9 Coco Chanel Facts You Probably Never Knew
In honor of the iconic fashion designer’s 136th birthday, WWD looks back at Chanel’s legacy.
Coco Chanel’s impact on fashion is unparalleled — and her design legacy is just as relevant today, on what would have been her 136th birthday, as it was decades ago.
The legendary fashion designer’s canon of now-staples — the tweed suit, her No. 5 fragrance and the little black dress — exemplify the elegant, modern style that she was known for and one that was carried on by her successor Karl Lagerfeld, until his death earlier this year.
In honor of Chanel’s birthday — Aug. 19, 1883 — WWD looks back at the designer’s legacy, unearthing some little-known facts about the iconic designer from our archives.
Here are nine things you probably didn’t know about Coco Chanel:
1. She refused a marriage proposal from the Duke of Westminster.
Chanel reportedly had a 10-year affair with the second Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, during which time the Duke proposed marriage to the designer. Chanel refused, later stating: “There are lots of Duchesses, but only one Coco Chanel.”
2. She was routinely at odds with other fashion designers.
Coco Chanel in 1954. AP/Shutterstock
Chanel’s influence on other designers was undeniable, especially to Coco herself. On Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel was quoted saying, “Saint Laurent has excellent taste. The more he copies me the better taste he displays.”
While they were previously close, Chanel and Cristóbal Balenciaga also came at odds after the former reportedly called Balenciaga “too old” to continue designing.
Upon Chanel’s death, Balenciaga reflected on their prior friendship and her passing, stating to WWD for her obituary: “I feel extremely sad and it makes me feel how old I am myself. An extraordinary, strong and influential person has disappeared with her.”
3. She began her career as a hatmaker.
In 1912, Chanel began her fashion design career by opening a hat shop in Deauville, a seaside town in France, where she quickly became a trendsetter and expanded into apparel.
4. She refused to dress royalty
Chanel wasn’t one to design for free, even for royalty. WWD’s obituary on the designer quotes her saying, “these princesses and duchesses…they never pay their bills. Why should I give them something for nothing? No one ever gave me anything.”
5. She preferred women in makeup.
Coco Chanel making alterations to a model’s jacket in the Sixties. Hatami/Shutterstock
When the atelier got word of Chanel’s arrival each day, models reportedly rushed to put their makeup on quickly, as the designer was not a fan of makeup-less faces.
Chanel herself kept blush at her bedside, explaining “Think of the man who sleeps beside you, does he want to wake up to a pale face?”
6. She often made comments that raised eyebrows.
Not one to keep her thoughts to herself, Chanel was unabashed in her commentary of others. For instance, Chanel was quoted in WWD’s obituary saying actress Brigitte Bardot was “money mad” and that her full bust “is too much.”
Chanel was also critical of fashion editors, stating that one unnamed editor had “the face of a monkey” and “the mouth of a sewer,” and stating another editor was “the most pretentious woman I have ever met.”
7. She was no fan of miniskirts.
Chanel had once called miniskirts “an exhibition of meat,” claiming she found the look to be indecent. She instead was a proponent of women wearing pants and was even arrested for wearing them by the Vichy Regime during World War II.
Chanel found pants to be a practical option for women. “Girls are nice and it is good to roll around in the sand all day long,” she said. “On the beach it is very easy to slip on a pair of pants.”
8. Her favorite flower was the camellia.
Camellia flower pins made for the Chanel fall 1992 couture show. WWD
The camellia flower has become one of the most iconic symbols of the Chanel brand, featured prominently in the apparel and accessories. In 1992, WWD visited Chanel’s atelier as the brand was designing various camellia pins for its upcoming couture show.
9. She was buried in her favorite Chanel suit.
Per Chanel’s own request, WWD reported the designer was buried in her favorite suit, a beige and white tweet suit decorated with the designer’s iconic gold buttons and braid.
