Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. She was born to a laundress in 1883, and died with vast wealth, the head of her eponymous fashion house, in 1971. For generations Chanel was knit jersey, the little black dress, and the boxy tweed two-piece suit. In the new millennium, however, with fashion increasingly a subject for scholars, she’s now the genius who built the first global fashion brand, her logo of two interlocking Cs emblematic of empire. This exhibition begins with Chanel’s history, offering a chronological look at her life and milestones, and then moves into a more semiotic section that “reads” the brand’s iconography: the two-tone pumps, the quilted bag, the perfume, and much more. The exhibition was organized by the Palais Galliera, Paris, and has been re-imagined for London and refreshed with additional garments from the V&A archive. It also looks squarely at Chanel’s controversial activities during W.W. II. —Laura Jacobs