Austrian rail operator OeBB on Saturday unveiled its new generation of sleeper trains - a response to demands from travellers for less pollutant alternatives to planes and petrol or diesel cars.
19.09.2023 - 00:25 / bbc.com / Chanel
The butcher was the only place in the Auvergne village of Courpière that showed any signs of life when I visited on an August afternoon. A handful of half-timbered houses and shuttered windows, this sleepy little place was allegedly once home to one of the world's most famous fashion designers: Coco, née Gabrielle, Chanel. Tracking down anything concrete was proving difficult, however, and records of her early life were no more substantial than a whiff of her No. 5 in the breeze.
The lack of clarity about where Chanel came from doesn't stop people thinking they know who she was. Part of this is due to media misrepresentation. Feuds with rival designers (thanks to the Broadway musical, Coco, starring Katharine Hepburn). Rumours that her older sister Julia took her own life, and that Julia's son André was in fact Coco Chanel's illegitimate child. Numerous reports of her having been a Nazi collaborator.
Google "Chanel" and you'll be confronted with 50 different versions of her life. Without evidence for any of the above claims, how do we know which is the truth?
"I think her home was down by the campsite," said one customer in the Courpière butcher shop.
"No, it was the house that belongs to the psychiatrist," said another with confidence.
"Ah bon, Coco Chanel lived here?!" said the butcher herself in surprise.
It had been like this everywhere I went, a series of lost Auvergnian towns in an area of central France known as la diagonale du vide (the empty diagonal), far from the typical tourist track. Towns like Mont-Dore, Brive-la-Gaillarde, Moulins, Thiers. Each delivered no more information than I'd been able to piece together online. Even the spa city of Vichy, where Chanel had worked as a water girl, serving glasses of Vichy's famous sulphurous waters to visitors on retreat, gave me nothing. The little black dress that she's credited with inventing may have permeated couture worldwide; the ubiquitous signature scent, Chanel No. 5, available in every airport duty-free and cruise liner boutique – but until Gabrielle Chanel became Coco, she seemed to have left barely a footprint.
It's particularly difficult to unpick as Chanel notoriously told many different stories to different journalists who interviewed her during the course of her life, and those stories, especially those relating to her childhood, often didn't add up. But as the first major exhibition of Chanel's work in the UK (Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto) opens at the V&A museum on 16 September 2023, it's a reminder that the line between art and artist is often inseparable.
"Chanel's aesthetic may be black and white, but her life is filled with shades of grey," said Justine Picardie, an author, fashion writer and former
Austrian rail operator OeBB on Saturday unveiled its new generation of sleeper trains - a response to demands from travellers for less pollutant alternatives to planes and petrol or diesel cars.
The fascination with theNorthern Lights dates as far back as the beginning of civilization, with the dancing waves of coloured light depicted in French cave paintings as old as 30,000 BC. Typically, they’re only seen in the northern parts of the Northern Hemisphere, near the Arctic Circle, on dark, clear autumn and winter nights. The lights are dependent on unpredictable solar flares ejecting charged particles that collide with gases in the atmosphere, so any trip to see the Northern Lights runs the risk of missing out on the spectacle altogether.
Piling onto a tractor-trailer, an assortment of Luxor youngsters leaned into a conversation with a pair of retirees from Europe. "We’re learning English," the youngest said, unabashed by any lack of formal introduction. A tumble of questions followed: "Where you from? You like Luxor? How many kids you have?"
Austrian rail operator OeBB on Saturday unveiled its new generation of sleeper trains - a response to demands from travellers for less pollutant alternatives to planes and petrol or diesel cars.
For decades, authors, artists and presidents have all been drawn to the Hudson Valley in New York.
Kia Karjalainen and her sister were vacationing in Greece when things took an unexpected turn. “We were in our hotel room, and I suddenly said to my sister, ‘It really, really smells of smoke. Is something burning?’”
As summer holidays come to an end, 50 Best has compiled its list of the World’s 50 Best Hotels in 2023.
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This weekend, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), pioneer of global art, design and performance, celebrates the unveiling of Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto. This exhibition is the UK’s first dedicated solely to Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, the iconic French couturière, who redefined the art of fashion. Spanning styles from her first Parisian boutique in 1910 to her last collection in 1971, the exposition vividly traces Chanel’s evolution and unparalleled contribution to fashion.
For generations, designers have adopted towns, villages, and other enclaves as second homes and visited them again and again, imprinting a touch of their own sensibility on their chosen place—and importing something of its essence into their own work. It’s the kind of symbiosis that Coco Chanel and Le Corbusier, who summered in neighboring homes, enjoyed with the Cote d’Azur’s Rouquebrune Cap-Martine, or Yves Saint Laurent with Marrakech and Tangier. More recently, Christian Louboutin popularized the Portuguese village of Melides, eventually opening Vermelho Hotel there earlier this year. Here, five designers on the places they go, and why they continue to be pulled back.
Ultra-cheap flights could be banned in Europe if a forthcoming proposal is approved by the EU: Officials in France want to set a price minimum on airfares across Europe to help reduce carbon emissions.
Overlooking the English Channel is a small resort town bedecked with freestone facades and half-timbered houses. English is heard everywhere, from the Art Deco Westminster hotel to the lighthouse, which, on the occasion of the late Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee, was lit up with Her Majesty's favourite colours. The bells of city hall chime in an echo of Big Ben, and it was just announced that the town's airport will soon be rechristened after Queen Elizabeth II.