting socially, like he was a friend, even though he worked for her. Another maxim, "I'd rather dine with a bum who amuses me than with rich people who bore me." Just a few more, "My friends, there are no friends." And by way of conclusion, there's another one, "Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them."

• 9:33David Senra?

  Okay, so now the author gets into, like, he was able to convince her, "Hey, you've lived an extraordinary life, you're world famous, you're one of the most successful people that ever lived, we need to document your life." So he says, "I was making her tell the story of her life. By now, I knew her well enough to appreciate the difficulties of such a task. She had tried before." And it's going to list all these names, and they're in French, so I'm not even going to try to pronounce them, but all these different authors she tried to work for. And it was unsuccessful. "Nevertheless, I should have recognized that it would require something more than inexhaustible patience to tell Coco's story with Coco. What is the truth of any life?

• 10:13David Senra?

  A birth certificate, dates, baptismals, vaccination certificates?" And then now this is a quote from Coco, "Those on whom legends are built are their legends." That was why she devoted so much care to the construction.

• 10:33David Senra?

  To the construction of the Chanel myth, even at the cost of creating enormous confusion. Okay, so that's kind of like a hint about all these stories that she tells up. And it's almost like she's, what I meant earlier about like, you know, you don't want to be a compulsive liar in your own personal life, but it might have actually worked out for her in her businesses because like she built a brand like from, from thin air. Like she just told stories and was very, even at the beginning, I'll get to like her starting, she started out just like making her own hats. And, but part of the allure and what spread so, so would help spread her, because she had enormous success within like the first two or three years of launching her.

• 11:16David Senra?

  She made hats and then she made these, these jersey dresses, which I'll get to. Was the fact that people would come from all over Paris just to interact with her because she was such a unique, bizarre individual. And she just told these wildly outrageous stories. So she says, "I am no longer what I was. I will remain what I have become." I don't even know what that means. She says, "Chanel, a Chanel creation. That alone is what she was. Born of herself, herself, shaped by her own hands, in her own clay." People can't even really lock down the actual year of her birth because she lied about that constantly. She lied about who her father was. She lied that she wasn't an orphan. Basically, she just made up stories about everything.

• 12:00David Senra?

  Now, from what we do know is she had a really rough childhood. Her dad abandoned, her mom died when she was young. Her mom was like 30 years old. She died of tuberculosis. Chanel had two sisters, two brothers. Two of the brothers were sent off to like, basically a military service for the state. And then one sister committed suicide.

• 12:25David Senra?

  Her father left Chanel when she was like six, I think I'll talk about that in a little bit. But basically, she just had a really rough and traumatic childhood. And then she lied about like being sent away to live with her two aunts. They were not even sure that the aunts ever existed. So basically, what he's saying, hey, she's shaped by her own hands and her own clay. She just decided, hey, my life sucks. This is my interpretation. My life sucks. So I'm just going to create a life that doesn't suck. And that kind of determination, because she's very determined, very hardworking, very stubborn. She's got a lot of the same traits that these entrepreneurs that we talk about on the podcast have. And you know, she definitely works her way into a fantastic situation.

• 13:08David Senra?

  But it's just, it's such a confusing story because you can't tell what is the myth, what they just said, the Chanel myth, or what is actually true. And by the end of the book, you're like, I guess it doesn't even really matter. Alright, so this has nothing to do with what I was just talking about, but this is Coco on marketing. And something that helped spread her designs rapidly was the media. And you can almost say this is like influencer marketing in the late 1800s. Chanel's customers read the very expensive magazines, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, etc. These magazines, and this is now Coco talking, these magazines are our publicity. The popular magazines with mass circulation are better. They create our legend.

• 13:52David Senra?

  See, she used that word over and over again. When my customers come to me, they like to cross the threshold of some magic place. They feel a satisfaction that is perhaps a trace vulgar, but that delights them. They are privileged characters who are incorporated into our legend.

• 14:12David Senra?

  For them, that is a far greater pleasure than ordering another suit.

• 14:21David Senra?

  Okay, so now I'm gonna go back in time. And another weird thing about this book, it's not in chronological order by any means. It goes into the future, back into the past, and just zig and zag everywhere. But this section said a little bit about her early life. At least, you know, I'm guessing this is actually what happened. "She told me of her rather harsh childhood: the death of her mother when she was six, her rejection by her father, who left her to make a new life for himself in America." That thing, he definitely left. We're not sure at all if he actually went to America. A lot of people think she made that part up. "Her strict aunts," those people don't exist, "her first communion, ordering her first dress."

• 15:03David Senra?

  "Her parents' occupation," now we're talking about after she was born, "her parents' occupation was listed as trade. Accuracy requires a correction. They were peddlers," her father was exactly, essentially, "peddlers wandering from town to town, from market to fair, always on the road."

• 15:22David Senra?

