French fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was BOTD in 1883. Born in Saumur to a working-class family, she grew up in poverty and was raised in a Catholic orphanage, where she first learned to sew. At 18, she moved to Moulins, supporting herself as a seamstress and café singer. (Her nickname is thought to be a reference to her most frequently-performed song, Qui qu’a vu Coco?) She became the mistress of English playboy Arthur “Boy” Capel, who installed her in a Paris apartment and financed her first millinery collection. In 1915, she opened a boutique in Biarritz, selling casual womenswear, inspired by Capel’s sports wardrobe. Dispensing with corsets and layers of petticoats, she used jersey and other lightweight fabrics to create practical, elegant womenswear, focusing on comfort and ease of movement. In 1919, she established her own fashion house in Paris, popularising the “little black dress”, which quickly became a fashion staple, branded “the Ford of Fashion” by American Vogue. She later branched into costume jewellery and fragrances, including the wildly successful Chanel No 5, packaged in a simple, sleek bottle and featuring her brand insignia of interlocking Cs. She became a star of Paris society, partying with celebrity homosexuals Jean Cocteau, Colette and Cecil Beaton, and had a close, probably sexual relationship with Misia Sert. She had a long association with ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, underwriting the Ballet Russes’ infamous 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring and designing costumes for Le train bleu and Apollon musagète. She also ploughed her way through European aristocracy, having affairs with the Duke of Westminster, Edward, Prince of Wales and the exiled Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, and enjoyed a close friendship with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. During World War Two, she closed her boutique and moved into the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where she had an affair with Nazi spy Hans Günther von Dincklage. There is also evidence that she worked for Nazi intelligence, using her connections to attempt to seize control of Chanel No 5 from its Jewish owners. After the war, she was investigated for Nazi collaboration, but saved from prosecution due to Churchill’s intervention. She relaunched Chanel in 1954, introducing some of her best known and widely-imitated designs, including “the Chanel suit”, comprising a collarless braid-trimmed tweed jacket with a matching knee-length skirt, and a quilted purse with gold chains. Ferociously competitive, she sneered at the New Look designs of Christian Dior (commenting “Only a man who never was intimate with a woman could design something that uncomfortable“), saving her praise for Cristóbal Balenciaga, whom she admired for his tailoring and old-world craftmanship. She remained defiantly single and childless, working into her 70s, despite long-term addictions to morphine and cocaine. She died in 1971 at the Ritz Hotel, her home of 30 years, aged 87. Now considered an icon of 20th century fashion, and a proto-feminist who liberated the female body from corsetry, her designs and canny business sense exerted a profound influence on generations of designers, notably Karl Lagerfeld, who became creative director of the Chanel brand after her death. Her life, legacy, war record and sexuality continue to be debated by biographers and historians, inspiring numerous stage and screen portrayals by Katharine Hepburn, Marie-France Pisier, Shirley MacLaine, Audrey Tautou, Anna Mouglalis and Juliette Binoche.