Chanel

Chanel stays private under the Wertheimer family and reported revenue close to $20 billion in the mid-2020s, most of it from fragrance, beauty and leather goods rather than from runway fashion. The 1924 agreement that handed Parfums Chanel to Pierre Wertheimer left Coco Chanel with a 10 percent interest in the perfume business, and the fight over that split ran for decades. Readers get the licensing economics behind a single product, No. 5, that has funded a fashion house for a century. The literature is biographical: Tilar Mazzeo takes the perfume itself as the subject, Hal Vaughan documents the wartime collaboration, Paul Morand recorded Chanel talking about herself, and several overlapping lives cover the same career from different angles.

6 books