  "This Chanel could be very likable when he wanted to be." This is her dad. "He was a light-hearted, exuberant fellow. His laughter dissolved the gloom in which Coco's mother languished." She was always of poor health. "She died of tuberculosis. 'I was six years old,' Coco said. 'My aunts came. I realized a deal was being made to take me away.'" This is also false. "My aunts were good," but I'm telling you because this is the story she would tell of her childhood. "My aunts were good people, but absolutely without tenderness. I was not loved in their house. I got no affection. Children suffer from such things." "No one in that family reached forty," she said. "I don't know how I escaped the slaughter."

• 16:07David Senra?

  She describes herself as her family's little prisoner. "It was a long outcry and one of great importance, essential to remember if one wished to understand Mademoiselle Chanel. Humiliation, a mother whom people pitied because they were really poor, a father who did not send the money that he ought to have sent, people who whispered about these things when they came to visit." And Coco's cry of denial, something that she's gonna repeat throughout her entire life. "I am not an orphan. I have a father. My father made my mother happy." These are all clues to the character of a little girl. But one thing we do know for sure, she was definitely an orphan.

• 16:47David Senra?

  Which makes, considering where she started, penniless orphan, and where she winds up, makes it all, like, her life more impressive.

• 16:59David Senra?

  Okay, so, this is another thing that she's gonna repeat over and over again. She picked up from a real young age, obviously, growing up in poverty, you realize what you're missing. And she, even though she makes a lot of money throughout her life,

• 17:14David Senra?

  the money was just a means of independence. And she says, "I've never been interested in money, but I was concerned with independence." And I would also add control. She's obsessed with independence and control. "If I analyze myself a little, I see immediately that my need for independence began to develop when I was still a very young girl. I heard a great deal of talk about money among my aunt's servants." See, we don't, this part's probably not true. She's saying, because she wasn't living with her aunt. She says, now she's making the story up. "When we have money, we'll leave. Those girls worked like the devil. It was fascinating to watch them. This is how they learned their trade. It took them three years, they made enough money, and then they left. Here it seemed, I had a clue, now the author's talking.

• 17:59David Senra?

  Here it seemed I had a clue to an understanding of Mademoiselle Chanel. In order to attain her independence, she must earn her own way. She had grasped this very early, listening to the whispers of the poor peasant girls, glad to have jobs in a good house where they could eat as much as they liked and learn a trade that would offer them rights. The right to live in their own homes, to go out, perhaps to dance, and also to love." So, the lesson is definitely accurate. Who she learned it from, or maybe it was just a result of her circumstances, that's unknown, but she does very much learn that at a very young age,

• 18:40David Senra?

  because she's about 20 when she realizes she works herself into a position for independence. So it says, now this is Coco, making a comment. She says, "My need for independence began to develop when I was still a very young girl."

• 19:04David Senra?

  Okay, I'm just reading my note here. So this is about myths and truths. This is her personality, how she dealt in fantasy. And then the note I left myself was something I mentioned to you earlier about, is this the same thing? Like, was this helpful in her building her company and the branding of her fashion house? So now, "So now I knew Coco's childhood as described by herself, what she remembered of it, what she wanted to reveal of it in the twilight of her life, and what had marked her. Why, as I listened to her bring forth her past, should I have imagined that she was creating her own legend?" So he discovers, the author actually discovers, he's not fooled by this. He finds out from independent sources that she made all this stuff up. So it says, "What is the truth? Here it is in all its simplicity.

• 19:48David Senra?

  When Coco's mother died, she left five children, two boys and three girls. Their father turned over the boys to the public authorities, and thereupon he went off to his mother with the girls. And then, as they say of husbands who vanish, I'm going out for some cigarettes. No one ever saw him again." So we don't know what happened to her father. We do know she winds up at this reformer's school, not at a, not with her aunts. But from that description, you can see, you know, your mom dies, you're six years old, your mom's dead, your dad disappears. Like, I have a six-year-old. I have memories from when I was six years old. The stuff that happens to you at that age sticks with you, and it definitely shaped the personality.

• 20:33David Senra?

  And, like, I guess, I would say, like, it adds fuel to her drive, because she was very adamant. I guess at the time, again, this is the late 1800s, right around 1900, in Paris, Coco Chanel was very beautiful, and so she gets a lot of attention from men. But she ridicules the other women. I guess at the time, it was very common for a man to be married, and then he has something, and it translates from French to mean a "kept woman," which is basically a mistress that he sets up, he pays her bills, and, like, they, the wife even knows about this arrangement. And she would ridicule other women's ambition, because that's as far as their ambition was.

• 21:18David Senra?

  And she's like, "No, no, I'm not..." She was in a situation like that for a little bit. But she's like, "I want to work. I want independence. I don't want somebody else paying my bills." So she had that drive from a very young age. And then she says, straight up, "I never tell the truth." And my note here is, well, stories sell fashion. The reason that I was a little hesitant to do this book is because it's a world that I don't understand. Like, why would you spend so much additional money for like a t-shirt or a dress or a shirt like that doesn't look that much different, but is 100x the price? And there's legends behind it. There's stories behind it. I just read this, or I saw this this story where it illustrated this.

