1924
Coco Chanel
Refashioning style
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, born in 1883, lived
several lives before her death in 1971. She
was the shrewd businesswoman who devel-
oped one of the world’s most famous per-
fumes, only to lose control of the company
that produced it. She presaged the era of
logomania with her own symbol, two linked
C’s. Opportunistically, she got through
World War II by consorting with Nazis.
But any woman today who loves elegant
yet comfortable clothes owes her a debt.
Chanel was one of the first designers to
use jersey fabric in fashionable day wear—
dresses and suits and pleated skirts—that
moved the dial away from restrictive cor-
sets and useless frills. And because Chanel
herself loved to borrow men’s clothes, in
1924, she designed a woman’s suit made of
supple Scottish tweed, so softly and inge-
niously tailored that it was a joy to wear. To
this day, the Chanel suit is a model marriage
of practicality and beauty. The woman who
brought it into the world knew that to move
forward, you first had to be able to move.
—Stephanie Zacharek1925
Margaret Sanger
A woman’s choice
In March 1925, one of America’s most
famous women took the stage at an in-
ternational birth control conference to
argue for “the health and happiness of
the Unborn Child.” Though she joked
about a civil service exam for would-be
parents, Margaret Sanger made a case
for birth control as an alternative to
both abortion and “enforced, enslaved
maternity.”
Already, Sanger had defied laws that
rendered both contraception, and talk-
ing about birth control, crimes. She be-
came a subject of gossip and outrage for
her public clinic and campaign to make
birth control a topic of conversation.
Sanger’s association with the eu-
genics movement would ultimately
compromise her reputation. She ar-
gued that birth control could be used
to weed out “defective” babies. It was
part of an ongoing alignment with those
who thought birth control could be
used to breed more desirable traits into
the population—a move possibly in-
formed by her desperation to popularize
contraception.
Historians still tussle over Sanger’s
complicated legacy. What isn’t at issue is
her influence: Sanger founded the pre-
decessor to Planned Parenthood, and by
helping legalize birth control, she helped
women gain control over their bodies
and futures. —Erin BlakemoreSMITH: GILLES PETARD—REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES; CHANEL: HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES; SANGER: GEORGE RINHART—CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES^31