While the famous designer Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel is known mostly for her wide-reaching influence into the realm of fashion and style, behind all that glamour was a depth of culture. A new Culture Chanel exhibition coming this fall aims to plunge into those hidden depths by delving into the one-and-only Coco’s relationship with books and reading in general. Entitled “The Woman Who Reads”, it will run from September 17 2016 – January 8 2017 at the Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice.

The exhibition will explore the designer’s rocky childhood, where she spent years of solitude stuck in an orphanage, all the way to the end of her life. Throughout those years, literature was a constant companion, and her life was underlined by such classical authors as Montaigne, Plato, Virgil, Sophocles, Dante, Homer, and Cervantes, among others. Beyond that, Coco was also involved in the cultural landscape at the time, and knew writers like Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy, and Max Jacob personally.

All these archives, photographs, dedications, paintings, and drawings will go up on display – exposing to what extent her taste for classicism and the baroque influenced her aesthetic vocabulary. Art objects from Chanel’s Paris apartment will also be shown to the public for the first time, displaying her love for Russia and the golds of Venice.

The Culture Chanel project was an ambitious work started in order to approach the story of the fashion house and its founder. It has already realized six installations around place like Moscow, Shanghai, Beijing, Canton, Paris, and Seoul. With this latest one, the world will get a little bit more in touch with one of the most seminal and dazzling figures in fashion.