• 22:00David Senra?

  The brand, there's a brand of like really cheap and expensive shoes called Payless. You might be familiar with it. You know, you go in there, buy a pair of shoes for, I don't know, $10, something like that. And so they created a pop-up. They changed the name. They made it sound like, like foreign. Like, they might even mean a French name. The same exact shoes and stuff that's in Payless, they marked it up. They built a story around it. They may have changed the packaging and all that other stuff. And the same shoes that you could get for, let's say, 20 bucks or $30, whatever it was, people were buying for 300, 400, 500. So it just shows that like stories sell fashion. And so that's what I mean earlier. It's like, I think it'd be annoying to be around a person that was a compulsive liar like this.

• 22:41David Senra?

  But it may have like actually been one of the reasons like her her fashion house is so successful. It's still around today. I think, I looked earlier, it's like 110 or 120 years old, something like that. And there's still, I think they did like $3 billion in sales last year. So it's effective. I'm not saying, you know, obviously do this for, like to add this to your personality, but I do think there's a reason that she was doing this. She says, "Why did she not consult a doctor? A close friend suggested that her father psychoanalyzed Coco." And this is Coco speaking. She goes, "I should go and tell my secrets to a doctor?" She said to me with a laugh that was not devoid of mischief. "I've never even told the truth to my priest." This statement.

• 23:28David Senra?

  That I'm about to read to you, she says over and over and over again, and I think it's probably one of the most important attributes for us in today's day and age. And she says, "I saw myself as very different from the rest." So now, indeed, she thinks she was obviously different than the people around her. But the reason I bring that up is because the products that she actually invents and creates is extremely different from anything else that existed at that time. And I think it's even more important in today's age to have this differentiation in what you're actually making. Because you don't necessarily have to be better, you just have to be different.

• 24:09David Senra?

  And there's a quote I'm going to read to you later, but it's been on my mind a lot because I just reread, like as I was editing, re-editing, and then rereading all the highlights for that James Dyson autobiography, the one I put out last week again. And I just love the statement he has in there. I think about it a lot, and he's like, his quote is, "It's difference for the sake of it in everything." So James Dyson thinks his products are different and better, but what he's saying is like, even if it's not better, just be different for the sake of it. I think that's a huge advantage, because I do think our core belief, like we, as a species, we just mimic one another over and over and over again. I was taking notes on a podcast, I can't remember which one.

• 24:54David Senra?

  Right, oh, now I know. There's an Instagram account that I recommend you following, it's fascinating. It's basically, it's called Things Testing, or Thing Testing, rather. And it is basically a woman who works as a venture capitalist in London, and she just tests out, like she does product reviews, but on Instagram. And she does it in a really interesting way. And something she said stuck out to me, where she's like, you know, she has to go through so, she only reviews products that she likes, so it's like a positive, she wants to have like a positive feed. But she said something that was interesting. So she, right now, she's testing out like eighteen different products. Out of the eighteen, maybe five will make the cut and they'll, they'll get on where she'll do a profile. And now the Instagram page is actually expanded out

• 25:39David Senra?

  into like a website and email newsletter. I don't know. I, I, I think what she's doing is really unique and interesting, especially her website. But her Instagram is beautiful as well. But what she said was interesting. She's like, listen, when you test so many products, you realize like people use the same colors. They use the same fonts. I found out they use the same lawyers. So it's nothing but sameness. And she's like, there's a benefit in just being weird and different. And I think that was true in nineteen hundred and I think it's even more true today. Okay, so this is another theme that's repeated a lot, that the theme that money equals independence. Coco, whose dream was independence, knew already how she would achieve it, or knew she would only achieve it, sorry, through money. Her relatives, who were somewhat frightened

• 26:23David Senra?

  by her, used to say, "That one," meaning Coco, "wants everything."

• 26:30David Senra?

  So she's in, they call it a covenant, but I guess it's like a reform school. So Coco felt humiliated in like, now she's around teenage age. Coco felt humiliated in the covenant. As a charity pupil, meaning their family couldn't like, they couldn't afford to pay the tuition. As a charity pupil, pupil, pupil, she was in a position of inferiority and it rankled her. In order to break out of the stereotype of poverty, she invented a father who was seeking his fortune in the Americas. Remember her maxims at the beginning, she talks about that, that superiority creates isolation. Like she thought, even though her,

• 27:11David Senra?

  what I, what I kind of admire about her in a sense is that even when she was extremely poor, like she felt that she would, she had talent. She, she had basically a belief in herself, even when, you know, if you, if you, if you examine her, her life circumstances at the time, no one from the outside would, would actually agree with that. Like you don't, you shouldn't have a reason to have this, this profound belief in yourself. And I think in general, we'd be better off with a world full of people who Have overconfidence in themselves where I think in for the large majority of people, we live in the opposite world. Like, I can't tell you how many people that I've come across or associated with that, like, they would actually go out and start a company if they actually believed they could do it.

• 27:55David Senra?