Attorneys General to Move Forward With Antitrust Probe of Big Tech
Investigation would add additional scrutiny to an industry already under a federal spotlight
WASHINGTON—A group of state attorneys general is preparing to move forward with a joint antitrust investigation of big technology companies, according to people familiar with the matter, adding another layer of scrutiny to an industry already under a federal spotlight.
The effort is expected to be formally launched as soon as next month, the people said, and is likely to focus on whether a handful of dominant tech platforms use their marketplace powers to stifle competition.
As part of the probe, the group of state attorneys general is likely to issue civil investigative demands, similar to subpoenas, to tech giants and other firms, the people said.
They said the new investigation could dovetail with plans by the U.S. Justice Department, which last month announced its own antitrust review that will focus on tech companies including Alphabet Inc. ’s Google unit and Facebook Inc.
The Wall Street Journal reported in June that a number of attorneys general were considering launching a probe into antitrust concerns surrounding Big Tech.
As that effort moved toward a formal investigation, representatives of about a dozen state attorneys general, including Republicans and Democrats, met with top Justice Department officials in Washington in July to discuss concerns about lack of competition in the tech industry, according to people familiar with the meeting.
The makeup of the multistate group is still a work in progress. A bipartisan probe could give the investigation broader leverage and help insulate GOP officials from questions over whether their actions are motivated by political concerns, such as how online platforms treat conservative speech.
A spokeswoman for North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat, said he is “participating in bipartisan conversations about this issue.” Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, also a Democrat, said in a statement that he continues “to be concerned with the aggregation of data in the hands of a few and [I] am always watchful of any monopoly.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, put out a statement after last month’s meeting saying that he and other attorneys general discussed “the real concerns consumers across the country have with big tech companies stifling competition on the internet.”
The expected formal investigation by states would add a third major layer of scrutiny for the tech sector. In addition to the Justice Department probe, the Federal Trade Commission is investigating antitrust concerns at Facebook, including the company’s acquisition of nascent tech companies, as well as competitive issues elsewhere in the tech industry.
The involvement of the state attorneys general could add to complexity and cost for the companies. These officials were viewed as a driving force in the landmark joint state-federal antitrust case against Microsoft Corp. two decades ago.
The Justice Department and the FTC earlier this year reached detailed arrangements for reviewing not only Google and Facebook, but also Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. It is possible that some of these big-four tech giants could receive scrutiny from multiple antitrust agencies.
Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple all declined to comment. The companies generally say they operate fairly and don’t engage in anticompetitive behavior.
A Google spokeswoman referred to congressional testimony last month by Adam Cohen, its director of economic policy, who said the internet search and advertising giant has “helped reduce prices and expand choice for consumers and merchants in the U.S. and around the world.”
At the same hearing, Facebook’s director of public policy, Matt Perault, said the social-media king “faces intense competition for all of the products and services that we provide.”
Representatives of Apple and Amazon echoed those comments at the hearing, each saying their businesses compete against well-established rivals.
Regulators, lawmakers and legal experts, however, worry that significant slices of the high-tech marketplace have become uncompetitive. Those include online advertising, search, social media, app sales and certain retail sectors, among others.
The recent meeting between state attorneys general and the Justice Department was attended by Attorney General William Barr, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, who heads the department’s antitrust division, people familiar with the matter said.
State and federal officials made a general commitment to work together and may formally join forces, the people said. Joint concerns include tech firms’ data-fueled growth and the resulting difficulty would-be rivals face in entering their markets.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
The Multiple Problems, and Potential Fixes, With the Boeing 737 MAX
A look at the plans to correct the aircraft’s flight-control system that contributed to two fatal crashes and the plane’s grounding
Two fatal crashes of Boeing Co. BA 1.01% ’s 737 MAX exposed problems with the aircraft’s flight-control system, spurring aviation regulators to push for additional changes before the grounded plane can again fly with passengers.
Here’s a look at the problems and how Boeing plans to fix them.
‘We Can’t Waste a Drop.’ India Is Running Out of Water.
