Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life

© Apis/Sygma/Corbis

Sleek. Chic. Notoriously guarded. Welcome to the secret world of Gabrielle Chanel.

The story of Chanel begins with an abandoned child, as lost as a girl in a dark fairytale. Unveiling remarkable new details about Gabrielle Chanel’s early years in a convent orphanage, and her flight into unconventional adulthood, Justine Picardie explores what lies beneath the glossy surface of a mythic fashion icon.

Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation. An authoritative account, based on personal observations and interviews with Chanel’s last surviving friends, employees and relatives, it also unravels her coded language and symbols, and traces the influence of her formative years on her legendary style.

Feared and revered by the rest of the fashion industry, Coco Chanel died in 1971, at the age of 87, but her legacy lives on. Drawing upon her unprecedented research, Justine Picardie brings Gabrielle Chanel out of hiding and uncovers the consequences of what she covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and myth, in a story that reveals the true heart of fashion.

‘Justine Picardie’s thoughtful and beautifully illustrated biography illuminates the iconoclast who might justifiably be said to have invented the twentieth-century woman’

Times Literary Supplement

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 This revised edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

© Justine Picardie 2010, 2017

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 Cover photograph © Apis/Sygma/Corbis

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Justine Picardie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN 9780007318995

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780007346295

Version 2017-04-24

‘I imposed black;it’s still goingstrong today,for black wipes outeverything else around.’

Coco Chanel

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword: Chanel and I

Mademoiselle Is at Home

Gabrielle

In the Shadow of the Cross

Coco

Courtesans and Camellias

The Double C

The Little Black Dress

Misia and the Muse

Number Five

The Russians

The Duke of Westminster

Riviera Chic

The Woman in White

The Promised Land

Diamonds as Big as the Ritz

Through a Glass, Darkly

The Comeback

Celebrity Chanel

Scissors

La Grande Mademoiselle

Picture Section

Bibliography

List of Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword: Chanel and I

I am writing this at the desk of Gabrielle Chanel, in her private apartment above the couture salon of the business she founded in 1910, in Rue Cambon. This is a place I first came to many years ago, not long after the death of my sister Ruth in 1997. The story that follows is not about my sister, but she is part of it, as is my mother, who married my father wearing a little black dress, cut from a Chanel pattern, eight months before I was born. That dress took on a talismanic quality when I was old enough to wear it as a young woman; it seemed to speak of elegance, but also of rebellion (for to marry in black is to break a powerful taboo). And Chanel appeared to be significant in other ways, too – for like legions before me, I came to associate her name with the scent of womanhood; in my case, via the flask of Chanel N°5 in my mother’s bedroom, and the vial of Chanel N°19 that her mother, my grandmother, gave me as a birthday present when I turned 18. Thus Chanel was written into our lives, but with a light touch (a spray of perfume; the feel of black satin against naked skin).

And then my beloved sister died of breast cancer at the age of 33, when her longed-for twins had just reached their second birthdays. In the aftermath, I felt as if my heart was cracked and might never mend again; for Ruth was my best friend, my comrade since childhood, the girl I had always sought to protect, a lifelong companion whose journey I had shared for so long.

As a consequence, perhaps, I discovered that grief has a strange communality (and also that mourning takes on many more forms than merely wearing black). This may also explain why I felt an unexpected rush of sympathy for Chanel herself, on that initial visit to her apartment; for it seemed to be the inner sanctum of a woman whose life had been marked by a series of savage losses. First came her mother’s death, when Gabrielle was 11 years old; swiftly followed by the disappearance of her father, who abandoned his five children; and then the demise of her two sisters (one committed suicide, having been rejected by the man she loved; the other drank herself to death after a failed marriage). All this I heard from my expert guide to the apartment – one of the remarkable women who work in Chanel’s archives – and later that day from Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s creative director since 1983, and a man who knows and understands every last detail of the life and work of the brand’s founder.

But if the shadow of bereavement is perceptible in the place where I am writing today, so too is a sense of the life that Chanel created for herself. Just in front of me, looking directly into my eyes, is one of her favourite mementoes – a small painting of a lion – and there are a number of others elsewhere in the apartment. These act as a reminder that she was born under the sign of Leo, but also of her own fierce spirit in establishing her independence, at a time when women in France were still denied the vote.