  But they're suffering from a lack of confidence. Coco had an abundance of confidence. And sometimes you're gonna have an abundance of confidence and it's, you know, not, it's not gonna work out for you. But I'd rather have an abundance of confidence and think I can do something and fail than never even try because I don't think I'm good enough. Okay. So let's skip, skip, skip. Okay, so this is Coco at 20. She meets this guy. Coco left Mullins, this is where the reform school was, without regrets. The fact that a dashing man was taking her to Paris gave her confidence in her own uncommon beauty. She was no longer, she no longer was afraid of her past, and she won her first victory over poverty and desertion.

• 28:37David Senra?

  So I do like how the author, even though the translation comes off a little funny, he's got a bunch of chapters. It's like her first victory, her sixth, her third victory, it goes all the way to like her sixth and seventh victory throughout her entire life. So he's saying her first victory was, was over poverty. She had, you know, I would argue, it's funny. My wife asked me the other day, she's like, out of all the people you've covered on the podcast, like, do they have one theme that like ties them all together? And, you know, there's a lot of themes that overlap. But I think only, I can only think of one so far, and you let me know if, if you've listened to them all, if I'm missing a theme. But I think, I answered the question with like the best description of entrepreneurship,

• 29:21David Senra?

  which was, they're all relentlessly resourceful. I don't think I've covered one person that wasn't relentlessly resourceful. And in this case, Coco is using the fact that a rich person who's 25 years old, remember, she's living in Europe in 1900, so it was very much like a, she's like basically the first like free woman to make her own money, and then she changes like fashion, does all this other stuff. But at the time, it's like, it's very much like a society thing, like who are you, who's your parents, what's your lineage you come from, and stuff like that. So she uses this guy's interests, and she starts.

• 29:57David Senra?

  He, this is what I mentioned earlier, when she was like for temporarily a kept woman. So she, because he's rich and he lives in Paris, he introduces her to all kinds of like the high-end society, which again, she knows nothing about because she was unbelievably poor. So while she's living with him, she starts, um, building or building, she starts creating hats. And her first store is on the bottom floor of like this, I don't know if it's a building that he owns or whatever the case is, um, but it's, it's a high-traffic area where other people of really high means have to go through. And so they stumble upon Coco, this, this crazy character with her crazy-looking hats.

• 30:39David Senra?

  And again, that's where being different for the sake of it's beneficial, like I've never seen anything like this. And what she was doing, she was just buying hats really cheaply. Um, she even like, like, she's kind of mean sometimes. Where she'd like ridicule these like rich, she'd call them like rich idiots, for lack of a better word. Cause let's say, I don't know the exact translation of the numbers between francs and everything, but let's say she could buy a hat, hat, hat for 10 cents and then she'd add some feathers. She, she'd sew something on it. She'd do like minimal improvements and then sell it for like $15. Like that kind of high margin to the point where like she'd immediately started making a lot of money right away. Um, and that not only on hats, but on the clothing she was making too. So anyways, what I mean about that, she's just resourceful. She realized, hey, listen, I, this is my way out

• 31:23David Senra?

  and I'm not going to squander it. I'm not going to be like, oh, now I'm, this guy, like, he's just going to take care of me. She's like, uh, she had a relationship with him. She loved him for a little bit, but she's like, I, you're in my way. I want to work. And she would leave men all the time, um, that anybody that got in the way of her ability to like, to, um, become, to maintain her independence and to make her money. She was extremely focused on work. As you could see when I started the podcast with a quote at 71, where she's like, it's okay that people don't compliment me anymore, you know, but they compliment like my, like, they don't have to compliment you the person, but they compliment the work and that's the only thing that counts. Um, okay.

• 32:07David Senra?

  So this is just a random thing. Sometimes, so she goes along these monologues and he's tape recording, the author's tape recording all these conversations. And so he would tape, uh, he would transcribe the recordings and be like, "Listen, you have all these contradictions." And so she would start, she had a defense, she had like a very well fortified defense mechanisms. And so this was her defense against saying something that makes her look bad, because again, she's building her own myth, she's building her legend, and it's, it might as well, like, he's asking for her life story, but it might as well just been, you know, a novel that she's creating. So this is what, how he would catch her, uh, when she's veering into saying something that might, that might not make her look good. She said, he says, "That was surely what she had said.

• 32:50David Senra?

