Pero Simone aspira a más: se libera del corsé, aligera los vestidos, prefiere el lino y el algodón a la seda, experimenta con los trajes de baño, creando patrones simples con géneros rompedores para su época. Hasta que una veraneante parisina, quien se presenta como Gabrielle Chanel, irrumpe en la tienda y, con su gran ojo para reconocer el talento ajeno, le propone trabajar juntas. Así comienza una colaboración que revolucionará la indumentaria femenina y sentará las bases de la nueva elegancia, llevándolas de un balneario de la costa atlántica al París de la Primera Guerra Mundial, y de la Cuba de los años treinta a la Francia ocupada por los nazis, y se desarrolla una sinuosa y compleja amistad con inesperado desenlace. Wendy Guerra combina realidad y ficción, su talento literario y su pasión por la moda para entretejer el destino de estas mujeres que no dudarán en arriesgarlo todo por cumplir sus sueños.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Award-winning author Wendy Guerra, who counts Eduardo Mendoza and Alejandro González Iñárritu among her admirers, is back with a moving and original novel.

"Lyrical and playful, funny, desperately sad, completely unique." Alejandro Zambra

"A novel about a fascinating era that encompasses the glittering backdrops and darkest moments of Coco Chanel." Clara Obligado

It's early summer in Arcachon, a small provincial city in France, and Simone Leblanc decides to reopen the sewing studio founded by her grandmother. Channeling her creativity to remodel the premises, and with the help of Teresa, her housekeeper and confidante, she has her designs in the showroom windows in time for the new season and the shop is soon full of customers.

But Simone has bigger ambitions: She does away with the corset, designs lighter dresses, favors linen and cotton over silk, experiments with bathing suits, and creates simple, genre-breaking patterns. Everything changes with a summer visitor from Paris, who introduces herself as Gabrielle Chanel and, with a quick eye for talent, proposes a partnership. The result is a collaboration that will revolutionize women's clothing and set a new standard for elegance. Chanel's Seamstress chronicles their complicated friendship, from its beginnings in a coastal French town to the Paris of World War I, 1930s Cuba and Nazi-occupied France, as well as its unexpected outcome. Wendy Guerra blends reality and fiction, literary talent and appreciation of fashion in this fascinating portrait of two women who risked everything to follow their dreams.