## Step 2 - Reading

#### Fashion designers

You are going to read two texts about famous fashion designers.

- Skim the texts and do exercise 1.
- Read the texts and do exercise 2.
- Read the texts again and do exercise 3.

####

Text 1 Coco Chanel | Text 2 Mary Quant
Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was born in France in 1883 and died in 1971. She was a pioneering fashion designer who revolutionized women’s fashion. She designed modern and simple clothes that were often based on menswear. She was so important that she was the only designer named in ‘Time’ magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Chanel had a very poor upbringing. Her mother worked in the poorhouse where Gabrielle was born. She died when Gabrielle was six and then her father abandoned her. She adopted the name Coco while she was a café singer in 1905. Two lovers funded her first store in Paris in 1910. They also helped her hats become popular with rich women. In the 1920s, Chanel rose to become Paris’ top fashion designer. Her comfortable, yet elegant clothes were popular across Europe. Women found her mannish clothes to be liberating. In 1922 Chanel introduced her perfume, Chanel No. 5, which is still highly profitable. Her famous Chanel suit has also stood the test of time and is part of the modern woman’s wardrobe. At the beginning of World War II she moved into the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which became her home for 30 years. During the Nazi occupation of Paris she had a lover, a German spy. This relationship made her unpopular for a decade after the war. Her 1954 collection did badly in France. Today, however, her name is the biggest in fashion. | Mary Quant was born 11 February 1930. She is an English fashion designer and fashion icon. She became an instrumental figure in the 1960s London-based Mod and youth fashion movements. She was one of the designers who took credit for the miniskirt and hot pants. In November 1955, Quant teamed up with a photographer and former solicitor to open Quant's first shop on the corner of Markham Square and King's Road in Chelsea, London. Quant decided to design and make more of the clothes she stocked, instead of buying-in stock. The miniskirt, described as one of the defining fashions of the 1960s, is one of the garments most widely associated with Quant. Quant later said: "It was the girls on the King's Road who invented the mini. I was making easy, youthful, simple clothes, in which you could move, in which you could run and jump and we would make them the length the customer wanted." She gave the miniskirt its name, after her favourite car, the Mini. Through the 1970s and 1980s she concentrated on household goods and make-up rather than just her clothing lines. In 2000, she resigned as director of Mary Quant Ltd, her cosmetics company, after a Japanese buy-out. An influential fashion journalist of the 1950s and 1960s, wrote: "It is given to a fortunate few to be born at the right time, in the right place, with the right talents. In recent fashion there are three: Chanel, Dior, and Mary Quant."