Chanel N?31

Mademoiselle Chanel, born Gabrielle, but indelibly nicknamed Coco, strode across the fashion stage of the 20th century as no other, a veritable colossus of invention and reinvention. This year she is striding across the screen in two new films: In Coco Before Chanel, released in the US last week, Audrey Tautou, the gamine French actress and new image of Chanel No 5, recreates the designer’s early career. Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, with Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen, supposes a love affair between the couturière and the famed composer.

The Chanel couture revolution—elegant, fluid clothes that liberated the feminine form—lives on into the 21st century, updated, sometimes brilliantly, by designer Karl Lagerfeld. The more private Chanel lifestyle played a background role, traced mainly through famous photos of the designer at home.

But a visit to the elegant private apartment she established on the Rue Cambon in the 1930s reveals that here among the dazzling Coromandel screens are the sentimental keys to what counted most for this extraordinary woman—the men she loved, the artists she revered, the friends who influenced her taste.

How Chanel, whose couture proclaimed her devotion to sophisticated minimalism, accumulated this decorative splendor is much of a mystery, says Chanel external relations director Marie-Louise de Clermont-Tonnerre.

The couturière bought the building at 31 rue Cambon in 1920, moving up the street from her original Chanel Modes shop at no. 21. By then she was rich and famous; her debt to her lover and business partner Arthur “Boy” Capel had been repaid as her fashion business flourished during the First World War.

She transformed the interiors of the 18th-century building into Art Deco style. The porte-cochère disappeared, boiseries were removed or hidden behind walls of mirrors.

“She created a very modernist decor, shocking at the time,” says Clermont-Tonnerre. On the ground floor, French interior designer Jean-Michel Frank decorated the couture accessories boutique—the first of its kind—selling handbags, shoes, gloves, hats, scarves and costume jewelry. The staircase, embellished with a new wrought iron railing, led to the mirrored couture salon, a true galerie des glaces on the floor above. The next floor up became the private apartment where one wall was covered with “a ravishing burlap fabric she had painted in gilded lead to give an effect like her flecked tweeds,” Clermont-Tonnerre explains. “It was the most expensive thing to restore in 1983 when Karl Lagerfeld took over the couture.” Above is Mademoiselle’s studio, where Lagerfeld designs today. The top three floors housed the workrooms of more than 100 “petites mains” (seamstresses), also still in place.

But, still recovering from Capel’s death in a car crash in 1919, the designer didn’t move in quite yet. Instead, she took a suburban villa, Bel Respiro, just outside Paris in Garches, which author and Chanel confidante Edmonde Charles-Roux describes in her book, L’Irrégulière, ou Mon Itinéraire Chanel. “She had her villa stuccoed in beige and its shutters lacquered in black—two hues that made the entire neighborhood frown.” But two very Chanel hues that remained lifetime favorites.

Then she surprised the neighbors even more by filling the villa with her artistic friends—Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, poet Pierre Reverdy, painter Juan Gris. From the moment she made money, Chanel befriended, and often financed, a coterie of artists. After the Russian Revolution, when the impoverished Stravinsky fled to Paris, Chanel lent Bel Respiro to the composer, his wife and four children, and they stayed for three years. After she met Serge Diaghilev in Venice, she gave him a check “beyond his wildest dreams” for the Ballets Russes production of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1920, and she swore him to secrecy in an encounter that, as Charles-Roux reports, was only revealed 50 years later.

Meanwhile, she decided to move back to town, into the ground and soaring first floors of a fabulous townhouse built in 1719 for the Rohan-Montbazon family at 29 rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré. As Charles-Roux recounts, “Gabrielle instinctively gravitated toward…the baroque taste of the Serts (her best woman friend, Misia, the beautiful muse of an haute artistic milieu, and her talented decorator/painter husband, José Maria). [She was] initiated by them, and discovered through them the main components of a decor she patiently made her own.” Her scheme possessed “as much gold as at Misia’s, just as much crystal, but more black accents…”

Filling these high-ceilinged rooms whose gilded panels she wished to camouflage, Chanel began what became her celebrated collection of lacquered Chinese Coromandel screens. They surrounded the piano, itself the magnet for friends from Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes to Picasso who often stayed here. When she thumbed her nose at the Great Depression in November 1932 with an exhibition of real diamond jewelry displayed here (the ticket receipts were donated to charity), the New Yorker described the scene, “among the Coromandel screens and rose-quartz chandeliers which have made Chanel’s home famous, if not for its simplicity”.

