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
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