  The words were jostling one another now, one another now in her lips. But when in her inner fortress forbidden truths raised themselves out of their dungeons, an alarm system went into action at the last moment. She recaptured them and thrust them back into their holes." So he clearly believes that she has a lot of negative experiences in her life that she's not gonna tell anybody about, no matter what, that she took with her to her grave. And here's this phrase again, "I felt I was very different from the others. Above all, I didn't want to be taken for a little yokel. I lied in order to be taken seriously." So again, being different for the sake of it, and two, the idea that, you

• 33:35David Senra?

  know, people looked down upon you, you didn't have a mom, you didn't have a father, you were an orphan, you were a charity case. She, she didn't like that, and that drove her to succeed. Okay, so this is, um, this is the beginning of her empire. So what I was saying is all the, they had all this traffic coming through. Um, so she, she would meet all these people, well, actually, this is right before she, um, right before she opens her store. Um, she'd make a bunch of her own clothes for herself before she started selling them. And she says, "All those ladies wanted to know who made my clothes, and especially who made my hats." Coco's hats, which Gabriel Dorziat, the best dressed actress of the time, was soon going

• 34:17David Senra?

  to wear, were the first sign of what was to become the Chanel style. Now, this is wildly different from what anybody was doing at the time. So she basically said, "Hey, the men are the ones making women's clothes. Women should make women's clothes because men make it for what men like, not for what women like." And she also talked about how uncomfortable it was, like they were dressing dolls instead of people, people that actually move. She said, this is her style right here. "The masculine transposed to the feminine without the slightest ambiguity. Men's fedoras with creased crowns, half the brim turned up and half down, had a simplicity that obviously was a slap in the face of the constructions of feathers and flowers that

• 35:01David Senra?

  were then all the rage." She also made a three-cornered velvet hat for Gabriel Dorziat, that actress, who wore it onstage. The press was full of it. They loved it. "Out of all the sound and fury that surrounded Coco, she conceived the notion of doing something to become independent." So again, because of her access to high society through one of her lovers, she was able to have access to the press and actresses. And of course, this still happens today. If an actor or an actress is seen with something, people are like, "Oh, where'd you get that shirt? Where'd you get that hat?" Et cetera, et cetera. So she used that to kind of jumpstart and bootstrap what became a very, very successful

• 35:46David Senra?

  company. So around this time, everybody, like, so I guess it's like stated that, you know, if you're kept, you're never going to be married, so you have to find, like, you can either stay in this situation for a long time, or you find a husband. So everyone around her wanted her to find a husband, but she wanted to work. And so she starts making money. She said, "She was learning what freedom's money conferred when one stopped working for it and allowed it to work for one."

• 36:18David Senra?

  And on the next page here's a little bit about her personality. "An amazing person who risked her skin only for herself. She never put..." and this is just being smart actually right here. "She never put one foot forward until she had been assured that the other could not slip." She's very intelligent too, very smart. We're gonna see that when she goes to war with her business partners. I think she's around like 60 years old at the time. And she wins, big time. And then again, this is just more of her bravado. And she's having a fight with the guy who she's eventually gonna leave.

• 37:01David Senra?

  And she goes, "You know very well I want to work, so I won't be dependent on anyone anymore." And he came from a really rich family. And she says, "Boy understands that." Now, Boy is a friend of her lover, the guy that brought her to Paris. His name's like Etienne. I've tried to avoid telling you his name because I don't know how to pronounce it. Etienne, whatever. And he introduces her to a friend. She starts having an affair with this friend. She says, "You know very well I want to work, so I won't be dependent on anyone anymore." Boy understands that. Boy's his friend. "He'll give me a hand." He's the one that actually helps her open her first door. "Can you imagine what that means to a woman like me, being dependent on a man like you?"

• 37:41David Senra?

  And then this is a rather big insult to him, but also gives us a highlight of her own self-confidence. And she goes, "I have nothing, and I know I can do anything. You have everything, and you don't do anything with it." So, that phrase is fantastic. I think we should all internalize that. "I have nothing, and I know I can do anything." And what she means by him saying, by her saying, "You have everything, you don't do anything with it." He's very rich, his family's very rich, and all he wants to do is like spend time with horses and like racehorses, but he's not very ambitious. And then this is Coco.

• 38:25David Senra?

  Reflecting on this, she goes, "I didn't want him to stop me from doing what I had in mind. I had learned that one is not the master of one's decisions when one doesn't work." And it's interesting to me, like, how much, like, she, it seems like she's, she figured out a very simple, like, blueprint for success, and she just repeats it over and over again. The fact that, "Hey, if I can get money, I can have control and independence and not have to rely on anybody else," right? Then I make my, uh, like, there's difference at the very beginning. My designs don't look like the other stuff you can buy in the store, so it brings, like, attention to people. Then I use the resources of the people around me. I'm introduced to people that can wear my clothes as advertisements. I can have the press talk about it. Um, she just has, like, she's very, she has a very, uh, high amount of common sense,

• 39:09David Senra?

  and she uses, like, she lever, uses all the leverage around her, around her. Um, I guess I bring that up because it doesn't, she just had a very simple goal. It's like, "I'm going to be the master of my own domain. I'm going to have my own business, and I'm gonna basically focus on that," and then did whatever she had to to obtain that goal. And this is, uh, the result, the feeling of accomplishment that she has when she starts the House of Chanel. And it says, "Coco knew the same sense of total happiness the day she first set foot in her own place. I've done something all by myself. The House of Chanel isn't a thing made by money. I had no financiers behind me. It didn't cost anyone anything.

• 39:51David Senra?

