Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel came out of retirement in 1954, but her return to fashion was initially met with some disdain. Her work was markedly, and intentionally, removed from the reigning aesthetic of hyper-femininity and overt opulence that had been popularized by Christian Dior.

The fashion buyers and journalists who were invited to view her comeback collection purportedly maintained a stony silence during its presentation. Undaunted, Chanel soon managed to regain much of her former momentum – in part because of the influence of Hélène Gordon-Lazareff, the influential editor of Elle magazine, who quickly recognized the potential of the designer’s chic yet unfussy suits for her audience of modern, forward-thinking women.

As the fashion writer Edmonde Charles-Roux observed, “For Hélène Lazareff, the [Russian] migrant, the Parisian of the suburbs, Chanel was a way of getting even with the grande bourgeoisie represented by that cosmopolitan aristocrat Christian Dior.”