Fashion is often deemed facile – and indeed, there are moments when it does make itself look ridiculous – yet Gabrielle Chanel brought dignity to her conception of style, while also reminding us that beautiful surfaces may have hidden depths. She herself kept so much of her past concealed – the shame of her childhood abandonment; the pain of her years spent in an orphanage; the agony of lost loves and loneliness. She became the most famous woman in fashion – whose iconography remains as potent today as it was a century ago – but for all her elegance, she remained vulnerable, despite the protective qualities of her perfectly tailored clothes.

It took me some time to feel brave enough to embark on a book about this complex and brilliant woman, although I wrote often about her, and her enduring legacy, in the years after my first visit to Rue Cambon. When I thought about Chanel – which was often, given that I worked for Vogue after my sister’s death; and subsequently for Harper’s Bazaar – I could not disentangle my feelings about its present incarnation, as a supremely powerful global fashion brand, from my instinctive emotional response to Gabrielle Chanel. She seemed to have everything, and nothing (though as I write those words, I am tempted to delete them, for fear of being misleading). Could it be that she was a tragic heroine, or someone else entirely, a more elusive figure than anyone could ever fully know?

But for all my doubts, I continued searching for clues about Chanel, making notes, slowly gathering the confidence to write her biography, acknowledging my own ambition in doing so. Doors began to open – to the Chanel archives in Paris, and a number of others elsewhere (including several private archives in England and Scotland containing previously unseen material dating back to Chanel’s love affair with the Duke of Westminster in the 1920s, and her friendship with Winston Churchill). I was also fortunate to meet two women who had been close to Chanel: firstly, her friend Claude Delay, an author and psychoanalyst (and therefore a perceptive interpreter of Chanel’s complex emotions, dreams and nightmares); and Gabrielle Labrunie, Chanel’s great-niece, who might in fact have been her granddaughter. Both women were exceptionally kind to me, and generous with their time and memories; indeed, Gabrielle Labrunie even allowed me to stay with her at her country house, outside Paris, while I was researching the book.

Their kindness may have had something to do with my own vulnerability when I first met them; for this coincided with the end of my marriage. My then husband, and the father of my two sons, had fallen in love with someone else; it was as simple, and as complicated, as that. In the chaotic, unhappy period following our separation, I travelled to Aubazine, a remote convent and Cistercian abbey, hidden away in the rural French region of Corrèze, where Chanel had lived with her two sisters in the wake of their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance. It was winter when I went there – and I had been reluctant to go, longing to remain within the familiar sanctuary of home, yet also knowing that the opportunity to visit Aubazine and stay in the convent might never arise again.

I still remember the journey – leaving London in tears, weighed down by anxiety and a corrosive sense of impending catastrophe; arriving in Paris, feeling as if I could not go on; catching another train to the town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, where Chanel’s mother had died; and then following the route that her father had taken her with her sisters, up through a circuitous mountain road towards Aubazine, where the grey stone walls of the ancient abbey looked more forbidding than I could ever have imagined. During Chanel’s residence there, in the late nineteenth century, the convent was filled with dozens of orphans and nuns; but by the time of my visit, the orphanage had been closed for decades, and the religious community had dwindled to a handful of nuns. The Mother Superior had agreed to my staying there, as long as I followed the daily routine of the nuns: prayers at dawn, noon, dusk, and night; silence except at meals; respect for their religious rituals and spiritual retreat.

It was a bitter winter that year, and my prevailing memory of those days – and long nights – at Aubazine is of the chill of the little room where I slept in a narrow iron bed, a wooden crucifix of an anguished Christ above me. The chapel where I knelt with the nuns as they prayed was equally icy; the stone floor cold as the black earth of the abbey’s garden, where the trees were leafless and the plants frostbitten and decaying. When I was alone at night, I alternated between weeping and writing; although eventually, my focus shifted away from my own dreary unhappiness, as I became more absorbed in the unfamiliar surroundings. In the short hours of daylight, between the nuns’ prayer services, I explored the abbey, and at last began to feel a profound sense of wonderment: not because of a sudden religious conversion, but rather because Chanel’s symbols – the interlocked double Cs that appeared in her designs; the restrained aesthetic of black, white and beige; the stars and crescent moons that were her signature in jewellery and other decorative embellishment – were also apparent in the ancient world of Aubazine. As I retraced Chanel’s steps along the corridor to the dormitory where she slept, I saw the mosaic of five-sided stars that had been crafted from thousands of tiny stones by the Cistercian monks who inhabited Aubazine during its medieval era; while inside the dark abbey itself were stained-glass windows with a stylised design that seemed to reflect – or pre-figure – Chanel’s logo. The nuns themselves still wore black habits with white cuffs and collars – again, reminiscent of Chanel’s ascetic monochrome palette – and their rosaries looked unexpectedly similar to her pearl necklaces and crucifixes.

