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Coco Chanel
born: 19-08-1883
birth place: Saumur, France
died: 10-01-1971

Designer Coco Chanel was born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel in 1883, although she would later claim that her real date of birth was 1893, making her ten years younger.

Her place of birth was also something that she sought to disguise. Coco was born in the workhouse in the Loire Valley where her mother worked, although she asserted that she was born in Auvergne.

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Her mother died when she was six years old, leaving her father with five children, whom he quickly farmed out to various relatives. The young Chanel was sent to the orphanage of the Catholic monastery of Aubazine, where she learned the trade of a seamstress. School vacations were spent with relatives in the provincial capital of Moulins where Gabrielle learnt to sew with more flourish than the nuns at the monastery had been able to teacher her. When she turned eighteen, she left the orphanage, and took up work for a local tailor.

When later when questioned, Chanel would claim that when her mother died, her father sailed for America and she was sent to live with two cold-hearted spinster aunts. She even claimed to have been born in 1893 as opposed to 1883, and that her mother had died when Coco was six instead of twelve. All this was done to diminish the stigma that poverty, orphanhood, and illegitimacy bestowed upon unfortunates in nineteenth-century France.

It was during a brief stint as a singer in cafes and concert halls that Gabrielle adopted the name Coco, a nickname given to her by local soldiers who went to watch her.

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