Editha as Chanel with Boy Capel (Jake Davis)

• I hate people touching me, rather as a cat do.
• I walk straight along the path I have plotted for myself, even when it bores me; because I have chosen it freely.
• Being as tough as steel, I have never missed a day’s work, and I’ve never been ill;
• “…Madamachelle; a face without bones doesn’t last: you, for example, Madamachelle, you would make a very beautiful corpse…”
• After these few months of exhilarating freedom, i returned to Paris and moved into the Ritz, where i stayed for six years.
• Nothing relaxes me so much as work, and nothing tires me so much as doing nothing. The more i work, the more I want to work.
• I very much respect other people’s liberty, while at the same time expecting reciprocity. I was working towards a new society.
• Beauty is not prettiness: it’s not learnt in a flash;
• A man, for example, generally improves as he grows older, whereas his partner deteriorates. The face of a mature man is more beautiful than that of an adolescent. A woman who is getting older takes more and more care of herself with every passing day;. .beauty endures, prettiness passes.
• As for the real secret, is to transform physical beauty into moral beauty, it’s the one trick which most women are incapable of performing.
• People talk about physical care but where is the moral care? Beauty treatments should begin with the heart and soul.
• Women should age with the times we live in, not with their own. The tragedy of the ageing woman is that she suddenly remembers that light blue suited her when she was twenty.
• It has been said that “every woman should have a Romanian in her life”.

— Conversations with Chanel