By the time I left Aubazine, I had not experienced a miraculous recovery from the pain of the end of a marriage, but I did feel lucky: to have been allowed to stay at the abbey, and also to have been free to leave there, unlike the orphans who had been locked behind its iron gates. Before returning to Paris, I went to see Gabrielle Labrunie again and told her about my experience at Aubazine. And it was then that she led me to a simple bedroom in her house that I had never been inside before and showed me the wardrobe lined with Chanel’s own clothes; most of them in the colours of Aubazine (white silk and linen, like the whitewashed walls of the convent; beige tweed, reminiscent of the sandstone floors of the abbey; black chiffon, dark as the shadows that shrouded the chapel). And there, too, was a faint scent that I recognised from childhood – Chanel N°5 – the scent of a woman, still distinct today, in Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment …

Gabrielle Labrunie died several years ago, but as I sit here on a winter’s morning, the pale sunlight filtered by the translucent curtains, I remember her face and her gentle voice; her compassion and her understanding; the touch of her warm hand on mine. The hidden mirrored door to the apartment is closed, but I can hear the sound of voices, from the women who are working in the couture salon below, the day after Chanel’s latest show (this one held at the Ritz, with a light-hearted parade of dancing models, wearing black wisps of chiffon, lustrous pearls and soft tweeds). There is a ripple of laughter, and I find that I am smiling, too. Chanel’s clock on the desk has stopped – it is forever 5.38 (a time that seems to have no significance, though I could be wrong, in this place where numbers remain powerful). But I am aware of how much time has passed since I first came here, and all that I have discovered about myself – as well as Gabrielle Chanel – in the intervening years.

What would Gabrielle say to me now, I wonder, if she could speak to me? Would she chastise me for daring to think that I could understand the infinite mysteries of her life? Possibly; probably … But even so, I say to her, speaking out loud in the quiet room, thank you. Thank you for all that you have given me. Thank you for making me braver than before, and for showing that women can, and should, be independent spirits, while also recognising that it is love that makes and shapes us. And thank you for giving me the hope to believe in second chances; and to trust that endings can also lead to beginnings, even when all seems forever lost. Would I have fallen in love again were it not for Chanel? Perhaps, though my own propensity for magical thinking (a trait that I share with Chanel) allows me to believe she might have helped me along the way; for after all, when I first met the man who I am now married to, our initial conversation was about Chanel. Indeed, as a consequence of that unexpected encounter, he led me to the faraway places where Chanel had stayed in the Scottish Highlands, and unlocked the door to her Riviera villa, La Pausa. And when we married on a June day in Scotland, with my sons and friends around us, I was wearing an ivory silk dress by Chanel …

Of course, my Chanel is just one version of her legend and her life; we none of us can ever fully comprehend someone else’s experience, nor pin them down, like butterflies, in a glass case, or preserve them in amber. Instead, I prefer to think of Chanel as a beguiling, elusive ghost – endlessly close, yet just out of reach, slipping through the mirrors that reflect one another in this beautiful room. When I touch the leather surface of her desk, I can feel the marks of her pen, but there are no words visible in the abstract pattern scored by her sharp nib, no apparent meaning within the labyrinth of lines engraved during the decades that she lived and worked here. I could study these puzzling marks forever, and never turn them into words; and therein lies the genius of Chanel. The enigmatic lines are mysteriously beautiful … just like the woman who made them, the eternally alluring Gabrielle Chanel.

Rue Cambon, 8 December 2016

Mademoiselle Is at Home

When my customers come to me, they like to cross the threshold of some magic place; they feel a satisfaction that is perhaps a trace vulgar but that delights them: they are privileged characters who are incorporated into our legend. For them this is a far greater pleasure than ordering another suit. Legend is the consecration of fame.