Population growth, modernization and climate change spawn a resource crisis; trouble in a remote Himalayan region
LEH, India—The Ladakh region of northern India is one of the world’s highest, driest inhabited places. For centuries, meltwater from winter snows in the Himalayan mountains sustained the tiny villages dotting this remote land.
Now, like many other places in India, parts of Ladakh are running short of water. A tourism boom has sent the summer population soaring, and the region’s traditional system of conserving water is breaking down.
Water crises are unfolding all across India, a product of population growth, modernization, climate change, mismanagement and the breakdown of traditional systems of distributing resources. India is running out of water in more places, in more different ways, putting more people at risk, than perhaps any other country.
Nearly all of India’s biggest cities, including New Delhi, the nation’s capital, are rapidly depleting their groundwater reserves, and 40% of India’s people could lack drinking water by the end of the next decade, according to a 2018 report by NITI Aayog, a government-policy think tank.
In Ladakh, making matters worse, the winter snows were scarce last year. In the fields above the city of Leh, tensions ran high.
Wheat farmer Tsering Wangchuck, 67, regularly rose at 3 a.m. to send water into his fields before others living at higher elevation awoke. At times, he had to march back uphill to confront a neighbor who had arrived later to redirect the water his way.
“You had to check all the time,” he said. “It was frustrating.”
India is the 13th most water-stressed country in the world, but its population is triple the combined population of the other 16 countries facing extremely high water stress, according to the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit group with offices around the world that tracks water use and other global environmental and resource issues.
Water resources in India have been mismanaged for decades. Critical groundwater resources, which account for 40% of India’s water supply, are being depleted at unsustainable rates, the NITI Aayog report said. Droughts are becoming more frequent, creating severe problems for India’s rain-dependent farmers.
By 2030, water demand in India is projected to be twice the available supply, according to the report. “If nothing changes, and fast, things will get much worse…with severe water scarcity on the horizon for hundreds of millions,” the report said.
In the southern city of Chennai, drinking water reserves almost completely dried up this year. Although a 200-day streak with no rain ended recently, the first month of the annual monsoon brought one-third less rain than the 50-year average, which makes it the driest June in five years, according to the India Meteorological Department.
Two of Chennai’s four reservoirs went dry, and the other two nearly did. Millions of residents of the city, India’s fifth largest, with a population of about 10 million, have to get their drinking water from trucks—either sporadically from government vehicles or by purchasing it from private companies.
In the agricultural heartland of India’s northern plains, where almost one-third of the country’s food is grown, farmers generally pay little or nothing for the groundwater they use or the energy needed to pump as much as they desire. That has led them to plant water-intensive crops, creating shortages, especially during lapses in the annual monsoons, that endanger the country’s food supply.
Various Indian states are locked in legal and political battles with one another over the control and use of water flowing through the nation’s legendary rivers, such as the Ganges.
Some tourist centers have run short of water. Last year, in the former British hill station of Simla, dozens of hotels had to cancel bookings and temporarily shut down, and the city’s major summer festival was canceled. Government schools were closed for 10 days because they lacked water for the children and teachers.
“Until now, it’s been relatively easy to increase supply without thinking too much about demand. But parts of India are beginning to hit the natural limits of water supply,” said Mervyn Piesse, manager of the global food and water crises research program at Future Directions International, a research institute based in Nedlands, Australia. “Unless there is a reduction in the rate at which those resources are being used, they are eventually going to run out.”
Beset by the multitude of water problems, Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his second term recently by appointing a ministry of water, combining previous ministries that oversaw wetlands and riverways development and drinking water and sanitation.
A warming climate is making water supplies more unpredictable throughout the Himalayan region, upon whose watershed some two billion people ultimately depend. A recent study by a nongovernmental organization that focuses on regional developmental issues, called the Hindu Kush Monitoring and Assessment Program, warned that glaciers feeding rivers in the Himalayan region could start disappearing after 2050.
Ladakh, which borders China and Pakistan in the nation’s far north, became a formal Indian state earlier this month when the central government separated it from Jammu and Kashmir. It has long been isolated, especially in the winter, when many roads snow over and temperatures drop well below freezing. In the 1970s, the Indian government opened the region to tourism, drawing a trickle of mostly Western travelers who came to trek and to visit the ancient Buddhist monasteries along the Indus River.
Then came a 2010 hit Bollywood movie called “Three Idiots.” The final song-and-dance extravaganza had two Indian megastars reuniting in love along the shores of Lake Pangong, then a small-time Ladakhi tourist attraction. Indian fans of the movie flocked to Ladakh to visit the lake.
The number of visitors to Ladakh, which has a year-round population of only 133,000, has soared fivefold since the movie came out, reaching 327,000 last year. Most stay in Leh. Local tourism officials and hoteliers say many of the new tourists, unlike the adventure travelers who preceded them, tend to stay in hotels where they shower twice daily and use flush toilets instead of the waterless dry-pit latrines traditional to Ladakhi villages. They also favor vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers over the region’s traditional potatoes and barley, which require far less water to grow.
The new tourists consume about 25% more water per person than longtime residents during the summer and double what the average resident uses in the winter, when cold weather curtails running water, according to Iftiqar Ahmed, an engineer in the Leh government’s office of Public Health and Engineering, which oversees water use.
A hotel building boom in Leh has increased the number of rooms since 2010 to 16,000, from fewer than 2,000.
In need of a constant water supply, the new hotels drilled their own wells. By the time authorities started monitoring wells last year, they estimated hotels were pulling up more than a million liters of water a day during the June through August tourist peak, from ground water reserves fed by melting snow and glaciers, said Mr. Ahmed. They now account for 20% of the water used in the city, he said.
Outside Leh, where farming still underpins village life, water has long been treated as a precious commodity. To preserve it and assure equal distribution, the villagers appoint water managers, known as churpons, to oversee the collection of snowmelt into catchment ponds and dole it out through an ancient network of canals and sluices that run downhill past family farm plots. They ensure that families with plots at higher elevations who get the water first leave a fair share for families with plots at lower down.
In Saboo village, where some 300 families live a few miles outside Leh, Jigmat Stanzin, 47, has held that job, which rotates annually among village families. “We can’t waste a drop,” he says.
April to July 2018 were anxious months in Saboo. Villagers decided the home gardens that provide food to most households should get water first, then water would go to apricot and apple trees, which would take a decade to replace if they died. Then, wheat and barley fields, and, finally, the poplar trees used as building material.
Mr. Stanzin and a team of five other churpons worked around the clock. Some fields weren’t planted and some crops were stunted. But the village made it through.
Leh, however, stopped using churpons in 2015 as farming gave way to tourism and other development. Mr. Wangchuck, who tends the family’s farm with his wife, couldn’t plant half his fields, forcing him to buy feed for his cows. His family cut back on what they ate and had less to sell in local markets.
The city itself came to the brink of catastrophe. Some hotel wells went dry as the paltry snowmelt failed to recharge underground springs fast enough.
As many as 100,000 seasonal migrant workers reside in and around Leh during the summer. Nearly all of them live in areas where water must be delivered by tanker truck, once every three days.
Longer term, Leh has an $11 million project to pump drinking water from the nearby Indus River. The project was planned in 2006, to be built through the year 2042, for a summer population projected to be 84,000 by then. But the summer population already is at least 90,000, Mr. Ahmed says. The project timeline has been accelerated for completion two years from now.
Until it is completed, water needs will be met with a patchwork of delivery systems. Some 4,500 households now have drinking water piped to their homes a few hours each day as part of the plan to deliver drinking water to all homes. During the winter, though, the pipes can freeze if they aren’t drained at night.
Tanker-truck deliveries will continue to thousands of other households. Residents store the water in plastic vats that they have taken to padlocking to prevent theft.
Stanzin Namgyal, 52, grew up in Leh and is trying to revive the churpon system to supply meltwater to remaining farmers and the many residents with home gardens. Yet for the 23-room hotel he is building in the city center, he intends to bore wells. “I’ll need one well, maybe even two,” he said.
