Coco Chanel, the birth of the myth told by Laure Duval in ‘The season of the wind’

The freedom to dare and the audacity to break the rules but also a bit of luck. Coco Chanel was not only the great seamstress who transformed her life into a myth but also a strong woman, capable of leaving her mark with self-determination and passion. This is where Laure Duval, nom de plume of the Parisian writer – but Milanese by adoption – started from here, who tells the great French designer in her first novel ‘The season of the wind – Coco Chanel’s saga between freedom and destiny’ to be released tomorrow for Mondadori types,

‘The season of the wind’ is a true female saga, which traces the events surrounding the life of Coco Chanel, with the precision of a historical novel. Not a biography but a choral story of freedom and self-determination with many highly original protagonists: from Misia Sert, ante litteram ‘influencer’ to Diana, a Red Cross nurse who tells the Great War from the unprecedented point of view of women at the front. Against the backdrop of this feminine epic, between twists and daring encounters with Picasso and Cocteau, the wind of war that will change history forever. The volume opens in the spring of 1913, when unusual, courageous dresses and hats with soft and linear lines appeared in the streets of Deauville. These are the creations of Gabrielle Chanel, Coco for friends, a sensitive and rebellious girl, who has just opened her second boutique here. Gabrielle’s life and fashion are marked by the search for freedom: freedom from social conventions, from the long trains with which one cannot walk, from the exotic trappings and from the corsets that oppress the female body in those years. It is her originality that risks precluding her success, in fashion and in love, and it is a challenge that she cannot afford to lose, despite so many moments of very human fragility. These are the war years, a new world is upon us and the wind of change is blowing strongly for everyone, leading everyone to face choices with no way back: for Gabrielle, who will have to fight to affirm her fashion house and create her own space; for Arthur, his great love, who seeks the balance between the past and the future, between philosophy and action; and for Aurore, their maid who has just come out of the convent, who feels intimidated and uncomfortable at the ruthlessness of the hostess. However, the war will also reserve unimaginable transformations for her. The Bildungsroman brings together historical characters with others of invention, born from a hint of reality (the waitress who cut Coco’s hair, the English tailor who made the maison’s first clothes …), to let the reader enter the world of a visionary woman with a hitherto unexplored point of view.