Coco Chanel, 1935

The House of Chanel stands at 31 Rue Cambon, a shrine to its dead creator, yet also a living, thriving temple of twenty-first-century fashion, the destination for pilgrims who travel here from all around the world. Outside, dusk falls on a grey wintry afternoon in Paris, the darkness and the drizzle mingling into an early twilight, the shadows of the surrounding buildings lying heavy on the narrow street. Inside, the air is perfumed and warm in the ground-floor boutique, a cocoon of luxury lined with cream surfaces and silvered mirrors, the customers hovering like hummingbirds above glass cases of enticing jewel-coloured lipsticks, or swooping on rails of silk-lined tweed jackets. Their eyes dart towards the film projection of the latest collection, comparing what they see in the shop with what is portrayed on the screen (and perhaps in their mind’s eye, a vision of themselves transformed, dressed all in Chanel). You can watch the video reflected in the mirrors, too; the porcelain-faced models riding on a white and gold carousel. But instead of wooden horses galloping in a ceaseless circle, there are the famous symbols of Coco Chanel: pearls and camellias and the interlocked double-C logo, as globally recognisable as the Stars and Stripes or the swastika. As the carousel revolves on the screen, the reflections in the mirrors are also spinning, and for a few seconds everything is in movement; nothing seems solid at all.

This is as you would expect in the heart and headquarters of an international fashion brand, where mutability is integral to its business of selling new stock every season; yet there must always be something immediately familiar, suggestive of an iconography that denotes heritage and enduring value. The contradictions of such an enterprise are unavoidable – it’s a balancing act between constant change and constancy – as is evident in Coco Chanel’s own observations on the business of fashion: ‘A dress is neither a tragedy, nor a painting; it is a charming and ephemeral creation, not an everlasting work of art. Fashion should die and die quickly, in order that commerce may survive … The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.’

And yet Mademoiselle protected her house, and here it still stands. Beside the entrance to the boutique is another doorway, closed to the public by a discreet dark-suited security guard, though not to select couture clients, who ascend Chanel’s mirrored staircase when they come for private fittings in the hushed salon on the first floor. Not a trace of dust or dirt marks the floor, dark and shiny as a lipstick case, and the ivory walls are perfectly smooth, as befits a ceremonial space where pieces from the current couture collection hang on rails, veiled in white shrouds like novitiates. Beyond here, the staircase continues to rise through the centre of the house, up to the place where Chanel watched her fashion shows unfold, hidden from the audience below, yet seeing everything beneath her, perched on the fifth step from the top of the spiralling stairs.

Pause for a moment on the staircase, and it gives you the strangest sensation. The mirrors are simultaneously reflecting from all angles; there is no escape from the sight of your body bisected, slivers of face and limbs. So you must watch yourself as you climb the flight to the second floor, to the unmarked mirrored double doors that lead into Mademoiselle Chanel’s private apartment. Open the door, and it is as if she has never left the building; for here is her sanctuary, polished and preserved, decades after her death on 10th January 1971.

You might call it a mausoleum, yet it feels too alive for that, for these rooms are still filled with her presence, along with her possessions. On the other side of the door is an entrance hall, the walls lined with early eighteenth-century Coromandel screens, their red lacquer patterned with a mysterious Oriental landscape, where women in kimonos fly on the back of white birds, and men are carried by fishes and turtles. There are pale mountains and wraiths of clouds and lakes on the screens, waterfalls and temples and precipices, a world beyond the walls of this Parisian apartment; and the sound of the city is silenced by the softness of thick beige carpet, the view concealed by the mirrors that reflect the Chinese screens.

The hall seems hermetically sealed, the way out hidden by mirrors, but two life-size Venetian blackamoors gesture to go on, past a pair of reindeer that stand to attention on either side of a bunch of gilded wheat in a silver vase. The statues point into the salon, but the reflection of their painted eyes and hands is multiplied in a series of mirrored images, upending all sense of direction, skewing perspective within these looking-glass walls. Another door leads from the hall to the dining room where Chanel entertained guests, six beige suede-upholstered chairs at a walnut table; two lions on the tabletop; two gilt and crystal-encrusted mirrors in the alcoves; the ceiling curved like the vaulting of a Romanesque church. A smaller sitting room is lined with more antique Chinese screens, watched over by a stone statue of the Madonna and Child, his eyes at the door, hers cast down to the ground. But there is no bedroom in the apartment, for Mademoiselle slept across the street, on the top floor of the Ritz, with a view over the rooftops of Rue Cambon. Her hotel room was unadorned – white cotton sheets, white walls, austere like the convent orphanage where she was educated – but her apartment remains as ornate as it was in her lifetime. The walls are lined in gold fabric; not that much can be seen of them, for they are covered with books and screens and mirrors, conserved like the inside of a holy sanctum, or the final resting place of an Ancient Egyptian queen.