Justine Picardie - Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life

I IMPOSED BLACK; ITS STILL GOING STRONG TODAY, FOR BLACK WIPES OUT EVERYTHING ELSE AROUND. Coco Chanel

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 minds 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 its a balancing act between constant change and constancy as is evident in Coco Chanels 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 cant 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 Chanels 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, black 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 gilt 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 Chanels 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 dark 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 pointing 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.

If the mirrored staircase is the backbone of the House of Chanel, then Mademoiselles salon the largest of the three main rooms in her apartment is its hidden heart. The outside world is not entirely excluded, for there are windows reaching from floor to ceiling, overlooking Rue Cambon to the school on the other side of the street, where children still study in the first-floor classroom, just as they did when Mademoiselle Chanel lived here. But did she look out of the window at them, or keep her eyes fixed on the treasures within these walls? There are yet more Chinese screens hiding the doors (Chanel hated the sight of doors, she said, for they reminded her of those who had already left, and those who would leave her again). Look closer, and you could lose yourself within their intricacies, drawn into a landscape of boats and bridges, of graceful women kneeling beside the water; a place where serpents and dragons fly through the air, above unicorns and elephants; where the trees grow leaves like fine white lace, and camellias are perpetually in blossom.

You could spend days in this room and never want to leave, such is the wealth of its riches. Two walls are lined with leather-bound books: antique editions of Plutarch, Euripides and Homer; the memoirs of Casanova and the essays of Montaigne; The Confessions of St Augustine and The Dialogues