‘A woman in a man’s world’: fashion icon Coco Chanel’s controversial life explored in a new ballet

Hong Kong Ballet production Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon dramatises the rise, emancipatory designs and controversies of the legendary couturier

Reading Time:9 minutes

Ye Feifei as Coco Chanel in a rehearsal for Hong Kong Ballet’s world premiere of new ballet “Coco Chanel, the Life of a Fashion Icon”, about the legendary 20th century couturier. Photo: Hong Kong Ballet

Published: 7:15am, 10 Mar 2023Updated: 2:07pm, 11 Mar 2023

“Be afraid of her!” choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa tells Hong Kong Ballet’s female dancers, as Coco Chanel stalks around her workshop in the rehearsal studio at Kwai Tsing Theatre, cigarette in hand, terrorising the seamstresses.

A few moments later, as Chanel gives grudging approval to one girl’s work, Lopez Ochoa adds, “See, she’s not just a bitch.”

Portraying the various aspects of such a famous historical personality is only one of the challenges facing the choreographer, currently in Hong Kong to create a new, full-length work for Hong Kong Ballet, Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon.

The project had to be postponed twice because of the pandemic, but the company’s artistic director, Septime Webre, says these delays have had a silver lining: “It’s now become a co-production with two other companies – Queensland Ballet and Atlanta Ballet.”

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa at a rehearsal for Coco Chanel: the Life of a Fashion Icon, at Kwai Tsing Theatre in Hong Kong’s Kwai Fong neighbourhood. Photo: May Tse

As well as helping with funding, this means the work will be seen on at least three continents and, with its world premiere at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts’ Lyric Theatre, from March 24 to 26, promises to generate plenty of buzz for the Hong Kong Ballet.

Belgian-born Lopez Ochoa is highly sought after and known for narrative ballets with strong female protagonists (previous subjects have included former first lady of Argentina Eva Perón and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo).