Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

Gabrielle Chanel was born to an unmarried laundrywoman in a poorhouse in Saumur and left at the abbey orphanage of Aubazine at twelve, where she learned to sew and where the black-and-white austerity of the corridors reappears, unmistakably, in everything she later made. She sang in provincial cafés — "Coco" comes from the songs — before a cavalry officer and then an English industrialist financed a millinery shop.

What she actually invented was not a garment. It was a proposition: that a wealthy woman would pay more for less. Her early work took the cheapest materials available — jersey, then used only for men's underwear — and the plainest possible shapes, and priced them at couture. She removed the corset, cut the hair, borrowed the sailor's stripe and the mechanic's trouser, and made simplicity legible as status. It was the first time in Western fashion that restraint was the luxury.

Her commercial record is far more mixed than the brand allows. In 1924 she signed away 90% of Chanel No. 5 to Pierre Wertheimer's Bourjois and spent the following two decades in litigation trying to get it back. In 1939 she closed the couture house entirely and put three thousand people out of work. During the Occupation she lived at the Ritz with a German intelligence officer and attempted to use Vichy's Aryanisation laws to seize No. 5 from the Wertheimers, who were Jewish; the attempt failed because they had anticipated it. She was interrogated after the Liberation and left for Switzerland.

She returned to Paris at seventy-one, in 1954, financed by the same Wertheimer she had tried to expropriate — because he wanted the couture house running to sell the perfume. Paris savaged the collection. America bought it. She worked until the day she died, in a room at the Ritz, in January 1971.