  I had a guaranteed bank credit that I never over-drew. I did it all. I built it all up. I made fortunes. I spent them the same way. I invented the Chanel perfumes. What didn't I do? No one knows everything I've created. I've made a revolution. But I was lucky. Everything was just right for it." In 1938, less than 30 years after Coco first started in fashion, the House of Chanel sold 28,000 dresses in Europe, South America, and the Middle East, and had 4,000 women on its payroll.

• 40:33David Senra?

  So I don't know if that's necessary. I mean, she did everything herself, but she definitely had financing. So I don't know if that money actually came from Boy, or if he was the one that guaranteed the bank credit that got her started, but I mean, she did have some help. I know she's reveling in like her accomplishment, which is great, but it might not all be accurate. And this is another note I left myself on a few pages later. It's an example of her relentless resourcefulness. And I think this is actually a metaphor on how to create opportunities. So like, I'm going to tell you the explicit story, but really think of it as like a metaphor for how you can pursue opportunities that you may not be pursuing at this time. And she says, "This then is Chanel's version of the birth of

• 41:17David Senra?

  Chanel." And so this is her first foray into clothing and out of hats. "A polo sweater caught at the waist with a handkerchief. The jersey dress," this is one of her most famous products, "the first one." And why she started making these things out of these, like, why is she not just using dresses like everybody else is doing? Like, why is she using a different material? Why is it, it's a lot of like clothing for men that she repurposes for women? And it's interesting because she had to, because where her store was located, they had these like exclusivity agreements. So here's the reason that she had to use jersey. And it's again, just an example of her taking a constraint and turning it into like an asset.

• 42:01David Senra?

  "A dressmaker had gone into business in the house in Avenue Gabrielle," that's where her store was, "where she had made her hats. Coco could not have made real dresses without the risk of being taken to court for unfair competition and bad faith. But the jersey? No problem. No one made real dresses out of jersey. Jersey was for men, and anyway, in France, it was not used. It was worn in English boarding schools." So she takes something that's made for men in a different country and adapts it for women, and they go crazy for it. Eureka, all that had to be done was to cut them and sew them. The line and the taste were all innate in her.

• 42:42David Senra?

  Her stroke of genius was to transpose the masculine English fashion to the feminine with taste that precluded any ambiguity, there's that word again, as she had already done with hats. She transformed everything she touched, her jackets, her blouses, the ties on the blouses, the cufflinks at the wrists, everything she borrowed from men became ultra feminine through her magic. And again, she was the only one at the time doing this. So if you wanted, if you saw, like, let's say if the people in high society in Paris at the time, wearing something unique, which your jersey just certainly looked unique, you could only get it from one place. This is a huge advantage for her. Okay. And then this is the quote from James Dyson again, "Difference for the sake of it and everything."

• 43:27David Senra?

  People started to go to her, meaning going to her shop, because she was amusing. And then they would say stuff like, "You know, that one's a real character." And from reading the book, it's even hard to keep up with like her stories. She's just, she was partially insane. Like, she's just, I understand what he means, like you're walking into a monologue, it's like a wall of text I'm trying to make sense of. That was what was being said of her. She was unlike anyone else. She made people laugh. Life looked different with her. It became comic, funny, less drab than usual. She brought one out of the commonplace. And again, she's doing this because she's telling stories, most of which are not true. She's getting from novels and stuff, and just acting like, "Oh yeah, this happened, I went to this place with this person."

• 44:10David Senra?

  And she tells, and again, if you're just like kind of a bored kept woman, you're not working all day, your husband's gone most of the time, but he's really rich, like you can go and spend his money and then be entertained by this strange character. That was Coco Chanel. And this is also the same part of the book where she's kind of making fun of these women that come in, because they're like, "Listen, I buy these hats for nothing and I resell them to you for a lot, just because, like, you can't put a feather and sew a hat? Like, what's wrong with you?" Which, you know, I kind of, she's kind of like... Kind of, um, like, to me, that, that, these kind of statements where she's belittling people, she's trying to prove like she's superior. And I think she's doing that because, you know, she had a really, she'd lived a fourth of her

• 44:55David Senra?

  life feeling, feeling very inferior. Um, she says, "The rich had introduced her to money, and this had helped her to work things out when she was setting her prices." This is such a good, again, like, um, I, I hear this all the time where people are saying, like, you, a lot of advice for entrepreneurs, uh, it's like, raise your prices. So Coco would give you that same example, or she would say that same advice. She says, "The rich had introduced her to money, and this had helped her to work things out when she was setting her prices." So, so she's very observant about them. And here's what she said, "She knew that they would pinch pennies over necessities and bankrupt themselves for frivolities." I don't know if I pronounced that right. You know what that word means, though. Stuff they don't need.

• 45:37David Senra?

  Okay, and then in the middle of the book, I thought this is a great one-sentence description of herself. Um, so it's the author's talking to a person that knew Coco really well and younger in life, and so the author is asking him, asking him, uh, like, he's saying, "Coco was an," and this is a word in French, I'm gonna butcher, "Coco was an overnot in spite of everything, no?" And then the guy's, the guy's like, "Yeah, I agree." And then the overnot translates, so, and the overnot in French folklore is the person who never does anything for nothing. She's a very calculating person. Okay, so I'm skipping way ahead in the timeline.

• 46:21David Senra?

  Her, her hats are successful, her clothes are successful, the House of Chanel is a fashion house, she expands into perfumes, which I think she actually makes more money from perfume than anything else. Um, and she has jewelry, all kinds of stuff, but what I found surprising, shocked me, was, uh, right at the beginning of World War II, she closes down her fashion house, and it stays closed for 15 years, and then she comes back when she's like 70. So this is the mistake, and this is her reflecting on the mistake of closing the house. She says, "How, how could I suppose that it would still be people who would buy dresses?" She closed it because she thought it was, like, no one, the war was gonna devastate everything. "I was so stupid, such a dummy about life, that it seemed impossible to me.

• 47:05David Senra?

  I said to myself, 'You'll just put everything in order and find something else to keep you busy.'" Well, I made a mistake. Some people sold dresses all through the war. That will be a lesson to me, and this is a great takeaway for all of us. Whatever may happen hereafter, I'll go on making my clothes. The only thing I still believe in is my work. And what I mean by lesson, I think all of us can take away is like, you can only control your output. So you can't control if wars start or end or anything else, but like she could have just kept going. She's like, I'm just gonna focus on this and adapt to the new reality. Now, that's her words of it. She had a biographer later on in life that, um, that, um, claimed to uncover like hidden documents. Like she was like, secret spy for the Nazis and all kinds of stuff.

• 47:48David Senra?

  But, um, basically hi- his assertion is that in 1936, um, you know, she only employed women. There was like a dispute over labor agreements at the time and they wanted stuff like paid vacations and social welfare laws and all this other stuff. And, um, and they basically closed her business. They went on strike and, uh, his assertion is that three years later, she closes the business because of that. I don't know that, I would need more details. It just doesn't make sense to me. Like, why would you wait three years if you were annoyed by that? So, um, but in any case, she did close. Uh, she, she winds up like living in Switzerland for a few years and then comes back and, um, and starts her business.

• 48:30David Senra?

  But this is what I meant earlier, how she's like rather like cunning. And this is how she, she has a war with her partners and it's a war over her products. Um, and then I'm gonna read to you the outcome and it's, this is amazing. Now, keep in mind, she's like 60, I think she's in her 60s when she does that. She goes, "After the war and before reopening her business, Coco Chanel embarked on one of the hardest battles of her career. This time, the little orphan declared war on finance. There was an attempt to deprive her of the profits from one of her perfumes. With the guile and stubbornness of a peasant woman and ably backed by her lawyer, she was to rest from the great financier's terms of payment

• 49:14David Senra?

  that would make her the best compensated business head in the world." So she refers to him as partners. Uh, every other source I've seen refers to him as venture capitalists. It's, yeah, the, the person that she makes the deal with is the family. That family, uh, is still, I think it's a third generation now, still controls Chanel today. Um, so, but this is, this is what happens.

• 49:39David Senra?

  It's actually really, really interesting what she does here.

• 49:43David Senra?

  Okay.

• 49:45David Senra?

  Chanel was consulting a lawyer because of her perfumes. She had been selling them since the first world war. Uh, since the first world war. By 1935, she had three labels, and just list of products there. Which only could, which could only be bought in her shops. In 1924, she had a visit from the, oh boy, Wertheimer. Wertheimer Brothers. Paul and Pierre, whom she knew very well. They were intelligent, rich, and aggressive. They suggested that they and Coco incorporate as Parfums Chanel. Uh, that's the name of the company. It looks like perfume spelled with an A. Parfums Chanel for the promotion of the sale of her perfumes in France and throughout the world.

• 50:31David Senra?

  Um, he said, hey, we're gonna start the company. You can be president. She agreed and she turned over to Parfums Chanel the rights to all the brands she had thus far marketed under the name of Chanel, remember that. As well as the chemical formulas and the manufacturing processes. Oh, Jesus. The Wertheimer Brothers were having the Chanel perfumes made by their own company. So they, this company's called like Bourgeot or something like that. Um, so basically they, they say, hey, you're gonna be president. We're gonna run the company. You're gonna get 10%, right? But it's 10% net. They start, they control everything. They start producing it using basically a second company so they can deduct expenses against. And then they granted sales rights to foreign subsidies, subsidiaries,

• 51:15David Senra?

  which they created and in which Chanel had always had the same 10%. So they're, they're creating now, they're creating all these other companies to manufacture them. So you have a company that owns the, the perfumes or the rights to perfumes. Then you have their separate company that Chanel doesn't have anything to do with that manufactures them. Right? Using the information that she gave them. Then the foreign subsidiaries, just like, you know, let's say there's one in England to sell in England and one in America to sell in America, whatever the case is. Uh, they own together, right? Chanel always had the same 10%. In a word, the more the business grew, the more Coco regretted ever having made the deal. And what they mean by that is, they open a factory in Haboka, New Jersey.