Last year, Leh began requiring residents and businesses to register their wells, but only a fraction of them did so. This year, the municipality is conducting inspections door-to-door to try to get an accurate count.
The eventual goal is to charge a fee for wells, and ultimately to begin metering and charging for water usage, although officials concede such measures may be years off.
Sonam Parvez, who also grew up in Leh, opened a 20-bed hotel and heads an association of some 300 hoteliers. When his parents operated a small guesthouse in Leh decades ago, he said, their water was allocated under the churpon system.
“The churpon system is people coming together and trusting each other,” he said. “With the coming of the present day, that trust is gone because everyone is tapping into the bore well system. Everybody thinks there’s free water down there. Last year, for the first time, Ladakhis discovered there’s no free water.”
Resilient US earnings buck recession fears
Corporate American still going strong as Goldman estimates surprise growth in Q2 EPS
Corporate America is still going strong, bucking Wall Street’s recent angst that an economic recession may be looming.
Earnings season in the US has gone better than analysts anticipated. Despite early forecasts for dismal second-quarter results, earnings for S&P 500 constituents are down just 0.4 per cent as of Monday, by which time nearly 93 per cent of the index had reported financials, according to FactSet. Analysts were looking for a 2.8 per cent decrease in earnings as recently as July.
Income for the most recent three-month period is on track to post a 0.6 per cent fall, based on a combination of official results and current estimates for pending reports.
If the projected decline in earnings holds true, it would mark the first “earnings recession”, or consecutive quarters of year-over-year declines, since 2016. However, a majority of S&P 500 companies have beaten estimates thus far. As of August 9, three-quarters of the companies to report earnings had booked a better profit against average forecasts.
Consensus estimates “were too pessimistic, as they were in 1Q 2019, and we see modest upside risk to 3Q and 4Q estimates”, Goldman Sachs said in a note to clients Friday.
Analysts at the bank estimated that earnings per share across the S&P 500 grew by 1 per cent in the second quarter, noting that lower-than-expected effective tax rates contributed to the rosier results. They also said tariffs “pose only a modest risk” to profit margins, since many corporations continued to build inventory during the quarter to protect against an escalation in the US-China trade row.
Goldman Sachs is looking for earnings growth of 3 per cent for the full year and 6 per cent in 2020.
“Forward looking signals from the 2Q reporting season support our forecast that the S&P 500 will climb 7% through year-end,” the analysts added.
Optimism over corporate earnings stands in contrast to broader fears over the US economy. Investors have grown increasingly wary of a potential recession — or back-to-back quarters of contraction — amid slower global growth and trade tensions between the US and China, even as domestic unemployment remains low and the Federal Reserve delivered a rate cut in July.
Investors were unnerved last week by an inversion in the 10- and 2-year yield curve. An inverted yield curve — when the yield on long-dated debt falls below that of short-dated debt — is considered a sign that investors expect a recession.
Economists are split over when a recession may transpire but expect one later than previously thought, according to a survey by the National Association for Business Economics. The group said Monday that just 2 per cent of economists believe the US economy will slip into a recession this year, compared with 10 per cent in a February survey. Meanwhile, 38 per cent see a recession coming in 2020, down from 42 per cent, and 34 per cent expect a 2021 recession, up from 25 per cent.
FTC chief says breaking up Facebook would be hard to do
Instagram and WhatsApp integration could stymie antitrust action, trade commission head says
Joseph Simons, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, said on Monday that Facebook’s plan to integrate Instagram and WhatsApp more closely could stymie any effort to break up the social media giant.
Mr Simons said all options were on the table as the agency investigates Facebook for potential antitrust violations, including major divestitures, but added that efforts by Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive, to knit together Facebook’s three major brands could complicate any case.
“If they’re maintaining separate business structures and infrastructure, it’s much easier to have a divestiture in that circumstance than in where they’re completely enmeshed and all the eggs are scrambled,” he told the Financial Times.
