Coco Chanel Was an ORPHAN Raised by Nuns

Raised by nuns with nothing, she grew up to dress the richest women alive.

Her mother died when she was twelve, her father left her at a convent.

The nuns' plain black and white world quietly shaped her eye.

She sang in cabarets for coins. That is where the name Coco was born.

Then she made hats, simple and clean, in an age drowning in feathers.

Women then were laced into corsets that barely let them breathe.

Chanel threw out the corset and borrowed soft jersey, a men's fabric, building clothes a woman could move in.

Then came the little black dress, and No. 5, a perfume that still sells worldwide.

Under the occupation she closed her house, and her ties to a Nazi officer shadowed her for decades.

At seventy she returned and reinvented the suit, the orphan who had defined elegance for a century.

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