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Though there are other published biographies on Chanel, Chaney went to great lengths to unearth as much new information as possible.. Taking four years to do so, the result is a systematic and engaging account of the very essence of a rags-to-riches tale.

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Chaney is adept at elucidating Chanel’s paradoxical character. . . [She] explores Chanel’s connections, often intimate, with some of the giants of Modernism, to cast her as a formative shaper of 20th centhry culture.

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Jezebel (Gawker’s fashion/gossip site) has a piece in their “Rag Trade” column

the authors of the three new biographies of Coco Chanel are taking swipes at each other in the pages of the New York Times. Lisa Chaney, the author of Coco …

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“Chaney’s incredible book merges fantastic discoveries with brilliant detective work, ultimately producing a unique and perhaps controversial piece of literature, allowing the reader to understand more about Chanel’s huge effect on the culture of the time and delve deep into her relationships with Picasso, Diaghilev, Cocteau, Dalí and many more famous names.”

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“An Intimate Life” is the most thoroughly fleshed out of the new batch. [...]

Ms. Chaney takes care to give detailed context all the way along, but not so much that she pulls us off the path. One appreciates her elegant tutorials—the way, for instance, she positions Chanel’s earliest “working girl” years. [...]

Ms. Chaney is also the first Chanel biographer to unearth a viable profile of Boy Capel, the erudite man who stole Chanel from Balsan, cultivated her and whom she truly loved (he died in 1919 in a car crash). [...]“

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A Nazi sympathiser or a whitewashed romantic endorsement of the brand?

Biographers are at war over the real life of Chanel, writes Lisa Chaney in this weekend’s SUNDAY TIMES Style magazine.