Facebook disclosed an antitrust investigation by the FTC last month, shortly after it agreed to pay $5bn and adopt new oversight practices as part of a privacy settlement with the agency.
Mr Simons signalled that he intended to complete the agency’s investigation into Facebook before the 2020 election. “Any significant case that I’m trying to emphasise, I would want to be out before the election,” he said.
The probe arose from the FTC’s technology task force, which was announced in February as part of an effort to review past transactions in the tech sector.
Mr Simons declined to discuss the specifics of what the FTC was investigating in Facebook’s case, but said the agency’s review of past mergers was focused on whether deals were designed to stamp out possible core-business competitors.
He pointed to the Instagram acquisition as an example, saying the FTC would not be looking at “whether they were going to succeed so much as a photo service, but whether they were going to develop into something that actually could challenge the Facebook platform”.
The FTC previously cleared both the WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions by Facebook. Mr Simons acknowledged that it would be challenging for the agency to ask a court to reverse a merger it had approved.
“Yeah, it’s not easy,” he said. “On the other hand, you might have a situation where you have additional evidence that the company was engaged in a programme to basically snuff out its competitors through a process of acquisition.”
The FTC chairman, a veteran antitrust lawyer who once served as the director of the bureau of competition at the agency, said there were two potential theories about the success of a service like Instagram: either it succeeded because Facebook bought it, or that it would have succeeded anyway.
“Those are kind of the two competing scenarios and you have to see, do you have evidence that allows you to pick one over the other and prove it,” he said.
When asked what evidence he would be looking for to answer that question, Mr Simons said: “Maybe we missed something when we reviewed the transaction and there was evidence that was available that we just didn’t get or didn’t see or didn’t appreciate.”
He added: “And then the other thing is maybe historically you can show that it was, like I said before, part of a systematic effort to eliminate your competition.”
Closing Stock Market SummaryThe S&P 500 rose 1.2% on Monday in a broad-based advance that extended its rebound rally to a third day. The Nasdaq Composite (+1.4%), Dow Jones Industrial Average (+1.0%), and Russell 2000 (+1.0%) also advanced at least 1.0%.
Monday's session was much like Friday's in that the market quickly jumped out to a big lead following another round of positive headlines. More reports surfaced about stimulus plans in China and Germany, which helped kindle some curiosity about the Fed's annual Jackson Hole Summit on Thursday and Friday. In addition, the U.S. granted Huawei another 90 days to continue buying supplies from U.S. companies.
None of the news, however, really provided the market anything "new" or surprising. Perhaps the calm that flowed from the absence of negative news and economic data helped the market reset from a perceived short-term oversold condition.
All 11 S&P 500 sectors posted decent gains on Monday. Seven sectors rose at least 1.0%, including a 2.1% gain in the energy sector amid higher oil prices ($56.00/bbl, +$1.11, +2.0%). Noticeable gains in the mega-cap stocks provided strong support for the information technology (+1.6%), communication services (+1.4%), and consumer discretionary (+1.3%) sectors.
Apple (AAPL 210.35, +3.85, +1.9%) was one of those mega-cap outperformers following a meeting between Apple CEO Tim Cook and President Trump over the weekend. President Trump said Mr. Cook presented a "compelling argument" for how tariffs would make it harder for Apple to compete against foreign competitors. Apple shares rose nearly 2%.
Estee Lauder (EL 201.65, +22.43) was another standout, rising 12.5% after the company beat top and bottom-line estimates and provided upbeat guidance for the remainder of its fiscal year.
U.S. Treasuries pulled back from a lengthy advance amid the positive disposition in equities. The 2-yr yield and the 10-yr yield increased six basis points each to 1.53% and 1.60%, respectively. The U.S. Dollar Index advanced 0.3% to 98.38.
Investors did not receive any notable economic data on Monday and will not receive any until Wednesday.
- Nasdaq Composite +20.6% YTD
- S&P 500 +16.6% YTD
- Dow Jones Industrial Average +12.0% YTD
- Russell 2000 +11.9% YTD