Coco At Home

Rue Cambon,where the Chanel story began (and ended too,for after the recession she famously made a comeback),a little street near Paris’ Opera is steeped in lore. It’s synonymous with Chanel’s flagship store,even though it connects the busy Place de la Madeleine,Place Vendome and Rue du Faubourg-St Honore,the most important luxury addresses of the city. The Chanel store is always as crowded and boisterous as a mall during a shopping festival. This is one of the most iconic labels in the world that’s instantly trendy and traditional at the same time.

But on the top floor,where you must make an appointment and show some damned good credentials,is Coco Chanel’s unspeakably lovely private apartment. This is where she entertained illustrious guests like Salvadore Dali,Pablo Picasso,Jean Cocteau,Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. (She went to bed across the road in her permanent suite at the Ritz,which the hotel maintains it as it was.)

Her love for travel is documented through her collectibles: the three small rooms are filled with pieces from her personal history. For parlour at the entrance,Chanel used 32 Baroque wooden panels from China and the Coromandel as wallpaper. A few of them have camellia inlays; the fragrance-free flower became a leitmotif in her design as it didn’t overpower the wearer’s perfume. Chanel’s most famous perfume,No 5,is named so because it was the fifth bottle the perfumer Ernest Beau asked her to test out. The chandelier in the living room is made of crystal and amethyst with the iron wrought to make the 5,the double Cs and a ‘G’ figures. Much of the living room still has her stuff,including her spectacles with a correction number so high it makes you woozy for minutes after you’ve removed them. Her desk,leather-bound books and art are all here,even a piece of crystal from the chandelier that fell off when Dali was once over. (He had asked her to stick it in the mouth of a glass frog on the coffee-table and it sits there).

Wheat shows up in several places in the rooms. It reminded Chanel of the fields around the orphanage her father sent her to,when she was very young. As do lions. Coco was a Leo. She loved animals and bought all figures in pairs; she was a great romantic at heart. At the dining room mantle,rests a bust that she would say was her father. It was actually a relation of one of her lovers,Boy Capel. (The Grand Duke Dimitri,poet Pierre Reverdy and the Duke of Westminster were some others).

Chanel was an unconventional woman in a parochial world. With her simplicity,she tore down the citadel of the Belle Epoque—the Beautiful Era—a period in European social history that began during the 19 th Century and continued till World War I. She was the first to put women in bathing suits and trousers and to make jersey suits fashionable and a tan socially acceptable. She was also a disarming mountebank trying to convince people that her father had nicknamed her Coco,when it was actually for soldiers out at a town pub that she would sing for her supper.

Coco Chanel is one of the greatest women to have lived not only because she created one of the most iconoclastic fashion labels in the world. It’s also because she is proof that a taste-maker does not have to be born into privilege; all you need is a good idea and the drive to pursue it. And a few lovers along the way to give you a helping hand.

(namratanow@gmail.com)