Living in nomadic luxury, she took some of this decor to the Ritz, to a grand suite overlooking the Place Vendôme, where she lived first with, and then without, her then lover, the Duke of Westminster. When she moved to a simple bedroom suite in the Cambon wing, she installed her collections across the street in this apartment.

“We know she was here by 1937,” says Clermont-Tonnerre, showing the photo of the designer in little black dress and pearls perusing a rare Indian book on her renowned sofa of tan suede with its quilted cushions. This contemporary element is set into the baroque fantasy of gilded mirrors, a crystal and rose quartz chandelier, a graceful pair of 19th-century Japanese bronze deer and the omnipresent Coromandel screens in a very modern mix.

When she discovered Coromandel screens, she claimed they made her “faint with happiness”, and she put them everywhere, but often treated them like wallpaper. In the petit salon, she cut two doors leading into a bathroom into one of the most beautiful screens of her collection, inset with motifs of fans.

“She entertained a lot here, but only a few guests at a time, four or six at the most,” says Clermont-Tonnerre of the dining room. Venetian mirrors, like the blackamoors in the entrée, perhaps recall her trip to that city with the Serts to lift the gloom after Boy died. Fantastical consoles supported by caryatids representing goddesses or the seasons were bought at the auction of the possessions of another famous muse, Marchesa Luisa Casati, in 1932.

Rather than clients, she invited friends: Cocteau, the Serts, Salvador and Gala Dalí, Luchino Visconti who brought Romy Schneider, Cristobal Balenciaga, Hubert de Givenchy, Marlene Dietrich, Jeanne Moreau and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild among others.

And although she adored artists, she never collected their works. “Paintings? Drawings?” queried Charles-Roux, “…no signed objects, not one portrait and not a single painting by a master.”

The only exceptions are a minute oil painting of a spear of wheat by Dalí and a pair of andirons she commissioned from sculptor Jacques Lipchitz in 1921 to go with a Louis XV rocaille fireplace. Lipchitz abandoned his Cubist lines to sculpt a sinuous shell form of a woman lying on a sofa. Both works still decorate the apartment today.

But collect Chanel did. “Objects, yes. A perfect jungle of them. As mysterious as possible, objects seen nowhere else,” the author writes. In the apartment, they beckon from every surface and they all have tales to tell, or perhaps mysteries to conceal.

There are camels and frogs, but the lions in marble, wood or gilded bronze that prowl tabletops or mantels are easy reads. Chanel, born August 19, is a Leo, the lion her astrological sign. Her long lost love, Boy Capel, gave her the Buddha; designer and illustrator Paul Iribe, another fiancé swept off by death—he collapsed on the tennis court of La Pausa, her home in the south of France—provided the bronze and crystal chandelier in the petit salon.

Many of the rare books that once filled the bookcase belonged to another suitor, Pierre Reverdy. As for Hugh Grosvenor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, he was perhaps the raison d’être for her collection of objects with wheat motifs—“a symbol of fecundity because she wanted to have a child (and heir for the duke),” suggests Clermont-Tonnerre. Along with Dalí’s stalk, a gueridon table by Chanel costume jewelry designer Robert Goossens boasts a wheat sheaf base and real wheat and sculpted wheat stand by the salon fireplace.

A slim bronze cast of a hand by Diego Giacometti was a gift from writer Claude Delay, whose hand it is. Delay, who wrote Chanel Solitaire, published the book about her friend only after the designer’s death, as did Charles-Roux. Another friend, Louise de Vilmorin, simply abandoned her own attempt to tell the story with even the barest trace of verisimilitude in her Mémoires de Coco. Once famous, Mademoiselle Chanel simply reinvented her past as determinedly as she had reinvented fashion.

Today, the apartment is used for fashion soirées and the rare lunch, as well as the backdrop for photo shoots. It continues to inspire Lagerfeld’s Chanel collections: the Baroque dresses in 1987; the 2006 couture coats and tunics embroidered with Coromandel motifs, requiring from 800 to 950 hours of Lesage embroidery. Another beloved trinket, the tiny gilded and jeweled birdcage enclosing two lovebirds, became the inspiration for Jean-Paul Goude’s 1992 advertising film introducing Vanessa Paradis as the new muse for the perfume Coco.

If these possessions changed in value and significance, “one remained very, very important,” says Clermont-Tonnerre, “the Russian icon Stravinsky gave her to thank her when he and his family left Bel Respiro in 1925.” As photos prove, “she always kept it close to her.” In photos of the Ritz suite, it sits on the mantelpiece; here it is placed above her 18th-century desk. And when she died, as Charles-Roux wrote, it was on her bedside table. Perhaps the love affair isn’t supposition after all.

Originally published in the June 2009 issue of France Today.