Different Like Coco
 | Candlewick, 2007, Hardcover |
|---|
This picture-book biography of Coco Chanel, now an international fashion and culture icon, shows just how far a person can come with a little spunk and a lot of determination.
Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was always different. And she vowed to prove that being different was an advantage! Poor, skinny, and orphaned, Coco stubbornly believed that she was as good as the wealthier girls of Paris. Tapping into her creativity and her sewing skills, she began making clothes that suited her (and her pocketbook) - and soon a new generation of independent working women craved her sleek, comfortable, and practical designs.
Title: Different Like Coco
Sales Rank: 73846 in Books
Creator: Elizabeth Matthews
Publisher: Candlewick, 2007-02-13, Hardcover, 40 pages, ISBN: 0763625485
Package Dimensions: 10.7 x 9.2 x 0.4 inches, 0.95 pounds
- Different. Yep, different. Different! Okay, we get it already.
- Elizabeth Matthews, Different Like Coco (Candlewick Press, 2007)
Different Like Coco is a perfect book to illustrate one of the dead horses I am constantly beating, though I didn't realize it when I first put the book on the to-be-read list. The point? That message books are, with exceptions so few they don't matter in the greater scheme of things, infinitely inferior… More reviews
- A terrible role model
- Coco Chanel was a heroin addict, vicious anti-semite, and Nazi "collaboratrice". She slept with men she didn't love to set herself up in the dress making business where she made a tidy sum peddling overpriced frocks to wealthy women. It mattered not a whit to her that there was a depression followed by the German occupation. If you want to write a biography of a French… More reviews
- Negative body image alert!
- What an insidious little work this is! While trying to convince the reading public (mostly young girls, I suspect) that Coco was "unique" and "beautiful", all sorts of negative body image messages are foisted on the reader. Note, for example, five pages from the end, which reads:
"Women no longer wanted just to dress like Coco… More reviews
- REVELING IN CORSET-LESS CHIC
- As Maurice Chevalier sang, "Thank Heaven for little girls" . . . at least we can thank Heaven for one who grew up with an independent spirit, and an imagination for corset-Less chic. Coco Chanel (1883-1971) said "In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different." The book's end papers reproduce other quotations from this fashion icon, including "Fashion is made to become… More reviews
- Applause! Applause!
- Children's non-fiction books have come a long way, not just in style but in subject matter. How great that Candlewick saw fit to publish a picture book biography of, astonishingly, someone the average child is probably unfamiliar with -- a woman who died long before the child was born, from a country not much studied in grade schools, representing a profession… More reviews
