There is a wonderfully subtle scene in the new biopic Coco Before Chanel in which the 20-something, not-yet-a-fashion-doyenne is asked by her lover “Boy” Capel to attend a summer ball with him in Deauville.

Chanel agrees, but she has the same problem that has afflicted every woman since Eve: she has nothing to wear. The couple heads to the local atelier, where Chanel picks out black fabric and demands there be no corset. “But it will be shapeless,” the woman tells her dismissively. “Do as I say,” Chanel abruptly answers back. Of course, at the ball all eyes are on the petite woman (played exquisitely by Audrey Tautou) dancing the night away in—voila!—a Little Black Dress. Never mind that Chanel really created the LBD when she was closer to 40, and long after Capel had been killed in a car accident. Almost a century after its real birthday in 1925, the Little Black Dress is still the standard cocktail-party uniform for women the world over.

Coco Before Chanel is the third Chanel biopic in the past year. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, starring Anna Mouglalis as the young Coco, closed the Cannes festival in May. In Lifetime’s Coco Chanel, Shirley MacLaine played the older Chanel. The illegitimate daughter of a nomadic peddler, raised in an orphanage from the age of 12, Chanel went on to become a multimillionaire. She was the first woman to start a cosmetics line and the first to have a perfume named after her—she always said that No. 5 was lucky (and she was apparently right). “She led this Cinderella life that appeals to a narrative in all of us,” says Chris Greenhalgh, the author of Coco and Igor, which was the basis for the film at Cannes.

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