• 51:57David Senra?

  They're not, they're kind of getting, playing loose with the quality of the perfume. They're starting to sell it everywhere, even like drugstores, kind of like diluting the brand, and they're getting 70 to 80% of all the profit. And so she's making way less than she wants to. And so for years, like, "We need to renegotiate, we need to negotiate." And they kind of just brush her off and ignore, right? And so, remember, she made the original agreement in 1924. Up until 1939, she's like, "Listen, I, like, we need to redo this, or I'm going to sue you." And they, they, like, did not respond. So she goes to this attorney in Paris, and she says, "I want my revenge. It's got to be all or nothing."

• 52:42David Senra?

  So, her attorney meets with their attorneys, and this is what they tell her. "An amicable settlement will bring you much more than litigation will," both lawyers reiterated to her, "but she was out for blood. All or nothing," she retorted.

• 52:59David Senra?

  So, this is the confusing part, though. The book, the book was, the way they wrote it, I didn't understand what was taking place, so I had to actually go and look at it. So, there, while this litigation's going on, right, she's going to court, and it takes like a few months in between until they're actually going to get in front of a judge. She creates her own, her new perfumes, under the same name, because she only agreed that they could use whatever the one she was using up until that point in 1924. And because she has an extensive network, she knew people like in New York, and Paris, and London, that owned very famous department stores.

• 53:41David Senra?

  And she was telling them, "Listen, if you do not come and renegotiate, I'm going to start, basically, competing." They didn't own the trademark to the names, so they could only, let's say they had three different products, I don't know exactly how many, I think it was three. But they could only control, they only had the rights to those three. So she's like, "I just made a bunch of other ones, they're going to be stocked in stores everywhere else." And basically, they're going to, she's going to cannibalize the sales of the three perfumes that the Wartheimer brothers owned.

• 54:12David Senra?

  So, and she does this in a few months. She was, already started manufacturing in Switzerland, and she already had distribution set up. So eventually, now the war is over, because I guess her partners were Jewish and they had to flee because of Nazis. So now the war is over, they're coming back to run everything in France, and they start coming to the table. And she said, and they're like, what does she really want? They don't want to go to, they're trying to settle before the judge, um, the judge is gonna rule. And he says, "No decision was ever handed down in the case because everything was settled out of court." Um, and so now, let me tell you what she was able to negotiate, which is one of the craziest things I've read. It says, "Ultimately, the Wertherheimers and Chanel came to a mutual accommodation."

• 54:53David Senra?

  So this is in 1947, which was about, almost 10 years after she, she was, uh, she wanted to renegotiate, and what, 23 years after they started the business. Um, so it says, um, "Ultimately, they came to a mutual accommodation, negotiating the original 1924 contract. On May 17th, uh, 1947, Chanel received wartime profits from the sale of Chanel Number 5 in an amount equivalent to $9 million in today's dollars." Now, this is the crazy part. "Her future share would be 2% of all Chanel Number 5 sales world come. The financial benefit to her would be enormous. Her earnings were projected at $25 million a year."

• 55:37David Senra?

  Remember, this is in the 19, this is 1940s, 19, that's insane. "Making her, at the time, one of the richest women in the world." "In addition, they agreed to an unusual," this is so bizarre. "They agreed to an unusual stipulation proposed by Chanel herself. Uh, Wertherheimer, the Wertherheimer family, agreed to pay all of Chanel's living expenses, from the trivial to the large, for the rest of her life." She doesn't, she, I think she dies in 1971? Am I right about that? Yeah, 1971. So you're talking about, what is that, 57, 67? 20, over 20 years. They have to pay for every single

• 56:20David Senra?

  living expense she has, and she's making 25 million or so a year on top of that, just in gross sales. Not including everything she makes from her fashion brand, which they also finance when she opens back up. Is that not insane? That blew my mind when I read that. That is just, that's insane. So this is now her talking to her lawyer. "My dear bunny," she told her lawyer, "I have already made a great deal of money in my life, "but, as you know, I've also spent a lot. "Now, thanks to you, I shall never have to work again."

• 56:54David Senra?

  Um, so that's one of the biggest takeaways from, from her life story and from the book I read. It's like she was unbeliev- like she has a lot of unhappiness and things like you don't, you obviously don't wish on anybody. But the one thing that I think we have to envy, a lot of people have to envy her for is like, she really found something she really loved to do. And she did it when she was poor and she did it when she was wealthy beyond any measure. And she did it up until the day she died.

• 57:21David Senra?

  And I just think that's, that, that's just something that's unbelievably rare. And I think nothing articulates, um, that point more than this section right here. "The hours dragged on and the night progressed. "She sipped red wine and she said, "The collection is fundamental because it's the future," meaning the new design she's making. "At that time, she was 80. "Her birthday was only a few weeks away, "but there was no thought of wishing her a happy birthday. "She would never know any happiness greater than her work."

• 58:01David Senra?

  And she died seven years after that night and she never stopped designing up until the day she died.