Gabrielle Chanel's legendary love affair with Russian composer Igor Stravinsky uncovered (Vogue.com UK) (original) (raw)

COCO CHANEL's relationship with the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky is to be documented in a controversial work of semi-fiction, entitled Coco and Igor. The book, by Chris Greenhalgh, is based on the author's romantic interpretation of Chanel's relationship with one of the 20th-century's most resounding musical names, and has drawn criticism from fans of fashion and plain fact. Though the affair in fact lasted just a few months, from the summer to the winter of 1920, Greenhalgh uses intriguing parallels between his protagonists' lives to imply that the bond between them survived. Beginning with Chanel's appearance at the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, the author reveals that, after losing everything in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the composer took his consumptive wife and four children to live with the designer. Having made her fortune during the Great War, it was a considerable social coup for Chanel to act as benefactor to such a celebrated musician - and Greenhalgh surmises that since Coco discovered her revolutionary new perfume, Chanel No.5, and Stravinsky made his great stylistic transition from modernism to neo-classicism while they lived together, they must have been major influences on one another's lives and successes. Among the other "extraordinary" coincidences Greenhalgh calls evidence are the facts that both knew Picasso, Chaplin, and Kennedy, were born within a year of each other and died in the same year, in 1971. While some might suggest that none of the above are all that amazing for contemporaries and friends, Greenhalgh would call it destiny. "Lives are always worth examining, re-inventing and playing with for the insights they yield," he says. "The way, for instance, that Chanel liberated Stravinsky sexually and the way he liberated her socially and culturally." Coco and Igor will be published by Review on July 1. (June 11 2002, AM)