Coco refused to wear corsets and ruffles of the time! Was it hard to make her stand out?
The most difficult thing for me was to show a glamorous, but very poor Chanel. I had to make her look elegant in a crowd environment when all the others were wearing frills and pastels. I also wanted to put as many clothes around her that she would use later in her collections. For instance, I put her in a lot of tweeds when she's horseback riding, even though she didn't discover tweeds until later on. The riding outfits she made herself were very influential. Also, there was a striped shirt she saw on French fisherman that we put her in, but in fact she wore it more in the '30s.

Coco had many firsts! Tell us something surprising you discovered.
Chanel invented the skin-toned shoe with the little black end because she saw that a skin-colored shoe made the legs look longer. It took off in the '60s and '70s. She invented a new kind of gold-plated chain weight to sew into the lining of jackets to make them hang right. The details were never for nothing.

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