Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel is one of the biggest names in fashion ever. She is considered to have had such an influence that she is the only fashion designer who ended up on Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century. Things that she contributed with were as examples the Chanel suit and the little black dress.

Born in 1883 in France as Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. The family was poor and when Coco was twelve her mother died and the father left. She lived in an orphanage until she was eighteen. She wanted to a cabaret singer but she had a hard time finding a steady job. She worked in a tailoring shop and became the mistress to French textile heir Étienne Balsan. By some Coco Chanel is considered to be one of the last courtesans. Balsan gave her dresses and jewelry. Chanel became involved with a friend of Balsan's, Captain Arthur Edward Capel who financed her first shops. She became very successful and made an unprecedented impact.

With the outbreak of World War II Coco Chanel closed down her fashion house because she believed it was not the time for fashion. She was heaily criticized for having an affair with a German officer. In 1945 she moved to Switzerland but returned to Paris in 1954 and launched a new collection. It was not received well by the French who did not forget her involvement with the Nazis bur it was liked by the Americans and the English. She died at the Hotel Ritz in 1971.

Coco Chanel introduced masculine feautures into ladies' fashion and made it more comfortable than it had been before. The Chanel suit is a must have among many women, especially if it's vintage. The little black dress should be in every woman's closet but it doesn't have to be Chanel. Trousers for women, strings of pearls and the Gardenia are other features of the Chanel Legacy. The biggest of them all is the perfume, Chanel no 5, which became especially immortilized when Marilyn Monroe said that the only thing she wore to bed was two drops of the perfume.

Today the Chanel collections are designed by Karl Lagerfeld as they have been for many years. He has done a good job of preserving the Chanel legacy and they didn't give him the nickname, "The Kaiser", for nothing.

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Herb Ritts

Naomi Campbell

Herb Ritts was a photographer who made an everlasting mark on photography and fashion in the 1980s and 1990s. He photographed celebrities and every supermodel worth mentioning. He preferred to shoot in black and white and just as Bruce Weber managed to produce an unearthly quality in his subjects. Adveritising shoots for designers, pictures for fashion magazines and musical videos for Janet Jackson and Madonna. He had a CV that would turn most people green of envy.

One of the first pictures of "the big five", Stephanie Seymour, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz and Naomi Campbell, that launched the supermodel phenomenom in the early 1990s.

Tatjana Patitz

Christy Turlington for Valentino

Herb Ritts is famous for his nudes of men and women, a lot of the them with homoerotic undertones. The pictures are very glamorous and there was noone who hestitated shedding their clothes for him.


Madonna was a close personal friend and Herb Ritts took a huge amount of pictures of her.

In the beginning of the 1990s Herb Ritts published the book, Duo, with pictures of the couple Bob Paris and Rod Jackson. The proceeds went to HIV and AIDS research.


Herb Ritts died in 2002 at the age of fifty of pneumonia due to that his immune system was weakened by the HIV-virus.

He carved a legacy that will be with us for as long as we celebrate the beuty of men and women.

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