Coco Chanel and Romy Schneider

Romy Schneider was just 22 years old, when Coco Chanel had already established herself as the premiere designer of French luxury fashion. She was more than 50 years older and that time she had hardly met personally with her clients, but Romy was the exception.

Romy Schneider was born in Austria and after a short – but successful – acting career in Germany she came to Paris and started filming Christine, where she met and fell in love with Alain Delon.

After she arrived to Paris she has transformed her style and she credited her transformation to three people: Alain Delon, Coco Chanel and Luchino Visconti. (The latter was the director of Boccaccio’70 which brought fame for her as an actress and in which film she was dressed in Chanel).

Romy Schneider in Boccaccio’70

Chanel’s collaboration with Hollywood was already over at this time. She designed costumes for three notable films (for Metro Goldwyn Mayer) after which she never turned back to Hollywood. Instead of the American film industry she built up a far more fruitful cooperation with the European cinema. When Luchino Visconti met Chanel he got taken with her „feminine beauty, masculin intelligence and energy”

Visconti and Chanel

At last, a short story about the birth of an iconic Chanel piece:

In the early 1930s, Gabrielle Chanel loved to visit the famous ski resort of Saint-Moritz where she met Baron Hubert von Pantz, an Austrian aristocrat. He had all the traits to charm Gabrielle Chanel with whom he had a two-year affair. In the early years of the 1930s he bought Schloss Mittersill, a castle in Austria,which he transformed into a prestigious luxury hotel.
Schloss Mittersill was an instant success and the most talked-of place in Austria. Among the guests were artists and actresses such as Marlene Dietrich.

It was at Mittersill that Gabrielle Chanel noticed the impeccable jackets worn by the hotel's elevator operators.

After many years, in the early 1950s she had this garment in mind when creating the iconic jacket of the Chanel suit, worn in 1961 by her friend, Austrian-born actress Romy Schneider. This is where our story began - the two remained close friends until the death of Coco Chanel in 1971. 

Romy Schneider in Chanel